Andy Matuschak

Made a Printer Friend which quickly transcribes speech onto little slips of paper. Very nice for card sorts, quickly capturing open loops, discursive notes in books, etc. The speed of thermal printers and their auto-cutters is so satisfying! And dedicated mechanical key! Mm!

Vibe-coded design jigs really hit different in physical computing. Something extra magical about so casually wiring up a bunch of enigmatic OEM hardware, controlling it from an improvised UI, producing tactile traces of fiddling with dozens of sliders…

✍️ Playing with programmable highlighters, e.g. * green highlight on a citation -> finds and prints the cited paper * orange highlight on a claim -> prints a skeptical fact-check

Reflecting on Illich's recent centenary: he wanted "tools for conviviality" which prioritized individual/local autonomy and situated improvisation over centrally controlled technology which could only be modified by professional elites.

In computing, that's often interpreted as a quest to spread liberatory understanding: everyone should be able to create and mold software; and/or programming should be made accessible to all. End the dependence on centrally-produced commercial software, etc.

I want weirder representations of "readings"—the trace/artifact produced by a reader's interaction with text(s). Here playing with a cut-up "poster-ification". Cumbersome in many ways, but interesting.

Marginalia feel too subordinate to the text's structure. A separate precis feels too decontextualized. I want to see the whole without leaving the parts behind. And a material I can work with over time, as my interpretation evolves. Ideally it can somehow represent my aesthetic experience.

Made an Obsidian plugin that turns audio files into interactive editable transcripts embedded within ordinary Markdown documents. 🔈✏️ buff.ly/iZEVkpm

With these transcripts, you can: * hold Command and click anywhere in the transcript to start playing the audio file from there * delete regions like ordinary text; audio playback will skip those segments * copy and paste regions like ordinary text, preserving playback support

Outstanding new work on a composable and collaborative malleable computing environment from @inkandswitch.com!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxG... * Same data, collaboratively edited in different tools! * Same tools, themselves collaboratively edited! (cont)

* Same data, bidirectionally editable in different representations via lenses! (!!!) * All in a composable hierarchy which itself can be molded! * Demos of a hierarchical composable behavior system that I don't yet understand!

Been tinkering with annotation "fusion": annotate a paper with ink; take a photo; markup is segmented, turned into structured data, and re-super-imposed on the clean original PDF.

It's stimulating (and very cool that it's possible), but I think it's conceptually wrong. Encourages a "write-only" stance: no good way here yet to continue "working with" this markup in context. Will keep noodling.

Rigged my camera to automatically produce instant prints, via phone (locked in pocket) as BTLE client. Also has a mode where it only prints when I "star" a photo in the camera's playback interface. So I basically get a "print" button directly on the camera.

Or: between $10 ESP32s/XTEINKs/etc and coding agents, Weiser's ubiquitous computing dream starts to look both more appealing and more tractable.

Rigged my camera to automatically produce instant prints, via phone (locked in pocket) as BTLE client. Also has a mode where it only prints when I "star" a photo in the camera's playback interface. So I basically get a "print" button directly on the camera.

Inspired by Polaroid type 55, which produces both a print you can give to your subject and also a negative you can develop. It can feel extractive taking photos of people (esp strangers), much nicer to give them something on the spot.

What are your favorite unusual elements of your studio/study/office? Drown me in inspo please! I'm renting a little space for myself as an experiment: never had a creative space of my own, always a shared office or tiny corner of a shared bedroom. Excited to see what it does to my practice.

Weird advantage of writing by hnad: because it's so slow, I experience stuckness less. Before I reach the end of a sentence, l've had lots of time to think about the next one. When typing I often hit a period, then stop dead, which makes the sometimes aversive not-knowing feeling way more overt.

I guess when I type I'm like one of those doofuses who drives a sports car in a city, like: green light, pedal to the floor, accelerate over 300 ft then brake hard for the next light, wait… such a jerky experience!

Very excited about Interface Studies by @mskayyali.com—videos explicating and discussing ideas and problems in user interface design. buff.ly/laz8yko (via @kevinlynagh.com—thanks!!)

I think this is a big gap in software design culture. There's lots of commentary on visual design and micro-interaction, but remarkably little explicating conceptual and structural design. This section from Magic Ink is lodged in my mind. buff.ly/Bl9JwTv

Of friends who use coding agents heavily, the happiest seem to fall into two camps: a) Controlled: 1-2min cycles, no context switching, still in control of the code, using the agent "to type faster" b) Delegated: Vibed in the background, while something else (eg design) is their primary focus

The ideal, maybe, is something like what @simonlast outlines in buff.ly/QFn54GV: teams of agents making technical plans, reviewing each others' work, autonomously and adversarially testing, etc. You still get robust "technical oversight"—just by other agents.

Of friends who use coding agents heavily, the happiest seem to fall into two camps: a) Controlled: 1-2min cycles, no context switching, still in control of the code, using the agent "to type faster" b) Delegated: Vibed in the background, while something else (eg design) is their primary focus

This leads to 10-30min cycles, which lead to parallelism (to avoid busy-waiting), which leads to context-switching and fragmentation, which leads to working memory churn and poor comprehension, which leads to situations where neither the agents nor I understand what's going on.

Of friends who use coding agents heavily, the happiest seem to fall into two camps: a) Controlled: 1-2min cycles, no context switching, still in control of the code, using the agent "to type faster" b) Delegated: Vibed in the background, while something else (eg design) is their primary focus

Could I possibly nerd-snipe anyone into polishing something like this non-modal update flow into an official UI for Sparkle? weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/04/28/u...

I’ve fantasized for years about submitting a PR to add something like this (and eventually change the default!), but keep getting wrapped up in other projects.

Could I possibly nerd-snipe anyone into polishing something like this non-modal update flow into an official UI for Sparkle? weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/04/28/u...

I created Sparkle a lifetime ago, when I was seventeen. Then I moved onto other things, and kind maintainers dutifully kept that original intrusive modal UI going for two decades. (!!)