iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

indeed, when the cost of discovery (read: shipping an mvp) drops, it does make market exploration cheaper. Assuming you're willing to change the strategy, which you might not be (or can't afford the risk)

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I think a lot of people in tech (especially in leadership) have no idea how anything actually works. They assume faster dev velocity means more things of value.

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I agree that none of that matters for increasing revenue, until it does. The question is when is that. It's usually much later than people think

I've been reflecting on this post. If people are actually getting 10x or 100x gains, this indicates that per-developer productivity gains from AI don't convert to revenue very well. So either people are working on the "wrong thing" (very likely) or the gains are more modest (also likely)

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Happy National Paper Airplane Day! I made a little parametric mini-app to figure out good angles for a paper airplane hero. Another fun 3d svg modeling task. Favorite parts are the particle occlusion and ribbon trail I promise this content will make sense soon

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wrote up something short about how agents can't possibly know what matters in a design environment, even if you tell it. www.hamiltonulmer.com/parametric-i...

hamiltonulmer.com

AI-assisted parametric iconography

A parametric paper-dart icon I built with Claude for a minimalist 16×16 icon set.

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I've been using Claude artifacts to create parametric systems for icon development. While models are only sort-of good at drawing svg, they're obviously quite good at getting basic math right. Especially helpful for getting 16x16 footprints to feel nice usually I can do the rest

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

iterating on a fun little isometric paper airplane loading hero for a new feature I'm excited about. Thinking about how to mitigate the ink trap problem while keeping the simplicity of three shapes

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

This break, I've been building a constraint-based implementation of a new time series axis component. The goal is to make it nice & comprehensible for any size / time range It's a nice pattern: React part of it is simple, the TS part is complex / well-tested, and the dev UI uses the test cases

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

Continuing the semantic code-folding design exploration. Instead of showing the typical "..." button, it shows an LLM summary of what's folded. Like "calculate 30-day revenue" for a collapsed CTE. Not sure if this would be useful yet!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I jokingly call it "vibescaling"

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I like the “retvrn to terminals” discourse around UIs, but imo it misses why old terminal programs were (or were not) good. So it’s a boring aesthetic argument and not a functional one based on how humans consume information.

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

only took me two years before I needed to do my own safety triangle implementation this works great for our upcoming "quick look" editor features aside from function docs, what other quick look features would you like in the DuckDB UI?

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

My Data Council talk on Instant SQL is up on YouTube! Instant SQL is MotherDuck's new realtime ad hoc querying and data debugging mode. I go into details, but the talk itself is really about designing tools that both require mastery AND enable joyful flow. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSeB...

youtube.com

Instant Preview Mode Real Time Feedback to Make SQL Data Exploration Fly

YouTube video by Data Council

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

I'm going to be talking online about the "why" and "how" of Instant SQL, our new ad hoc querying experience that enables keystroke-fast previews of results & deeper introspection into your query's data flow. Weds. May 21st, 9:30am PDT link in reply!

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Possibly! We do have a plan to open source our UI, but not a firm timeline. Once that's done, Instant SQL will be freely available (w/ source) for anyone to integrate into their editor.

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If you want to work on data-intensive UIs combining the best of databases and dataviz, my team is hiring. Send me a message in chat and let's connect. I'll have a JD up once I recover!

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I just gave a talk at Data Council about Instant SQL and will be sharing that once it's available. It's a really fun talk. Here's the vibe

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Instant SQL works by using samples / subsets of data. Of course, at any point, you can run the actual query against your whole data set. Think of it as a complement to running your query, not an alternative.

Instant SQL is great for humans, but it also works GREAT with AI tools. Any suggestion made by an LLM is instantly previewed as you go, giving you a lot more confidence when working with SQL and AI.

Because we have access to the whole pipeline of the query, Instant SQL can dissect results, making it easy to debug complicated formulas and regular expressions It's like we've turned your query into a big excel function that returns a list of expression trees on every keystroke

on every keystroke, Instant SQL parses the query, analyzes it, and caches just enough to render a preview of the SELECT statement where your cursor is. This enables inspection of CTEs and subqueries. Make a change, then go downstream, and see that change instantly reflected.

Instant SQL follows Bret Victor's 2 rules from "Inventing on Principle": when you make a change in your software, there can't be a delay and there can't be anything hidden Using DuckDB's internals, we've built a realtime query-as-you-type system. But it does a lot more, too:

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

So thrilled to announce we've released Instant SQL in both the MotherDuck and DuckDB UIs! It's a new interaction pattern for writing SQL queries that provides realtime result previews and deep query inspection & debugging. Bye bye run button 👋 Truly, literally only possible with DuckDB

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hah thanks! This is a one-way door for me; I can't go back to constantly mashing the run query button for every small change

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Instant Preview Mode has been achieved internally

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Hamilton Ulmer @hamilton.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Migrating over my DuckDB AST path generation code to our UI. The way I've done gut-checks on the grammar is to use this CodeMirror semantic highlighting extension I wrote We can implement a very long tail of unique features with the path generator, including instant preview mode

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this UI is V1, & a big project to hoist the MotherDuck UI into a new context. I can't wait to add more features! If you've talked to me about how you use the CLI in the last month, please know you've made an impact on our roadmap! Also, Column Explorer w/ max threads = 🌠

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In DuckDB land, it's common for databases to have paths. Rather than making icons for each type, we opted to separate memory vs. on-disk & add a location icon on the right. (This serves as a copy button too!) We'll add custom icons for external dbs later (e.g. sqlite)

Minimal onboarding. We assume DuckDB CLI users understand the basic mechanics of running queries. Our onboarding shows the relationship between the editors and the catalog on the left hand side.