efields

I'd watch all 20 minutes of that screen share.

Same. I've been a fastmail user for years and JMAP is a must-have for me now. But infra is so much easier to manage than it used to be, and I see projects like this and I'm thinking it could just be my own affordable box in the cloud now (that I could use for other servers as well).

I'm amazed to learn from these comments that there are so many local PDF solutions (and opinions on them).

I have a typescript app that launched February. It's regularly updated when there are bug reports, but I'm doing a big cleanup in prep for new marketing efforts.

I don't know how folks stayed on top of this ecosystem before LLMs. Rails was at least on a schedule.

We have a an aging rails monolith that gets cast aside whenever there's more important work to do, which is most of the last 8 years or so. The maintainer (my old boss) stopped deploying properly and there was code drift on prod.

He left, my time freed up because claude, and I gave claude the directive of making an API to use with a Vite frontend so we can rebuild the UX carefully with user input along the way, and the end result will be running the monolith in parallel while users migrate to the new platform, monitoring, then phasing out the rails app. I'm skipping over a lot of the details, but so far so good, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

If I was rebuilding the same app today, I'd still probably use rails as the API layer. The conventions are great, it's readable for when you need to read it... before AI the JS community was forever hunting for the "rails for node" and never got it. I think that says something.

I figured they weren't. People smarter than me made them.

I think they've been implemented well in some cases. I think they've been implemented poorly in others.

So it goes.

That's where I am too. Opus 5.5 but increasingly faster is a future I'm hoping for.

GLHF

The medium is the message here. As others have said, chat output largely sucks for anything but the most basic responses and we've done little to improve upon that foundational UI in the last couple years. We've _added_ a lot for specific domains like coding and document editing, but the primary content normal users get back from the chats is verbose and uninteresting. This is a step in the right direction.

Gettin closer to fully dynamic interfaces for a lot of software. Hell, give me a mode in Google Docs that takes every pixel of chrome away then vibe the rest as I need it. Persist across new documents going forward.

I was repulsed too at first, but honestly cheap build-your-own-video-game tools have been out there since the 90s at least. This is just the modern version. Fine.

I could see microgames creep into social media feeds maybe. That's what this allows for. Games that might be novel for a few minutes. Some folks will put in the effort to make a modern multi-hour game here but very few, like their player-base.

Also, prototyping! Maybe it's good for that (just don't share it publicly).

Self-review is an anti-pattern.

I love this kind of work for agents.

I'm a dev/creative person. I have code and I have assets and I sometimes need to be in apps to manipulate assets and increasingly I'm looking for ways to agents to take care of it. I want to use apps less and less because I've witnessed how good an agent can be when given the right prompt/tools. As a photographer, I'd be happy to simply pop an SD card into my computer and tell an agent what to do with the contents.

There's no studies, but a lot of anecdata.

> Suddenly, everything has changed. Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8.

I've been feeling this way for months and months. If you're a person who's curious about computers and what they can do you can do for you, we just kind of talk to the computer now and ask it to do the thing. And it does it. I know most of what's happening the whole time yet it still feels like magic. We're pondering orbs all day now.

I've been a professional software person for 15+ years... my assumptions as to what the right decisions are in building software now are racked every day. And more than ever I want the device you're describing: blank slate hardware I build to do what I want how I want it to. Yes, I know that's not for everybody. But I really want to just boot up something from scratch and say, "this is how we should deal with email." Because the way I want to deal with email is the way I want to deal with email, and LLMs will help me get there. Get all this UI chrome out of my face.

Last, I've also mused (heh) about a sort of GitHub for PRDs:

> ...there’ll be thousands of times more applications that pull in 1/7th of the guts of a word processor to solve some idiosyncratic work or home life problem for somebody who doesn’t know what a for-loop is.

I think those guts-as-md-files can be maintained in on publicly available platform for all to use. Sort of a "best practices of the commons." Language-agnostic. Or rather, one language: English. Apps going forward don't necessarily need a datatable plugin — because every datatable plugin eventually has defaults or assumptions that clash with what you need — but it needs the schematics for the types of parts a datatable can have.

It's just such an interesting time to be curious about computers.

Sounds like I should check in on rust in a year or so.