Avec la garderie, vous pouvez publier un set de notes très rouges,
et ensuite vous pouvez le faire et le fixer.
C'est une partie de la philosophie.
Donc, c'est supposed à la bothuer la friction et les barrières pour la publier,
et aussi, mettre votre barrière de qualité plus haute,
parce que vous devez continuer à aller en revanche et à l'improver.
Bonjour, bienvenue à la podcast de DevTools FM.
C'est un podcast sur les tools de développeur, et les gens vont les faire.
Je suis Andrew et c'est mon co-host Justin.
Salut, tout le monde.
Nous sommes vraiment excitées d'avoir Maggie Appleton sur aujourd'hui.
Maggie, c'est super de vous avoir ici.
Andrew et moi avons tous les deux lué beaucoup de vos writings.
Je vous ai bumpé à la Causel Islands Conf, en Toronto,
et nous avons voulu vous parler pour longtemps.
Donc, vous êtes maintenant en train de travailler sur votre design à Elysset,
qui est une company qui est construit un tool de summarisation pour les documents de recherche.
Et j'ai aimé entendre plus de cela bientôt.
Mais avant de nous en parler et de parler de ce que vous avez travaillé sur
et de ce que vous avez pensé,
serait-ce que vous devez nous parler de votre part?
Bien sûr.
Merci beaucoup d'avoir mis en place.
Comme vous l'avez dit, je suis un design.
Je suis un développeur, mais je me appelle moi-même un développeur malin
ou un développeur médiocale.
Je me suis aimé de travailler en front, mais je ne dirais pas que je suis bon.
J'ai commencé ma career en design à travailler sur une company qui s'appelle Egghead,
qui les gens savent que c'est une plateforme d'éducation de développeur.
J'ai appris le programme de vivre entre les développeurs,
qui travaillent avec des gens vraiment marquants.
J'ai commencé plus en éducation de développeur.
J'ai travaillé sur les diagrams pour les réactes,
et j'ai fait beaucoup de conférences sur lesquels j'ai appris le programme.
J'ai appris le programme en tant que beginner,
et c'est un peu difficile,
j'ai donné beaucoup de contenus, je pense, avant.
Je suis devenu un développeur, un design à la hybrid,
et en parlant de la voix des gens qui sont peut-être un peu moins techniques,
peut-être qu'ils n'ont pas un background fort technique,
mais qu'ils ont essayé de se mettre à la vitesse
pour réacte et de la compréhension de la développement frontière.
J'ai beaucoup d'empathie pour ces gens.
Et ensuite, j'ai appris un peu de connaissances de la communauté de management.
J'étais active dans la communauté de Rome,
j'étais très active sur Twitter.
Je suis probablement un grand fan de ce genre de choses,
qui est un grand nom de blogging,
dans une façon différente.
Je travaille maintenant pour une compagnie,
comme vous l'avez dit,
qui va essayer de speed-up le processus de littérature scientifique,
qui est un processus très manuel,
que les recherches font,
où ils doivent lire des milliers de pages
et s'en occuperer le data dans les écrans.
Nous avons trouvé que le modèle de langue est bien fait.
L'équipe ou l'accurité de l'accusé est plus importante que les gens.
C'est donc un bon outil de utilisation pour eux.
Je m'en souviens beaucoup de choses
de questions d'interface,
sur comment vous présentez les réponses de langues,
sur les réponses de langues,
sur les signes de la confiance,
sur les signes d'accurité,
et sur les gens d'understand les modèles de langues,
même quand ce n'est pas leur travail de temps.
Ils ne savent pas beaucoup de choses,
mais ils doivent comprendre
la manière dont le tool utilise.
Donc, oui,
à l'intersection de beaucoup de choses intéressantes.
Alors, nous allons commencer avec votre égale.
Vous êtes un storytelling très bon visual
et vous faites des graphiques
qui sont vraiment excellentes en communiquant les concepts.
Vous pouvez vous partager avec nous un peu
votre processus pour s'entraîner
avec ces métafores visuels ?
Bien sûr, oui, je fais beaucoup de ce travail.
Je suppose que dans ma précédente,
je suis un illustrière qui a commencé
en plus d'un visual designer.
Et maintenant je suis un design productuel
qui est un peu plus de processus
et de l'exide de choses.
Mais originalement, je faisais
des détails,
des illustrations de choses
quand j'ai travaillé avec Egghead.
Egghead a beaucoup de courses différentes
sur les topics de développement front-end.
Et je suppose que je suis en train de faire des décisions.
Et je devrais faire des couvres pour tous les deux.
Donc, je devrais aller avec des métafores visuels
ou des images visuelles
qui peuvent représenter des choses comme
RxJS
ou des monads.
Donc, vous n'avez rien à faire
en termes de symboles.
Je pense que vous avez peut-être
l'icon de l'écran de l'élaboration
ou le logo si vous avez l'un.
Mais ce que j'ai vraiment aimé
et que j'ai vraiment aimé
c'est que je devrais travailler
par les courses de course.
Et je voudrais essayer de voir
ce quelles concepts
ils en étaient en train de parler.
Si ils en parlent en réacteur,
c'est comme, OK,
les choses qui répondent à des événements.
Et puis je voudrais aller
en processus de
utiliser beaucoup de tools linguistiques
et des tools de la brainage
pour dire, OK,
bien,
quelles choses dans le monde
réactent à d'autres choses.
Vous pouvez parler de l'électricité,
vous pouvez parler de la physique.
Vous pouvez même juste parler de
les voitures, les réacteurs,
les lightes de trafic
ou quelque chose.
Vous pourriez faire des manières
pour faire des visuels
qui représentent
ces concepts de programmation
très abstracts
en utilisant des metaphors très tangibles.
Ce qui est vraiment fun
et je pense que j'ai
un processus très bien
dans le processus,
à l'extérieur que nous avons commencé
à mettre plus de visuels
en train de faire des courses
pour expliquer ces concepts.
Donc, si je suis venu
avec une médafore
qui a travaillé très bien
pour la couche de course,
nous pouvons ensuite
faire des illustrations
qui ont aidé à la batterie de course
en utilisant ces mêmes metaphors
pour soutenir
l'actualité que les instructeurs
ont dit dans les vidéos.
Donc, c'est un rôle très fun.
Et je pense que j'ai appris
beaucoup de
programmation
plus tangibles.
Je pense que
votre capacité
pour communiquer
des choses
abstractes et complexes
et des illustrations,
je pense que vous êtes
vraiment bien à ça.
J'ai toujours aimé
beaucoup de les illustrations
que vous avez sur votre site.
Juste parce que c'est comme
que vous avez l'une des
sortes de la Terre
de l'Internet.
C'est vraiment intéressant
comment vous avez
appris beaucoup de
informations dents
sur la sort de médafore
que vous avez communiqué
à différents niveaux
dans cette illustration.
Et je pense que
l'instituture est bien.
Je pense que
il y a un point
où l'art technique
est vraiment bien.
Mais aussi,
la médafore est très solide.
Je pense que c'est
une skill unique
que vous avez
là-bas.

Je vais dire que
cette médafore,
bien,
c'est le meilleur artiste.
Un autre qui est venu
avec la médafore
Yancey Strickler.
Et puis, Venkatesh Rao,
qui est un autre artiste
de l'Internet
qui j'aime,
a expéré
sur Yancey's idea
de cette Terre d'art.
Et j'ai commencé à parler
de la web cosy
comme l'espace de l'underground.
Donc, il y a tous ces
fantastiques writers
qui peuvent,
généralement,
les médafores
sont discus en mots.
Et j'aime trouver
des gens
qui sont vraiment
bonnes créateurs de médafore
comme les writers
parce que
je viens de
either collaborate
avec eux
ou de construire
leur écrit
et de faire
le médafore
beaucoup plus tangible
par en desserrer.
Et puis, vous pouvez
faire des illustrations
que tout le monde
réacte
fortement
parce que
cela peut s'éteindre
ce que pourrait être
un essaye en 1000 mots
dans une image
que vous pouvez mettre
sur Twitter
ou juste regarder
et comprendre
l'idée
de ce qui se passe là.
Donc,
oui,
j'ai trouvé
que c'était vraiment
un
collaboration positive
avec des vrais writers
pour pouvoir
prendre leur travail
et faire des visuels
qui construisent
les idées.
Oui, c'est
vraiment cool.
Cette semaine,
on pourrait penser à notre sponsor,
mais on n'a pas l'un.
Si vous êtes intéressés
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DevTools FM,
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un peu de notre merch.
Vous pouvez vous ajouter
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Et avec ça,
on va retourner au épisode.
Juste en parlant
de médafore,
vous avez mentionné
l'invélation
du concept
d'un gardening digital
que vous avez exploré.
C'est quand je suis
first introduced
à votre travail
que vous avez
découvert
votre écrit
sur le gardening digital
sort de
en poste
la haine de la pandémie
quand beaucoup de gens
parlent
de la pensée des outils
et des moyens
de vous expérimer
l'invélation.
Donc,
pouvez-vous nous dire
à l'audience
qui ne peut pas
avoir entendu
du gardening digital
ce genre de concept ?
Oui, oui.
Encore,
j'ai pris
quelqu'un
plus
plus fort que moi.
Mike Corfield
est une
recherche d'information.
Je pense que l'information
est de la spécialité.
Mais il a été
écrit
sur le management de la connaissance
sur le web
et
les wikis
et la façon
qu'on peut faire
l'invélation
pour nos âges.
Il a écrit
ce piece
qui s'appelle
le Garden et le Stream
qui dit
que

web
sont
en
2006,
c'est
quelque année
où on a commencé
de obtenir
des streams
d'information.
Donc, pense
sur la news feed
sur Facebook
quand ça s'est passé.
Et quand Twitter
s'est passé,
tout est
une
chronological stream
d'agriculture.
Le plus
nouveau
qui vient de la
top
et pour vous
de trouver
quelque chose
d'ancien
qui a été
dit
avant,
c'est très difficile.
Je ne veux pas
juste
parce que
Twitter
est mal.
Mais même
trouver des choses
qui ont juste
passé
un week
ou deux
mois
d'anime
est
déçue.
Donc, c'est
que la structure
de la façon
dont nous
nous
browse
d'information
online
s'intéresse
maintenant,
et
tout d'abord
tout ce qui a été
dit
avant.
Et bien sûr,
ce qui
s'impose
est la façon
d'y partager
d'information
et de
trouver d'information
et de
juste
complètement
notre
relation
à la façon
d'interacter
avec d'autres
idées
d'idées
en ligne
et que
nous ne sommes pas
en train de
faire
ce qu'ils ont dit
un mois
d'anime.
Nous ne sommes pas
en train de
construire
ce qu'on a dit.
Nous ne sommes pas
en train de

ce qu'on a dit.
Nous ne sommes pas
en train de
l'improver
sur ce qu'on a dit.
C'est juste
ce qu'on a dit.
Donc,
Mike a
cette
vraiment
intéressante
observation
que
je vais l'inquiéter.
Je vais l'inquiéter.
Donc, je ne vais pas
essayer de
le faire
sur le dessus de ma tête.
Mais
peut-être que c'est 2017.
Mais il n'a pas vraiment
été réglé
beaucoup.
Non,
je pense qu'il a publié
ce qu'il n'a pas été.
Il a pris un couple de ans
pour que les gens
aient pu
le voir
et le voir.
Donc, je l'ai trouvé
sur
mon ancien boss,
Joel Hooks,
qui a été
un grand

vraiment magnifique pour moi.
Il a commencé
de
aller
sur
mon blog,
pas un blog,
c'est un garde digital.
Il était
un
très long
essaye
qui était
appelé
une histoire
et une histoire
de la garde digital
qui n'était pas
vraiment
un

Il a été
un



très long
essaye
qui n'est pas









qui n'est pas



qui n'est pas



qui n'est pas
qui n'est pas





qui n'est pas
qui n'est pas
qui n'est pas
qui n'est pas
qui n'est pas
qui n'est pas











Internet.
Right.
I mean, I'm sure there's like been wonderful kind of philosophies of blogging written that
unfortunately I haven't read.
I think a lot of them are in the academia space.
I have looked at papers every now and then about this, but like how personal writing
changed when we moved into blogging versus what would have been like zines or books,
right, where you had a very long editing process and a lot of hoops to jump through,
like to get a book published before the age of blogging and the web was like, you know,
you had to have a publisher and they were going to like proofread and fact check everything.
You know, and then once you get people just like, you know, ftp up there HTML files to
the web, like in the early days, you know, that all goes out the window and it's kind
of this explosion of everyone being able to publish whatever they want.
But it does mean that there's a quality hit, you know, it gets into like trustworthiness.
How do we know what, you know, what's publish is actually true, right?
Like that gets the whole fact checking thing.
But I think there's like lots of ways we could be doing quote unquote blogging, you know,
other ways of publishing personal information that brings back some of those really good
qualities that we would have had in the old days of like fact checking and more editing
or like caring more about quality.
But then also opening up just different content types, like being able to publish,
you know, short videos and just short notes that are like deeply interlinked so you can jump
between them easily without it having to be like this big publication in the way that we think
of with like publishing a blog post or publishing a book.
It's like a big lift, but there's a lot of kind of short form, smaller stuff we could
be publishing that's like less friction that we just don't have the quite like content
shapes for yet.
So how has this idea helped you with like forming ideas and then like maybe what note
in your garden has grown the most over its lifetime?
Yeah, it's definitely gotten me, well, to rate in the first place.
Like before I got into this whole digital gardening ethos, I think I had a couple small
pieces of writing up, but I was still in blog mindset where I thought publishing a blog
post was like a big deal or something.
Or like, you know, I was just like, oh, I have to be really, you know, like make it a
thing.
I can't go back and change it once it's been published.
That was like very much the blog mindset.
And with gardening, you can kind of publish a very rough set of notes and then go back
and fix it later.
That's kind of part of the whole philosophy.
So it's supposed to both lower the friction and the barriers to publishing and also kind
of set your quality bar higher because you're supposed to keep going back and improving it.
So it's kind of trying to have the best of both worlds of like, oh, we want good quality
information on the internet, but we also don't want this feeling that you can't publish
anything because you're going to have to do so much work to get it to be good enough
to hit publish.
So it helped me a ton because then I just started publishing lots of stuff.
I just started, you know, have an idea and you just bang out a quick note about it and
you hit publish and you're like, it's okay, I can go back and update that later.
Like, I think a big part of this too is signalling that.
So on my blog posts, well, I mean, garden posts, I have, it'll say like published at
date and then updated at.
And then I also have growth stages on them.
So it'll say like, if it's a really rough note that I know I haven't done a good job
on and will revise later, I call it a seedling, right?
It's a gardening metaphor.
And then it becomes a budding note and then it becomes an evergreen note.
And then it gets upgraded to an essay if it's like, I've properly thought about this
and like drawn a cover image and it's like a real thing now.
So I try to create ways to signal to readers like the doneness level of the post.
And I've seen other people do this in cute ways, like saying something is raw
or half baked or fully baked or it's like a spark or flame or bonfire.
So people have tried different metaphors to signal doneness levels.
But I really like that as a little design pattern to help like explain how how user
should take this work, you know, do they understand like what quality level is that?
Yeah, I love that.
It's such a simple little visual indicator to like really drive the metaphor home.
And it's actually useful to do you have like the flip side of it where it's like,
oh, you didn't water this plant long enough and it's it started to wilt.
Not yet.
This is something I do want to build in.
I'm actually in the process of rebuilding my garden, which like is maybe just a
thing all developers do, right?
Every three years, you're like, oh, I need to rebuild my whole website.
Like, because it's a next jazz and it's terribly complex.
And now I need to rebuild it in Astro.
Like, I am that person and it's fine, you know.
But part of it is wanting to build some of these new features in.
Like I talked to other designers before about having things look like they've decayed over time.
So like, if I don't touch a piece for like three or four years,
I feel like it should fade or like have, you know, it should like crumble at the edges or something.
I mean, it's it's a very weird idea.
But I really want to make a script that does this to pieces
that are older than a certain amount of time.
And then maybe also make some sort of interface for me, right, as the author
to like have those surface to me.
Like, oh, you haven't touched these 10 pieces of writing in a couple of years.
Like, do you either want to archive them or add something to them?
But like, have some sort of authoring tooling that like prompts you to do that.
Because as far as I know, none of the existing blogging or writing platforms do that.
Not like WordPress or Squarespace, they would never sort of enable that interaction.
But this is why I kind of love kind of handcrafted websites
that are built like gardens, is you can just think of these very new design patterns
and like ways of interacting with your posts that that aren't kind of status quo.
So since the the heights of release, when you started writing this like heavily
in sort of 2020 and time has progressed,
the tools for thought movement has kind of given away to the sort of like local first movement.
It seems like a lot of folks have like crossed that boundary.
How do you feel about where people are or the conversation
that's happening around digital gardening still today?
And is it something that you think has reached like a broad adoption?
Or is it like still, does it still need more advocacy?
Where is it at? How do you feel about it?
I really wish I had like hard numbers on this, like how many, you know,
humans on the web have heard about digital gardening.
I imagine it's terribly low.
It's got to be less than like 0.1% or something.
You know.
Because I still think there's so much possibility in this space
of what we could be working on.
It's like I, when I wrote the essay, a lot of the writing I do is a little bit.
I don't want to say manipulative.
I write things because I want other people to build stuff
because I'm not the best engineer.
So I will often write pieces and I will be like, hey, like, here's the problem.
As I see it, here are some possible solutions.
I would love it if people were to go and build, you know, X, Y and Z.
Or I will like suggest, like, wouldn't it be great
if people would go explore building stuff?
And people did do this with digital gardens, which I loved.
It's like I wrote this piece and a ton of people said, oh, look,
I've built a Jekyll template for this.
I've built like a tool in Hugo that you could just set up your digital garden with.
Someone's built like an entire hosted platform
where you can like set up a digital garden that has these features
that I highlighted at the time, like backlinking
and these like kind of quick notes and like a really kind of exploratory structure.
So that's great.
They did that, but I still want more.
I'm still like, oh, I still want more exploration
and like weird gardening tools and weird web frameworks
for people to be able to like make their own.
Because I still get tons of people messaging me
who really, really want to be able to build a garden
and make these kind of interconnected notes and like grow over time.
But they have no programming experience and that's a total blocker.
That's like they, you know, I can tell them, OK,
listen, you're going to have to make a GitHub account
and I can walk you through it.
You're going to have to like get a code terminal
and they're like, well, what is that?
And I'm like, OK, now we're going to go NPM install.
And they're just deep over their heads.
There's just it's kind of a non-starter.
And at times I thought of like, oh, could I be building the tool to solve this?
But then you're talking about like rebuilding
Square Space or something and it just seems like
you're going to end up trapping people in a system
that's too rigid, that might as well be WordPress or Square Space.
But you're going to give them a set of predefined patents
and they won't have the agency to change those themselves.
My like current new hope is that language models
might play a role in this because they really are good pair programming assistants.
Like I really am a better developer
because I'm able to use co-pilot and I have some like latent dream
where I'm like, OK, the way that digital gardening
will move forward and that more people will be able to build them
is we will just figure out a way to build
like a programming assistant that's like specialised for this
where we could like walk someone through
getting like a local site set up
and then like somehow teach them CSS in this process
and like teach them basic HTML.
Like, I don't know, bring their programming literacy up high enough
to be able to customize a garden to suit their needs.
Because I think I also have this belief
that it's not a one size fits all solution.
Like you're just not going to be able to build a framework that works for everyone.
And I just want people to have the same access to agency that programmers do.
Because I've learned in learning programming,
I now have a ton of agency over my computing environment
and the web and what I can publish to it.
And when other people clearly have that same desire
and I'm like, oh, you have to learn all the front end development
to get that same agency, it feels very sad.
I don't know if that answered the question.
I think I just went on a little tangent there.
But you know, no, I think I think it was good.
And you know, I feel the sort of pain.
I think this is a this is a little bit of a trap
that even like seasoned developers,
while you're talking about redoing your own site.
And there's like so much inertia that gets killed by people, engineers,
especially going as like, OK, I'm going to start blogging before I do.
You know, before I write a single word,
I need to build this like industrial skill, you know, personal site.
It's going to have all these features and do all these things.
And then, you know, they get halfway through that and abandon it.
And then they were right single words.
Or they finish it, right?
They like architect the perfect blog.
And then they're like, here's my first post.
Here's how I built this blog.
And then that's the only post on the entire site forever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which is, I think, a failure for publishing pipeline
or like a writing practice that, yeah,
somehow software has failed them, but I'm not sure how.
Yeah, it feels like you're coming straight at me with those statements.
I did the same thing recently where I rebuilt my entire website.
There were a few blog posts about how I did it.
But those, the ideas of like digital gardening
definitely infected me.
And I'm like, oh, like, it needs to be interconnected.
You need to be able to hover over a link to see like a little preview.
And you're right, those features, like, they were hard fought for me
and I'm 10 years into my career.
So like a person that knows nothing of programming,
it's pretty hopeless.
The only product I'd say that comes close is Obsidian
and they're like published workflow.
You don't have to be all that technical for that,
but then you lack fully on customization.
Yeah, like, I have a blog post called Digital Gardening
for Non-Technical People, which isn't a great title
because it's not like that non-technical,
but you know, for non-programmers that says Obsidian
and Notion really are kind of the best kind of make your own solution options.
I mean, if you're not going to code, but they're so limited,
it's sort of like people read that and they go, OK,
like I've set one up like following your thing.
But like now, how do I make all the cool stuff you have?
And I was like, oh, no, you can't actually do that.
Yeah, something I think of often,
and this is a little bit of a side and we'll get back my track here,
but writing isn't the only form of content you can do.
And what we're talking about here is like the thing,
we're talking about these prerequisites
that take their own, they have their own momentum.
It takes a lot of inertia to sort of get them going.
And yeah, using tools like Notion or Obsidian or whatever
and just writing something and polishing that is good.
There's another site builder that I'm really fascinated by.
It's called MMM.page.
It's by an engineer here in Brooklyn,
and it looks like a little scrapbook.
And that's fascinating.
And I think that you see the kind of creativity
what people do with that,
where it's just like it fills more like a site from the 90s
and a more of a Geocities vibe
where people are like putting poems and pictures.
And sort of, I think like the way you express yourself
and your creativity can be through many means.
And it's like, I think there are also some people
that are just going to bounce off of writing.
And it's just like, don't put too much
in front of your writing, just write.
And then if writing is not your thing,
there's a lot of other ways to share your ideas
and a lot of places to engage.
Yeah, like another difficult thing
of personal websites at the moment,
or maybe it's just like,
I don't know if it's like the structure of the web
and the way things work.
But like all the private companies have nailed formats
that are really good,
like TikTok, Short Videos, Twitter, Short Tweets.
I really wish there was a way
we could be publishing those to our own website.
So we actually owned that content
and it wasn't trapped in these proprietary platforms
with companies that could get run by a crazy billionaire
or shut down tomorrow
or like they just won't last forever
and there goes all your content.
I really love the indie web,
they're a community trying to promote people
owning their own content,
having their own websites,
publishing to your own website first
and then like syndicating out to social media sites.
But of course, all the social media sites
are quite against this
and so they don't, they shut down their API
or they won't let you publish
from not using their interface.
So it really becomes a big challenge to actually do that.
But I'm kind of waiting to see people,
I would love to like come across a digital garden
that is like very video based or very audio based.
It's not necessarily writing
or people just define their own content types.
Like I know people who have content types
that are like, you know, coffee review
or like a walk I took
and they like map all their walks
and have like visual maps of everywhere they've walked.
And I love those more experimental content types
but I'm still waiting for us to move past
that like here's some text on a page
is like the primary content type.
Yeah, but this conversation makes me want,
it makes me want Blue Sky to win so much
because it's like, you have a protocol
that enables all of that.
And I could imagine a future where it's like,
my website just connects to app Proto
and pulls in my videos and my tweets
and my blog posts and all of that
and it would just be so cool.
Yeah, I'm hoping Blue Sky wins too.
I have tried tweeting on there,
not tweeting on there,
I mean, it's so in my mind now.
I've posted on there a little bit
but I have found the,
it's just like the massive people isn't there yet.
I keep trying to get people to come over
but when you're just like posting into the void,
you're like, okay, I don't know
if I have the motivation to keep doing this.
Like Twitter's a drug because all the people I love
and like are really interesting
and love the same things as me, you're on there.
And it's very hard to step away from that.
I'm kind of hoping,
I mean, in a bad way that like Elon just continues
to destroy it in a way that makes it completely unusable.
Like it just collapses on itself in a couple of years
and then we have to find other options.
But until it truly collapses,
I don't think people are actually gonna move off it.
Yeah, it's a real challenge.
Let's talk, let's transition a little bit
because one of the last things that we talked about
was the potential for maybe people to use LLMs
to enhance their technical ability
to write their own digital gardens,
write their own blog posts.
I mean, you're working at Alicitte,
a company that deals heavily with LLMs.
And so maybe we can talk a little bit about Alicitte
and then talk a little bit more about LLMs in general.
So will you tell us a little bit more
about sort of the details of the company?
Yeah, they're a really interesting player in the space
because language models are at the core of the product, right?
We're using language models
to summarize these scientific research papers
and help researchers extract data from research papers.
They'll need to do things like, okay,
I have a thousand papers on whatever it is,
like vitamin D deficiency.
And I need to know like,
of all the studies done in these papers,
you know, how many people were studied,
what dosage should they give people of vitamin D,
like what protocol, what was the methodology,
like who funded the study?
And usually, grad students would be paid minimum wage
to go through every paper
and extract these manually into a spreadsheet.
And it turns out that you can use language models
in a certain kind of architecture.
It's not like a single language model call,
giving it the paper and asking it, you know,
what was the dosage?
We do a whole bunch of things
to make the accuracy rate really high,
but we do a bunch of tiny steps
and we like double check the answer at every single step.
So you're kind of saying, okay,
rank the paragraphs in this paper based on relevance
to like whether it mentions dosage
and then take the top three ones
and then like check whether those actually have any dosage
and then get a different language model to check that answer.
So like you're doing these like multi chain steps
to improve accuracy.
But so that like makes our outputs very accurate,
but I'm still very skeptical of language models
like being used in other contexts.
I'm still like quite hesitant about them
or I think the way that other people are using them
in a lot of the new products I like look at
and I'm like, this doesn't seem like a good idea.
So it might seem like a contradiction,
but it's that, Alicitte, it's kind of branding
is like we are very big on being very careful,
like being very like AI safety conscious.
Like the founders kind of came out of the world
of worrying about how language models
would cause kind of really negative repercussions
on shared truths and like reliability
and how we'll be able to like prevent language models
from just like spewing dis- and misinformation
throughout the world.
So it's strange to work at an AI company
and everyone kind of things like,
oh, you must be such a fan of like writing
with chat GPT or something.
And I'm like, oh, very much the opposite.
I vary, I would never use a language model
to like write a single word of my work.
I think they are useful for things,
but very much as like research and search assistance
and not as like creating outputs for humans to read.
So I was going through guys's homepage
and you guys don't actually mention AI language model GPT
or anything on it.
So was that like a conscious decision?
Yeah, I think it's a little bit
that like we got started before a lot of the big hype
and we're trying to just stay focused
on like what problem are we solving for our users
and that's very much like they need to do a literature review.
We're trying to like speed them up
and help them improve their accuracy
and like make their lives easier.
How we do that is not necessarily that important to them.
I don't think the word AI,
I don't know what it means anymore to be honest.
Like I'm still on the team of like a calculator,
it's an AI, right?
A calculator like does maths in a way that is like,
oh, that's intelligent and it's not a human.
So it's AI as far as I'm concerned.
I know, of course, I'm like not an idiot
and like look at the current cultural conversation
of that we've decided that anything to do
with neural networks is AI for the moment,
but that will change, right?
Like at some point,
neural networks will no longer be AI
and like whatever new thing we invent will then be AI.
Like this is like a moving target
and whatever's the new hot thing
is like the new artificial intelligence.
So I think we don't use that language
just because we're trying very hard to,
yeah, not mislead
or like we're trying to say exactly what we are,
what we do.
And I think we do use the word language models
on like our FAQ
or if people ask us how the system works,
we'll talk about it.
But hopefully it shouldn't be too relevant to them
like what our backend contains.
Yeah, I like that way of framing it.
It's like advertising that the AI is doing all of this
is really just like an implementation detail.
What I want to know is like what your app does
and how it can help me.
And in this age of AIs,
we have to design our apps differently.
Currently, most people have done that
by adding a chat box somewhere in their app
and letting AI go wild.
But how do you think we should go about designing AI
into our apps?
Yeah.
Okay, I'm trying to come up with like a snappy line for this.
It's going to be like a point in a lot of my upcoming talks,
but I'm now big on like we should not be using generative AI.
I don't think, I think I'm now quite down
on whatever we think generative means,
which in my head is like generating images and videos and text
and just like shoving them on the web
and being like, wow, look, we made a thing.
And it's like, yeah, but how is that useful?
Synthesizing, condensing and like searching AI is useful.
Like AI to me is like a really good search engine.
Like we should definitely be using AI
to like improve search across the board.
Like semantic search is incredible, right?
This is the kind of thing where like you search for dog
and you also get bone and bark and like words
that are near it in latent space
or like in the space of a neural network
when they've embedded all the words in a training set.
You know, it knows what like a dog related words are.
So this is incredibly useful.
We obviously had this for a long time,
but we're now just going to have much better search.
My favorite example of this is exa.exa.ai.
Have either of you used that search engine?
Yeah, I used it when it was metaphor.systems,
but yeah, it's nice.
Yeah, I don't quite know how they've done it,
but they've essentially taken an approach of,
it can't be all the links on the web,
but somehow they've taken the web
and embedded it into this like neural network latent space.
And then they're able to search for similar websites
based on what you request with natural language.
So I can ask something like,
give me all the blog posts like written by engineers
about like voice to tech systems.
And it will do a pretty good job of finding me blog posts
like written by that type of person about that topic.
Which, if you type into Google, you do not get that, right?
And it's partially because of the way people game
the Google SEO system, right?
That like all the junk kind of rises to the top
and maybe that could happen one day with exa,
if like this all goes wrong.
But search engines really will become much better
because of this kind of thing.
So searching, researching,
when you're able to, we now do have much better techniques
for like giving language models corpusses of data
and saying only answer based on this corpus.
So they're not gonna answer
based on their training memory, right?
Which is like whatever they were trained on,
which is mostly like all of Reddit,
you know, Sure Wikipedia,
but like all of the web is usually
what they would answer based on.
But you can say, you know,
here's a bunch of legal documents,
only give me the answer based on these legal documents,
which again, it's kind of just better search, right?
This is all better search.
And then distilling, it's like,
okay, you can give it a full article
and say just give me a summary of this article
and it can do a pretty good job
of accurately summarizing things.
So super useful for all of that.
But anything that's using AI
to generate end products,
like an essay, an article, a video,
where you don't have a lot of human in the loop input,
there's not a human there,
like vetting every single thing that AI says,
or like checking if that's useful to anyone.
Or like, I think I have a friend who's a writer
where we've done a couple of podcast episodes
on writing and language models
where we're both quite, yeah, negative about it.
Because we were trying to make the argument
like writing is a human going out into the world
and having lots of experiences, right?
And forming opinions about the world.
We're saying like, okay, I experienced this,
I touched that, I smelt that, I talked to that person.
And all of these have added up to me realizing something.
And now I want to communicate that to other people.
So I'm going to write it down in very specific words,
where I have this fuzzy experience in my head
that's very embodied, it's very human, it's emotional, right?
It has all these qualities
that language models could never understand or mimic.
And then I'm using that very like holistic
embodied emotional experience to create words
that like get another person, another human,
to feel those same feelings
or to understand what I saw and felt
and like touched in the world.
And a language model can generate words
that seem the same,
but because they didn't actually go out into the world
and have those experiences, it's like,
the point of those words is very ambiguous.
Like why, what would be the point of me reading them?
I think we got to that at some point, we were like,
well, we would never want to read words written
by a language model about the experience of like,
I don't know, getting married or having a child
or like going through a severe illness.
Like all of those words would be not useless
because maybe it could provide you comfort,
but it wouldn't be accurate at all.
It wouldn't actually represent someone's experience.
And so there's a real danger here of us divorcing reality
from like all these words written on the web about reality
that are not actually connected to reality.
Yeah, every time I talk about the current company
I work at Descript, I put it in very similar terms.
Like a lot of other AI video companies seem to be like
full generation, just spit a video out
and we got a video now.
But in my opinion, those are far less useful tools.
Like I want an AI to help me to enhance me
and like to tie it back to some examples.
We have two features in our product,
one where it's like find all the good clips in a podcast
and then make them into tiny videos.
Then another one that's like, okay,
condense this clip down into like a readable nice thing.
And the former gets into that generative territory
for me where it's like,
it doesn't have my experiences or my perspective.
So it can't really pick out
what I think would be a good clip,
but it's very good at taking something
I've already deemed good and then like condensing it down.
So I definitely like tools that are more on that side
than the just do it all for me side.
Right, because otherwise you would have to teach language models
what your judgment of good is.
Which some people think we will be able to do that,
but to me it sounds a little bit like this idea.
Like I don't wanna say it's a naive idea,
but it does feel like it.
Like in the early days, I think a lot of researchers were like,
well, we will make language models like ethical and moral
by just writing down all the ethical rules for them.
And it was like, hmm,
if you've read philosophy because people have really gone
into how this is like impossible and like.
All ethics are like culturally relative
and they like completely vary across time and place
and languages and communities.
And like there is no agreed upon set of ethics,
hence like all the controversy over every law
we ever have to pass in society.
And it feels the same to me that if you say
you're gonna write down what defines a good video,
that is very culturally constrained.
What would make a good video in like,
I don't know 1890 is very different
to what would make a good video today.
And depending on whose taste and like what are they like.
So I think I'm still skeptical on that front
or I'm also a little afraid that one set of goodness
will be encoded into the models
and that will be like the end of us changing
what is good forever, right?
Cause it's now in software
that we like have spread around the world
and like could not possibly update somehow.
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting ideas there
and like challenges.
I mean, one of the base things is like taste
is not a thing that can be easily taught to people.
I mean, in general, so there are like these tactical things
like we had Steve Ruiz on the podcast a while back
and he gave tips on like,
here's how you make a really good
engaging illustrative video on Twitter.
It's like this length, this speed,
like very tactical
and you might not have picked that up
on just watching those,
but you might still think, oh, this is good.
So if like language model or something can say,
hey, these clips do you really like
have these properties consistently?
Then like maybe that's very helpful,
but like teaching taste to another human
is a very hard thing beyond those like tactical things.
So I see that as like a,
if you can't do it for another human,
how are you gonna do it for a machine?
Yeah, that's a very good example though.
I like the idea of,
I think I am still quite positive on this
of language models or neural networks in general,
being able to point out patterns,
that is like a really promising avenue, right?
That they could say,
okay, you've liked all this stuff
and it has these patterns in common
that you would have never been able to put words to.
And now that you've synthesized that
into a statement of saying, oh, they're,
you know, they're speed,
they didn't have, you know,
if it's animation, this easing pattern
or they use these colors,
then you can kind of clarify your taste a little bit more
and be able to make more stuff that you feel is good.
So again, that kind of falls in the like,
maybe I'd call it like research
and self understanding is maybe more,
I'm excited for them to be used for.
They think they have a lot of potential
as rubber ducks as well.
Like if you've ever tried,
like solving a programming problem with co-pilot
or cursor or whatever, like AI assistance tools,
half the time you're just trying to think
through the problem out loud,
the way you do it with colleagues.
Like I do a lot of voice to text
where I just talk to my computer
to work through a problem cause it helps me.
And then seeing the text written down
and then like saying again,
what I think the problem is,
I've solved a lot of bugs that way.
So I think I'm still like quite bullish on them
as self reflection machines.
But again, it's still such an internal process.
It's me working through what I'm thinking
and what I'm figuring out.
And then I make the final words on screen for an essay
or like I write the final code and check it.
It's that kind of thing.
Yeah, totally agree with that.
Let's switch topics.
So you are hosting the future of coding event in London
that's a fantastic event.
I haven't been to the London win,
but I was, I've been to the New York one several times.
So I'm really glad that you're doing it.
What motivated you to start hosting that
and how have they been going?
Yeah, I kind of accidentally started hosting it.
It was like future of coding, right?
Again, not started by me, Steve Krause,
who might have met if you went to the New York one,
founded it.
I think when he was living in London with Ivan Reese,
oh, I think it was another founder,
I'm gonna forget the name.
But anyway, they started,
what was essentially a website and a Slack
just for people who were interested in a set of topics
that kind of loosely gathered around end user programming,
kind of saying that computers are too limited for end users.
We should be allowing people to have more agency and control
over their computers and their machines.
A lot of this philosophy came from kind of the early 80s
and 90s, like Alan Kay, Brett Victor picked up on it
in like the 2010s and made a lot of talks
that inspired a lot of people who were part of the community.
Just trying to say,
like we can do better in a way with programming
and allowing more people to be programmers.
So I found this community,
and they have a podcast that's wonderful,
which is like a whole history of computing, really.
It's such a good thing to binge.
And just was like, oh, these are my people,
like this is absolutely what I bang on about
in all my conference talks, like I love this.
So I joined the Slack and there was a London channel.
And at some point,
one of my Twitter friends was coming into London
and I was like, oh, we should go get beers.
And he was kind of part of this community too.
And I was like, you know what, we'll post in the Slack,
we'll see who's free, I'll just put like a pub
at a time and a place.
I think we had like maybe 15 people come the first time
and we went, oh, this was great,
we should do it again next month.
And then we had 30 the next month,
and then it was 40 and then it was 50.
And then we outgrew the pub, right?
We had too many people and they couldn't fit us in anymore.
So then I found a space where they had a projection screen
and we could kind of do like beer and pizza there.
And so now we're closer to like 100 at most events.
And we do a lot of very short demos.
So people just get up and do anything
from like a three to seven minute demo
or something they've been working on
or like a weird side project.
And it's become a really wonderful community.
We just have lots of people who come back over and over again.
Because Europe doesn't, I guess, have a lot of these,
we have people who fly in from like Barcelona or Sweden
or like Paris and they just come
just to go to the event for the night
because it's the only space they can go
where other people are really doing kind of
very strange experimental things with interfaces and programming
and who care about end user programming.
So it's become a wonderful community.
But yeah, I don't run me like future of coding official.
Like that's a whole bunch of people doing the podcast
and like sending out weekly newsletters.
And it's it's really a collaborative space
where people do a whole bunch of different stuff
to kind of get everyone rallied around this core idea.
So what are some of the things of people have shared
and what gets you most excited about the future of coding?
We get a lot of weird stuff, which is what I kind of love.
I joke that like the demos are never allowed
to be like commercial or practical in a way.
Like no one could ever turn a startup out of one of these.
I guess a few people have like Steve,
actually Steve Ruiz, who does TL draw.
He did a lot of like early demos there, which were really great.
At the last one we had last week, we had a lot of VR stuff.
So we had someone doing like, how could you make
like a 3D animated children's character in VR?
But how could like a parent paint them themselves
and like allow the child to interact with it?
But in a way that like they could actually make the 3D animation.
So I'm trying to make that more accessible.
In the past, we've had people do things like
wear one of those the headsets
that can like detect your neural brainwaves
and then play a video game, just thinking like thoughts
to the players in the game.
Like, OK, I want you to like run and then shoot and it works.
They can like think certain patterns
and somehow the device can tell like what pattern is like run or shoot.
So that was kind of crazy.
We had a lot of really good
like people inventing their own programming languages
and just like demoing how they work.
Sometimes joke languages, sometimes like musical languages.
So it's it runs the gamut.
We kind of I don't really filter too much of who can present.
I mean, if someone's really just that like pitch their start up,
I'm usually like, oh, it's probably not a good fit.
But usually people are building weird things on the side
that like don't fit into any other meetup.
And so they end up a feature of coding.
Yeah, brain interfaces are crazy.
Like I know I know it's from the the evil billionaire
who's not should not be named, but a neuralink.
They just installed it on a person.
And the way the guy, he's I think paraplegic,
describes moving the cursor on the screen.
Just he's like, I can't explain it.
It's like moving a limb.
It's like, I go to move my arm
and the cursor just moves on the screen.
So it's just like it's mind blowing.
Yeah, that's so cool.
I see I had no idea before I saw the demo.
I was just like, this is dog magic.
I had no idea we had these devices.
And apparently they're quite cheap.
Yeah, it's really wild.
So there's a lot of overlap in this community
with other movements of their community.
So I joked earlier about like
when I got involved with the scene,
it was like the tools for thought scene was very active.
And I went to beta works
and I met a lot of the people
who were kind of going through their think camp.
And then now it seems like there's this
mind shift and people are talking more about local first.
It seems like a lot of the similar people.
There's like this end user programming theme
and this idea of like we want more software agency.
So at the end of our episodes,
we like to ask a future facing question.
And my question for you is,
what do you think, where do we go from local first?
What is the next big community mind shift in this space?
I guess that yeah, I like that insight
that we're all just like coming up with different names
as an excuse to like host conferences
that are all secretly like
how do we give people more agency over their computers?
Because I do feel like tools for thought was that, right?
It was like, OK,
how do we make new tools for thinking?
Right? We like are thinking too small.
We just have like Microsoft Word.
Like how do we expand our minds?
And then same with local first,
it has a slightly different flavor.
Like how do we allow everyone to own and control their data?
I mean, I would love if at some point
we all just like finally embrace
the end user programming thing.
I know we don't because it's been a word
that's been around since at least.
I don't think it was invented in 1991,
but that was when like a small matter of programming,
which is kind of one of the core books of it was written.
And I think people got very skeptical of it, right?
There was this big like, oh, we're going to, you know,
spreadsheets have happened.
We're going to enable anyone to be able to do programming.
It's going to be this like whole enlightenment age
of just all users around the world's like being able to program.
And in a funny way,
we kind of have done that with low and no code.
Like people do have way more power
over their machines than they did before, right?
Like things like air table and notion
really do like empower people to do crazy stuff
without having to code.
But we still know there's like more to do.
So I'm kind of hoping that everyone
just at some point like gives in is like, OK,
I know that we think end user programming
failed and like it was supposed to be this impossible dream
and we had to like give up on it and like settle for low and no code.
But I'm still like, oh,
is there a way language models could bring this back?
Like, I just, you know, if we, whatever it is,
like Devon or whatever the next demo is
of the like magical coding assistant
that like browsers the web for you and reads the docs, right?
And like runs your console for you and all you have to do,
I don't say all you have to do.
This is still a very big thing, right?
It's like, tell it what you want, which is not simple
because, right, there's a kind of a joke
that like, oh, we could get computers to program for us
if we could just specifically define
exactly how we wanted the program to behave.
And everyone's like, yeah, that's called code.
But still, you're like, OK,
but there could be a way that I, as a non-programming user,
who'd come in and say, listen, like, OK,
I'm having trouble with whatever it is,
like scheduling my kids' activities, you know,
and I want to describe exactly what I want.
I want like a notification to happen at this time
and I want like a calendar event to be rescheduled
if this happens and I could write in plain English
a bunch of if this, then that statements, you know,
if this, then that is the platform is actually quite limited
and what it can do.
But if I could genuinely just have a conversation
with the chatbot, describe exactly what I need.
It might not be that complex.
Maybe I don't need some big crazy database,
you know, to manage it.
And we could just have a system that builds you the app you need
and you own it and control it
and it's local on your computer.
And there's no need for Facebook to get involved
or there's no need for anyone to make ad revenue
or like get VCs involved
and like this having to be some high growth company.
I think I still optimistically believe
that future is not that far away.
Maybe a couple years, it just, I think the pace of change
and like the scale and improved performance
with language models, this doesn't seem crazy to me
even though there's a huge debate raging on Twitter
of like half the people saying like, yeah, yeah,
we had this idea in the 80s, like stop bringing it back.
Yeah, it would be cool if everybody could make their own little apps
cause like that's where I gain the most value out of my skills.
Like over the weekend, I was rebuilding one of my,
one of the things I used to discover music
and just having the ability to craft those things is so fun.
You wanna move on to tool tips? Do you have tool tips?
I do have two.
Okay, the first one is Grant Sanderson
who goes by Three Blue One Brown on YouTube,
has a set of six videos that explains language models
and neural networks in like the most accessible way.
Maybe not the most.
There is still some like calculus in there
that frankly I like glaze over and just skip through
cause I'm like, this part is not relevant to me.
But for anyone who's like totally lost in the whole AI thing
and like what in the world is everyone going on about
with like neural networks and latent space and embeddings
and vectors and like what do these words even mean?
Grant does a really good job of just explaining it
in a very accessible way that you're like,
oh, this is not dark magic.
Like I totally understand now.
Like this helps me understand how chat GPT behaves.
So I think those are a really good resource
and they saved me.
I would have no idea what this stuff was without him.
Yeah, the guy who just left from open AI recently
does the same thing where he'll like explain
like these really hard concepts
into like really short code and short videos.
I absolutely love it.
I think he recently implemented GPT
in like less than a thousand lines of code.
So it's really interesting to see like these crazy
new groundbreaking concepts
are actually kind of like simple
when you break them down into like the minimum amount
of code needed to run it.
It's more like the hardware required to get it good, right?
That's the hard part.
Yeah, it only costs a billion dollars in GPUs, it's fine.
Yeah, only a trillion dollars.
So coincidentally enough,
while I was searching for a tooltip before this episode,
this tool came up and it seems very similar
to the product that you're working on,
but it's an open source tool slash paper from Stanford.
It's called Storm,
which that's actually an acronym, that's fun.
You can use it to synthesize topics online
into like a like fleshed out Wikipedia article
with references.
So the way they describe it is
you kind of just like put in a Google search
in their example,
I'd like to know more about the Hualien City earthquake.
It creates a Wikipedia-like article for you
with a bunch of different references
and you can use this as a jumping off point
for going into more detailed work.
And it's from Stanford,
so it's probably pretty okay.
Yeah, that one looks great.
I mean, I'm sure people have also heard of perplexity
as like another great search engine
that's doing this really well.
I would hope that they're gonna kind of be the leaders
in the space of like more general web search
with really reliable references.
I still need to check out perplexity.
Raycash just added all of them to their quick thing,
so I'll probably try those out soon.
Next up, we have Atomico.
Yeah, I don't remember exactly where I discovered this,
but it is a framework for building web components.
I've been thinking more about web components lately
because I'm working on my own startup
and there are some times when I have components
that I want to share,
but I don't know what the end-user's
whole web situation is like.
So it's like, you know,
actually, this is a really good use case for web components.
And this library,
which is sort of a library for building web components,
gives you a really nice abstraction interface
for building those components
and their design work is impeccable,
their site is wonderful.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I saw a component library that was released with this
and it looked really interesting.
So I don't remember exactly what that was called,
but anyway, it looks like a cool tool.
So if you've used Lit or a bunch of the other
web components things,
maybe this is a good one to check out.
They really went very hard for their hero image here.
They really did, yeah.
Yeah, the animation is impeccable.
Yeah, I've always wanted to build one of those types of things.
OK, Maggie,
what was the second thing you wanted to talk about?
It's a tool called Super Whisper,
which allows you to do voice-to-text transcription
locally on your machine using Whisper,
which is like the tool that OpenAI made.
So it's very, very accurate.
I think the problem with voice-to-text systems
in the past has just been that they don't understand
any accent that's not American, right?
And they don't do like multi-language
and just if you're mumbling or your microphone's bad,
they're just too inaccurate to really use all the time.
But Whisper was a model released by OpenAI
that was trained on all this speech data
way more than had ever been before
because of the use of neural networks.
We were able to do it.
So it's super accurate, supports all kinds of languages.
I love it, I use it all day.
Like I rarely type at this point, which is very strange.
But you just hit a keyboard shortcut, you talk,
it transcribes what you say in line,
like it's paced into whatever app you're in.
So it helps the time with doing email,
with like responding to colleagues on Slack,
for like getting down quick ideas for blog posts.
So I use it all the time, I really love it.
That's awesome.
Another website with an impeccable header.
The noise they use here is just beautiful.
I love a little noise on my surfaces in web design.
So pretty. Cool.
Next up, I have a tiny little library
from the Twitter user Shuding.
Or Shuding, I have no clue how to say the name.
But I think they work at Versel
and they came out with this package
that enables Next.js view transitions.
So if you've seen the View Transitions API,
it makes it really easy to transition one element
from one page to another element on another page
and make it look real like native and flowy.
But in Next.js app router, up until this point,
if you've wanted to do it,
you would just be pointed to a GitHub issue
where there's no solution
and just a bunch of sad developers.
So now they can point themselves to this library
where it's actually super easy to add these view transitions.
You just add a context at the root of your app
and you use their link component
and then you get magical view transitions out of the box.
So if you've been looking for something like this,
I'd go check this out for sure.
Nice.
Yeah, that's great.
I was one of those sad developers on that issue.
I'm not gonna say that my motivation to want to move
from Next to Astro was partially just view transitions,
but it kinda was.
They came out with support so quickly.
It was crazy.
Astro, yeah, yeah, it was odd.
Okay, next up, we have Superstate.
Yeah, this is a really interesting one.
I am fascinated by state chart or state machine libraries,
but they generally tend to be pretty complicated.
Massive respect for the X-State team.
I love their visual diagramming tools,
but I still find, I bounce off of X-State a lot
just because of the complexity of the actual interface.
So Superstate is another attempt
to do a similar sort of thing.
It's to define the state machine.
Their differences, they have this very simple DSL.
It's mostly string-based
and there's this one chain function
and you can just call a bunch of things together
and kind of very tersely describe this interaction
that you wanna have.
And I'm not 1,000% sold on the DSL
that they came up with here,
but I do like how minimal and how clean it is.
And it's cool.
I love to see more people playing in this space.
I think that this is a very underutilized tool.
Oftentimes, programming,
especially very stateful programming,
gets really complicated
because you just have too many variables
and you don't actually need them all to be variables.
C'est comme combinatorie, logic explosions,
c'est un problème.
So, definitely, if you need something like this,
if you have a complex UI element,
it's like in a bunch of different states
and you wanna make sure that works correctly,
then a tool like this might be really helpful.
The string API is interesting.
Are they using TypeScript template strings
to make that type safe?
Probably.
I don't fully know, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's one of the things that I felt like,
maybe feedback to the developer,
maybe there's like,
you could play with this API a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, cool.
That wraps it up for tool tips this week
and for the episode.
So, thanks for coming on, Maggie.
This was a very interesting conversation,
not our usual conversation,
but I loved how we got into AI
and how you think about growing your own digital garden.
So, thanks for coming on.
Yeah, thank you for having me on,
even though I'm not really very dev-tool-y,
but I really appreciate you going out on a limb
and having someone a bit more weird on.
Yeah, no, it was really awesome.
We've wanted to talk to you forever.
And I mean, I think that when we started this podcast,
we were really thinking about
not just the tech that people put out,
but also the people who were shaping
how we think about both our tools and our work.
And this fits just solidly in there.
So, thank you so much for coming on.
It was really great.
Yeah, I had a great time.
Thanks so much.