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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · 29d

Possibly my favorite cooking book ever!!

Reposted by Geoffrey Litt

Cyrus Omar @neurocy.bsky.social · Jun 11

Really enjoyed this distillation of the vision of malleable software that drives so much great work in our community today. Important point is that we need tools that titrate in programming continuously, so that users of all skill levels can adapt their tools and expert users can *really* build.

Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Jun 10

New longform @inkandswitch.com essay! 📜

Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

by me, @joshuahhh.com, @pvh.ca and @seaofclouds.com

inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

It's about why people need agency over their software tools, and how to make that happen.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can...

inkandswitch.com

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Reposted by Geoffrey Litt

Josh Horowitz @joshuahhh.com · Jun 13

BTW: I'm slowly assembling a LIVE Primer to help folk submitting to LIVE (& others) get the lay of the land. Please take a look and let me know what's missing, what sucks, what's rad, etc.

live-workshop.github.io/primer/

The LIVE Primer

live-workshop.github.io

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Jun 10

It's not a short read, we went deep on it -- but we tried really hard to keep it accessible to anyone who's curious.

Let us know what you think, and share with others if you like it :)

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Jun 10

New longform @inkandswitch.com essay! 📜

Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

by me, @joshuahhh.com, @pvh.ca and @seaofclouds.com

inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

It's about why people need agency over their software tools, and how to make that happen.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can...

inkandswitch.com

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · May 25

The key is you can actually explain what you want thoroughly and in detail, so it actually writes the code you want.

(And yes, I promise this can be much faster than coding by hand, in some cases!)

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · May 25

You may not like this answer, but one solution here is to do more coding thru an agent chat rather than autocompleting… it achieves a very different kind of “flow” but I find it much faster for certain tasks and less jerky than code autocomplete

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · May 23

How would you compare to o3?

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Reposted by Geoffrey Litt

Paul Sonnentag @paulsonnentag.bsky.social · May 15

What if you didn't need git to collaborate on games?

We've been prototyping a new approach to collaboration in Godot: live and async collaborative editing, with branches and diffs, built right into the editor.

We're looking for people to test out an early version, see link in next post:

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · May 2

Crazy game

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 30

I like your point, but also the single mediocre undergrad works at 10-100x human speed sometimes which is a big deal!

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 23

Strong overlap between good craftspeople and life philosophers!

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 23

Man, this is such a beautiful video series.

Seeing the amount of work it takes to build a good house is awe-inspiring.

youtu.be/d7e6IOdKfVw?...

Building a Craftsman House [Start to Finish Timelapse]

YouTube video by Essential Craftsman

youtu.be

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 22

we have lots more ideas cooking on ambsheets that we're excited to share - to subscribe to future updates and to see more details on filtering, check out our lab notebook post about this work! 6/6

www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/no...

02 · Filtering scenarios

Using spreadsheet formulas to choose scenarios to focus on

www.inkandswitch.com

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 22

you can also write any spreadsheet formula you want and use the result as a filter 😎

and, you can filter on *outputs* and filter "backwards" showing what inputs are compatible w/ that output!

eg: in this video we see what we can afford while staying under budget:

5/

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 22

this starts very simple: just check a box to focus down on a subset of the values in your sheet.

eg: "if i lease the cheaper car, what might my budget total look like"?

but, because we're in an open-ended spreadsheet, it can also get more interesting than that... 4/

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 22

one way to explore a space is *filters*.

we've all seen filters on shopping websites: you can use checkboxes, range sliders, etc to narrow down a list.

we can borrow from that familiar paradigm and bring it into our ambsheet. 3/

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 22

ok, first some quick background. we previously introduced our Ambsheets project: a spreadsheet where one cell can hold multiple values.

this creates a space of options... but wait, how do you explore that space? 2/

bsky.app/profile/alex...

Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Feb 4

What if a spreadsheet cell could hold multiple values at the same time?

That's the idea behind Ambsheets, a project I've been working on w/ @geoffreylitt.com at @inkandswitch.com. It's a new spreadsheet that makes it easier for you to explore many possibilities simultaneously.

1/2

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 22

what if you could model a problem in a spreadsheet, and then instantly start applying powerful *filters* to explore your space of options?

that's the idea @alexwarth.bsky.social and I have been exploring recently at @inkandswitch.com ... 1/

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 13

Yes, I remember loving it, that’s why I chose the name!

Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 13

Yeah meal planning is next up for me too! Would be ideal to hook up Instacart automation but unfortunately that seems complicated.

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 13

lol yeah, it’s been a while since I read the book and I don’t really remember the details, I should revisit…

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 13

Oh weird! Thanks for heads up

Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 13

Yes that’s fair! Have already seen a couple close calls with date / time zone confusion.

Wouldn’t rely on this yet as a sole source of info but I find it to be a nice extra layer

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Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · Apr 13

www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/h...

Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

www.geoffreylitt.com

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