Maggie Appleton

Got a little too into making poppies for this reflection on great WWI novels and digesting the horrors of the war. maggieappleton.com/in-memoriam

Obsessed with “Yesteryear”. So well written, funny, a necessary critique of the tradwives. I had to ask Claude for the gist of the twist at the end before reading, because it’s labelled a “thriller” and I am too soft to read anything truly horrifying. But it’s not that kind of thriller. Sort of…

…ruined the end for myself. But knowing the rough shape of how it ends makes me appreciate all the hints and subtle cues along the way of what’s to come. Doesn’t feel like I’ve ruined it at all. Makes me appreciate the story craft! The kind of book you could read twice and see new layers.

Got to talk at @aidotengineer.bsky.social conf last week about the need for collaborative AI engineering. All our current coding agents are single player. We're trying to scale up individual productivity, but creating tons of alignment problems in the process. We have no good tools for...

Plans are also shared and editable as a team in real time. Because it is kind of insane to make elaborate plans with your coding agent alone in your terminal without getting anyone else's input. And then send it off to be implemented without checking if it's any good.

Got to talk at @aidotengineer.bsky.social conf last week about the need for collaborative AI engineering. All our current coding agents are single player. We're trying to scale up individual productivity, but creating tons of alignment problems in the process. We have no good tools for...

...multiplayer humans all have to be in the same workspace. At @githubnext.com we've made a new research prototype called "Ace" in this direction It's like Slack, Github, Claude/Copilot, and a bunch of sandboxed cloud computers had a baby. Some demos:

Got to talk at @aidotengineer.bsky.social conf last week about the need for collaborative AI engineering. All our current coding agents are single player. We're trying to scale up individual productivity, but creating tons of alignment problems in the process. We have no good tools for...

Putting together the final touches on slides for my talk at AI Engineer conf this Thursday @aidotengineer.bsky.social Talking about how we need realtime, multiplayer, collaborative agentic dev tools. Not isolated, single player terminal instances. And showing one we've built at @githubnext.com!

We have reached a moment where instead of releasing software you simply release the detailed spec for software and tell people to prompt their agent to build it themselves From the README of OpenAI’s new Symphony orchestrator: github.com/openai/symph...

This is gathering chatter so I need to clarify: neither openAI nor I is suggesting everyone prompts their own version. Obvs wasteful. Theres a canonical implementation! The important line is “in your programming language of choice”. Where lang could be any number of design prefs and variables.

We have reached a moment where instead of releasing software you simply release the detailed spec for software and tell people to prompt their agent to build it themselves From the README of OpenAI’s new Symphony orchestrator: github.com/openai/symph...

The whole GitHub Next team is coming to London in March! And we're hosting a meet-up for anyone interested in the next generation of software eng tools Sign-up here → luma.com/v5eltkec?tk=... March 3rd at 6pm We'll show our recent work & research, but also have open spots for community demos

(And no, unfortunately/fortunately we don't have any power over or insight into GitHub's uptime or the speed of the PR page. Sorry. Not our work.) We're a small R&D team exploring non-obvious futures; what does the post-PR, post-async-human-code-review, post-manual-git-management SDLC look like

As a person with a liberal arts education, I’m egotistically biased to strong agree with this. But legit my whole day is just doing tons of critical thinking, meta thinking, and design thinking - the kind I learned in my crunchy lib arts school - in order to decide what to prompt the bots to make

A delightful feature of near-perfect-voice-to-text is that when my husband and I are pottering about at home, talking to our devices about work problems or baby things or side projects, we get lots of context on the things occupying each other’s minds…

The meta-machine continues to grow of its own accord

Someone pointed out dark mode didn't work on my website (a huge oversight!). Claude implemented dark mode in <10 mins. But the diagrams in my latest post still looked weird since I designed them on light backgrounds. But they're SVGs so it was easy to prompt a bit more and get dark/light versions

I have Gas Town derangement syndrome and spent the last few weeks writing thousands of words on agent orchestration patterns; how they shift our bottlenecks and force us to ask whether and when we should stop looking at code maggieappleton.com/gastown

And I am unreasonably proud of making all the diagrams in this responsive on mobile. With no help from Claude. Lovingly hand-crafted only because agents are shit at visual explanations and graphic design. I am still useful for a while yet.

The London Future of coding meetup came back last night! Now renamed to "the feeling of computing". More context on the name change: feelingof.com/the-name/ I handed over running it to @todepond.com, @mimireyburn.bsky.social, and Chee. They're doing great – same energy and wild demos as always

2/2 @orionreed.com doing some debugging mid-demo

The London Future of coding meetup came back last night! Now renamed to "the feeling of computing". More context on the name change: feelingof.com/the-name/ I handed over running it to @todepond.com, @mimireyburn.bsky.social, and Chee. They're doing great – same energy and wild demos as always