by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-10 18:19:35+00:00
The challenges here feel insurmountable, but I can't help but feel there's a certain inevitability to the de-monolithization de-totalization of the domain of computing being ensconced so wholly as it is inside of applications, experiences purely pre-defined by a given app.

Already with AI we are seeing a huge uptick in people's expectations that agents operate across apps. The app is losing its monopoly of power, is losing its primacy as the thing the user touches. See How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet which is an article about a lot of factors, many more Conway's Law & corporate fiefdom oriented, but which touches repeatedly in the need to thread experiences across applications, across domains, and where the historal "there's an app for that" paradigm is giving way, is insufficient. https://www.mihaileric.com/posts/how-alexa-dropped-the-ball-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40659281

AI again is an interesting change agent in other ways. As well as scripting & MCP'ing existing tools/apps, the ability to rapidly craft experiences is changing so quickly. Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers talks so directly to how this could enable vastly more people to be crafting their own experiences. I expect that over time frameworks/libraries themselves adapt, that the matter of computing shifts from targeting expert developer communities who use extensive community knowledge to do their craft, to forms that are deliberately de-esotericized, crafted in even more explicit compositional manners that are more directly malleable, because ai will be better at building systems with more overt declarative pieces. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029

Right now the change is symbolic more than practical, but I also loved seeing Apple's new Liquid Glass design system yesterday, in part because it so clearly advances what Material set out to do: constructs software of multiple different layers, with the content itself being the primary app surface. And in Liquid Glass's case extending that app surface even further, making it practically full screen always, with tools and UI merely refractive layers above the content. This de-emphasizes the compute, makes makes the content the main thing, by removing the boxes and frames of encirclement that once defined the app's space, giving way to pure content, making the buttons mere layers floating above, portals of function floating above, the content below. In practice it's not substantially different than what came before, yet, but it feels like the tools are more incidental, a happenstance layer of options above the content, and is suggestive to me that the tools could change or swap. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226612

There's such a long arch here. And there's so many reasons why companies love and enjoy having total power over their domain, why they want to be the sole arbiter of experience, with no one else having any say. We've seen collapses of interesting bold intertwingular era API-hype hopeful projects, like Spotify desktop shutting down the amazing incredible JavaScript Apps SDK so long ago (2011-2014). https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/rip-spotify-apps-rip-sound...

Folks love to say that this is what the market wants, that there is convenience and freedom in not having any choices, in not having to compose tools, in everything being provided whole and unchanging. I'd love to test that thesis, but I don't think we have evidence now: 99.999%+ of software is built in the totalistic form, tablets carved and passed down to mankind for us to use as directed (or risk anti-circumvention felony charges!). We haven't really been running the experiments to see what would be good for the world, what would make us a better happier more successful world. Whose going to foot the bill, whose going to abandon control over their users?

And it's not something you can do alone. The really malleable software revolution requires not individual changes, individual apps adding plugins or scripting. The real malleable software shift is when the whole experience is built to be malleable. The general systems research for operating systems to host not just applications, but to host views and tools and data flow, history event sourcing and transactions (perhaps). No one piece of software can ever adequately be malleable software on its own: real malleable software requires malleable paradigms of computing, upon which experiences, objects, tools compose.

It all sounds so far off and far fetched. But where we are now is a computing trap, one posited around a philosophy of singularness and unconnectedness delivered down to us users/consumers (a power relationship few want to change!). The limitations of the desktop application model, as it's related and been morphosed into mobile apps, into watch apps, feels like an ever more cumbersome limit, a gate on what is possible. I feel the dual strongly: I'm with those pessimists saying the malleable software world is impossible, that we can never make the shift, I cannot see how it ever could become, and yet I don't think we can stay here forever, I think the limitations are too great, and the opportunity for a better opener computing to awaken is too interesting and too powerful for that possibility to lie slumbering forever. I want to believe the future is exciting, in good ways, in re-opening ways, and although I can hardly see who would fund better or why, and although the challenge is enormous, the project or rebuilding mankind's agency within the technological society feels obligatory necessary & inevitable, and my soul soars at the prospect. Malleable software: thus we all voyage towards computing.