Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 19/07/2026Ended up making a whole data vis for showing the massive number of deaths over the course of the war. Three.js and canvas rendering 9000+ subtly moving 3D flowers here. Plus a lot of tricks to make it performant across devices. (though if you see anything janky, lmk) 3233
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 19/07/2026Got a little too into making poppies for this reflection on great WWI novels and digesting the horrors of the war. maggieappleton.com/in-memoriam 4430
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 16/05/2026Obsessed with “Yesteryear”. So well written, funny, a necessary critique of the tradwives. I had to ask Claude for the gist of the twist at the end before reading, because it’s labelled a “thriller” and I am too soft to read anything truly horrifying. But it’s not that kind of thriller. Sort of… 1130
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 15/04/2026Plans are also shared and editable as a team in real time. Because it is kind of insane to make elaborate plans with your coding agent alone in your terminal without getting anyone else's input. And then send it off to be implemented without checking if it's any good. 1120
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 15/04/2026It's multiplayer chats, plus agents, and everyone working in sandboxed vms so you're all sharing the same code and context. Prompt and code together, in real time. You're all connected to the same computer. You can all see the same outputs. No one is stashing work and switching git branches. 4201
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 15/04/2026...multiplayer humans all have to be in the same workspace. At @githubnext.com we've made a new research prototype called "Ace" in this direction It's like Slack, Github, Claude/Copilot, and a bunch of sandboxed cloud computers had a baby. Some demos: 2221
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 15/04/2026Got to talk at @aidotengineer.bsky.social conf last week about the need for collaborative AI engineering. All our current coding agents are single player. We're trying to scale up individual productivity, but creating tons of alignment problems in the process. We have no good tools for... 2213623
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 07/04/2026Putting together the final touches on slides for my talk at AI Engineer conf this Thursday @aidotengineer.bsky.social Talking about how we need realtime, multiplayer, collaborative agentic dev tools. Not isolated, single player terminal instances. And showing one we've built at @githubnext.com! 11485
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 26/03/2026After an unexpected flood of messages from my kid’s nursery about the “Easter bonnet competition” deadline, I have now learned this is a thing. Very camp. Very British. It’s giving Victorian children with more access to crafting supplies than expected. 1130
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 21/03/2026Obsidian & Claude Cowork are doing all the house management and renovation tracking that I don't have brain space for right now. I ramble at Claude about things we need to fix in this very old and rundown Victorian we recent bought and it makes plans. Works great - both just operate on markdown. 71583
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 06/03/2026God grant me the wisdom to understand the internal logic of the credit system 6450
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 05/03/2026We have reached a moment where instead of releasing software you simply release the detailed spec for software and tell people to prompt their agent to build it themselves From the README of OpenAI’s new Symphony orchestrator: github.com/openai/symph... 1317425
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 09/02/2026TFW you talk to Claude to sharpen your idea and it’s like “yes, of course you have this idea. Bret Victor put this idea in your head a decade ago” I am a stochastic Bret Victor parrot. 91095
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 04/02/2026The meta-machine continues to grow of its own accord 1241
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 04/02/2026Designing designs < designing custom machines for designs 3311
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 25/01/2026Someone pointed out dark mode didn't work on my website (a huge oversight!). Claude implemented dark mode in <10 mins. But the diagrams in my latest post still looked weird since I designed them on light backgrounds. But they're SVGs so it was easy to prompt a bit more and get dark/light versions 81013
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 23/01/2026And I am unreasonably proud of making all the diagrams in this responsive on mobile. With no help from Claude. Lovingly hand-crafted only because agents are shit at visual explanations and graphic design. I am still useful for a while yet. 4880
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 23/01/2026@priti.is Showing us the Atlas of Intangibles -https://atlasofintangibles.com/ A sensory set of walks through London documenting digitally intangible things: plant growth, sounds, graffiti, weathering, litter, damage. All presented through gorgeous data vis and design And some hardware at the end! 162
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 23/01/2026Some demos! (Though in parts because Bluesky has a 3 min video limit) 1/2 @orionreed.com making desktop windows malleable: adding sidecar windows, porting data between them, adding custom formatting, and obvs needed some sand and lava piles 1112
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 23/01/2026The London Future of coding meetup came back last night! Now renamed to "the feeling of computing". More context on the name change: feelingof.com/the-name/ I handed over running it to @todepond.com, @mimireyburn.bsky.social, and Chee. They're doing great – same energy and wild demos as always 3677
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 22/01/2026Extremely funny. The author is a New Zealander so has a finely tuned taste for wry sarcasm Also features this banger John Updike quote: “celebrity is a mask that eats your face.” Unsurprisingly about Sheryl Sandberg. Strong recommend. Not the exaggerated tell-all I expected. Much better. 1316
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 12/01/2026I hadn't tried out Nano Banana for diagrams yet so I had a little play. Wonderfully promising and hilariously crap in the details. So close and yet so far. 10392
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 11/01/2026It's OpenCode! It's delightful. With the theme catppuccin-macchiato. Also using Ghostty for my terminal and have same theme set there. 0100
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 11/01/2026Claude's second attempt at fixing some of the problems, with a lot of additional steering from me on improving the visual details. It's still unable to make an arrow go where it needs to, or make two elements connect with a line. But it's a decent starting point - enough for me to cleanup by hand. 220
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 11/01/2026Figuring out a workflow to make Claude better at creating diagrams and illustrated explanations. By default it is pretty crap - see this example. Labels overlap. Arrows in the wrong place. Text too small. But it's also decent at identifying what's wrong once it takes a screenshot. 11371
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 03/01/2026I'm not going to claim I entirely understand the workflow primitives even after a couple reads (does this diagram help? no? no) But the gist seems to be breaking tasks down into atomic units of work, tracked in git, executed, checked, and merged through a zoo of loops and pre-defined workflows. 160
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 03/01/2026This is utterly unhinged in the best possible way. High praise for running a tour of the plane while it's a quarter-built and mid-flight. steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-g... Some choice excerpts. 3523
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 22/12/2025Context windows out to thwart all our beautiful dreams 2455
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 02/12/2025The body temp feature is also really good at picking up when you're about to get sick / validates when you are sick. Helps me let myself rest and skip workouts. My sitch of managing new parenthood obvs a bit extreme. But I bet there are useful insights that lean more into optimisation vs. survival 160
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 02/12/2025It's made a big difference for me over the last 6 months. Being in a time of chronic sleep dep and sickness is a good challenge for it 😅 Helps me figure out how much sleep I've gotten when most nights are split into 5-6 stretches and I have no memory how many times we were up, for how long, etc. 100
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 12/11/2025The new Oura app redesign is so beautiful it’s almost making me feel better about having norovirus. 10610
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 08/10/2025First day of my new life at Github Next! @githubnext.com ✨ I've had my eye on this team for a long time, and it feels like the perfect moment to join them. 272717
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 22/09/2025TFW you can't find any software that will let you track map locations connected to structured data in a table in one interface so you have to vibe code it yourself. Felt, Airtable, etc. were all $100+/month for the right to do this. Lol, nope. One day of GPT-5 vibe coding and problem solved. 11875
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 11/09/2025They do have a culture section and you can personalise the feed to what you're interested in. They could certainly expand how much control users have over topics and sources here, but it's a decent start. 020
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 11/09/2025Feels like the news (mostly) sans short-term, small scale, sensationalist distractions. I wish the filtering & ranking system was more transparent re: how the system decides what ranks high/low. There's a write up on the about page (newsminimalist.com/about), but it should be clear in the main UI. 190
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 11/09/2025Loving the concept and content on News Minimalist: newsminimalist.com Using ML to rank news stories by "importance" (scale, impact, novelty, credibility, legacy) and gives you a feed of only high scoring items. At first glance, better quality than the front page of the BBC, Guardian, or NYT 68215
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 14/08/2025I've wanted versioning on my digital garden for ages. Felt like a critical missing piece. Making my own dreams come true over here. Hard but fun to design this. These aren't automatically generated – I intentionally decide when to make new versions. Not every edit = new version. Only major updates 111256
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 06/08/2025I found it's easy to prompt ChatGPT and Claude into being more critical. They can be harsh in a good way – the kind of harsh you need when your ideas/work sucks a bit. But I think this critical character shouldn't be something users have to prompt engineer themselves. It should be easier to access. 2372
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 04/08/2025Claude 4 Sonnet in Cursor just LOVES giving itself evaluations like OUTSTANDING and PERFECT when it's done implementing something. Complete with effusive details of everything it's achieved. For features it writes bugs into, it simply grades them: WORKING 7322
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 02/08/2025A helpful graph made by @stevekrouse.com on the inverse relationship between vibes and understanding in AI assisted code. Put a few thoughts down here: maggieappleton.com/2025-08-vibe... Original article: blog.val.town/vibe-code 27311
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 17/07/2025Starting to get emails from sentient beings living inside Gemini. This is getting fun. I've never written about "spiritual tooling" but okay cool lol. 3382
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 28/06/2025Gemini in Google Colab is a shining example of how *not* to integrate LLMs into a product. So much potential. Ruined by terrible design. Giant diffs where I can't accept/reject on a line-by-line basis. Unclear what context it has. Can't ref specific cells. Can't copy/paste code into chat! Wild 4573
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 20/06/2025Nothing says I'm a millennial like routinely referring to my child as a rapidly evolving Squirtle. 41121
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 12/06/2025Today’s multi-tasking setup: holding sleeping baby, building agents, reading @mikecaulfield.bsky.social ‘s new book “Verified” - all good stuff! 2593
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 06/06/2025Also this is total overkill for this little feature on my blog, but it's now super cheap n' easy to make one-off test pages and get Cursor to render components in multiple states with various test data. Would never be bothered to do this myself, but much easier to catch bugs this way. 0110
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 06/06/2025I have a cursor rule that outlines how I want Cursor to write these docs, where to put them, how to update them: github.com/MaggieApplet... I have a long, rambling chat w/ Cursor before it writes these Example of an in-progress one for a ~medium size feature on my site: github.com/MaggieApplet... 1160
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 06/06/2025Fave Cursor workflow at the moment is get Claude to write feature implementation plans into a markdown document and update it as we go. Breaks features down into phases with checklists, notes, relevant file lists. Essentially acts as read/write memory to prevent chat context from getting too long. 41059
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 03/06/2025Garmin needs an “I have a baby” mode so it can show me something less depressing than a bright orange stress graph every morning. How about we replace the graph with some affirmations like “this is fine” or “think about how hard this would have been in 1600”… 1440
Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 13/05/2025Much FOMO that I'm missing out on Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com this year. One of my fave conferences. A smaller crowd (~200?) where everyone cares a lot about the problem. Lots of friendly collaboration and collective problem-solving. In Berlin, May 26-28th – www.localfirstconf.com 1392