Jan

no thank you app developer X, i don’t trust YOUR agent, just give mine webMcp and shut up about it!

Don't believe anything that is the "12 factor" anything. That is way too many factors! You can frame anything into that, so its meaningless.

Diffusion models would look so much cooler cdn.prod.website-files.com/635c4eeb7833...

Apple’s Interoperability Commitments to the UK’s CMA Promise Nothing - Open Web Advocacy

UK friends! Today is the last day to submit comment regarding the CMA's plan to capitulate to Apple & Google (booo!), prolonging harm to UK businesses and consumers, despite new powers that would let the CMA rein it in. @open-web-advocacy.org has the details:

open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-...

new p(doom) = 0.5

- expose standardised api for UIs like webuis, IDE extensions and TUIs to connect to, no more tying the UI to the agents!
- abandon mcp servers eager loading finally.
- main concepts: skills (md skills, tool skills, mcp skills, init skills etc.), permissions/capabilities all with taint tracking

what we interact with, those will be only interesting as subagents.

A dependable app agent framework would:
- run in web worker (in browser or local)
- use rest+sse over http or unix socket
- run as daemon independent of ui
- have pluggable state store (threads, history, tools, permission etc.)

Is there really not a single usable agent framework out there yet? Everyone seems to be working on the same dead ends. We need to separate system agents (rust, terminal, direct fs access) from app agents (js only, lightweight, isolates)

I mostly care about app agents system agents will not be

do not go to work

the agent is wherever inference touches the world.

always-already-programming.md GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

”The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of less agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into more agency.”

parody of Onion De Blasio article: Discord: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy To Find A Chat App That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’

The Web Is For User Agency We take the Web for granted as that thing that's there and we talk of things being good or bad for the Web, but we don't ever sit down and really say what the Web is for. I take a look at this questio...

rainy day re-reads

@robin.berjon.com - berjon.com/user-agency/

@gordon.bsky.social - newsletter.squishy.computer/p/the-minima...

... and rebuilding the ideas you like from scratch. Not much room for classical external contributors or PRs.
Agents will run as services in layers of sandboxes not in a cli or extension. The sandboxes will run wherever you like.

(You just wont have to see them if the code and/or the data does not matter to you, but there is no alternative for the 10% where it does matter)
There will be so much software, so much vulnerability and so much slop, the only way to cope is sharing screenshots and pure ideas in networks of trust...

Content addressed storage, version control and sync protocols will be the only stable foundation to build on.
Web IDEs and sidebars will not go anywhere, whoever says otherwise, wants to sell a future that is not realistic or dystopian. (eg. amp)

Evolving the software will be part of the user experience not just move to some agent factories behind companies, CLIs, product managers and gatekeepers. Everything will be open source or be cloned.

Software will move so fast, having separate dev and prod stacks makes no sense. Users will need to be able to pin the version that works for them and update or downgrade how and when they please and be able to view source, fix bugs and add features for themselves and while using the software.

all obsolete things i got rid of many years ago, now have to fight not to get in the way.

Training on bash is getting out of hand. I hope we don't end up in a reality where we have to use fake bash and string parsing to take over with native tools. This is just one example of AI crustification of whatever happened to work at one point. react, bash, TUIs ...

free open source software needs fewer engineers and more designers and product people

in which the account registration rate on the matrix.org homeserver hockeysticks over the last few hours.

Hm, did something happen over at Discord?

Google calendar does not have a list of special dates and then shows illustrations for them, it checks every event title for strings, so if you make a Christmas planning reminder 1 month before that day will show up with Christma illustrations.

looking forward to when we go to ai looking design galleries like we go now to see geocities.

The crystal towers of software are melting. New streams have to carve new riverbeds and lay down fresh sediment. Swamps aren’t great for human settlement.

Just got some german paperwork from 2021 and 2022. This is just business as usual there. I guess i have stop celebrating my this time really totally last contact with german bureaucracy.

I know, i know, everyone has vibe-coded this exact same app, but the firehose is just so cool to watch. clockwork-blue.ntr.io #ATproto

frogs are cool

"Now, human-computer interaction is shifting away from the mouse and toward even more intimate interfaces: Touch devices are another step toward the forgetting of the body as it merges with machine. Like the mouse but more so, touch provides the illusion of even more direct agency and therefore of being in more control. But if you are closer to the physical metal when using a laptop’s trackpad or touchscreen, you are no closer to understanding how it works or, more important, how you work on your laptop and how it works on you. “As computer interfaces increasingly shift toward touch pads and touch screens,” Ali Na warns in “The Fetish of the Click: A Small History of the Computer Mouse as Vulva,” “it is important to avoid understanding this transition as one toward more direct or unmediated contact with the digital.” The more direct the interface seems to ordinary users, the more likely they are to take it for granted and ignore how their experience is being mediated. This in turn allows the would-be programming elite to remain “close to the metal” by taking advantage of those users’ ignorance (even as coding itself becomes more automated and distant from the machine)."

"Bad Metaphors: Close to the Metal" by Emma Rae Norton (2019)

reallifemag.com/bad-metaphor...

i mean i dont care much for traces, we have to assume code is malicious and ai generated everywhere now until its reviewed. the annotation layer for version control is missing for a while though. i hope as with many things, ai will force devs to build what we human devs wanted for ever