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  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Jul 2, 2026, 5:55 PM

    The hunger for tinkering affordances helps explain the ubiquity of spreadsheets in the business world. [long subthread left as an exercise for the reader]

    It also helps explain the traction of the “AI Agent” marketing. I can’t think of a technology that’s simultaneously done a better job of removing barriers to user-designed automation and done a worse job of helping people anticipate and deal with the consequences of automation. (Security and data integrity are two of the big places where attempts at deep tinkering affordances have crashed and burned.)

    10/

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Replies

  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Jul 2, 2026, 5:57 PM

    And LLM-driven agents add a new wrinkle: they’re nondeterministic and have bizarre failure modes, so it’s all the “massive oops” dangers of deploying code but with an added layer of “random haywire at any time” on top of that.

    We all hear the stories of people figuratively burning down their houses with agents — truly, these things are the “deep-fried turkey” of computing — yes still people are enthusiastic. The hunger for tinkering affordances is large, so large it outweighs the obvious danger.

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  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Jul 2, 2026, 6:02 PM

    There really is good reason to give people hermetically sealed, beautifully designed objects that aren’t very customizable but •just work•. And there’s no reason to think that we are anywhere close to solving the intrinsic difficulties that turn all computational automation into programming, and that make programming hard.

    and yet…

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  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Jul 2, 2026, 6:05 PM

    …we want to be able to shape our machines, to make our computers •ours•, to make them clay not yet fired.

    The hunger is there.

    The noble humanist vision is more relevant than ever.

    The societal need to get humans out from under the concentrated power of computing vendors is dire and urgent.

    And the success of things like HyperCard in making the machine just a little more fungible, of inviting people into the magic of tinkering…well, those historical successes make me think we should keep pursuing that goal of the “soft clay,” even if it’s a utopia that will •always• be beyond the horizon, will always be a direction and never a destination.

    /end

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  • George Bgbargoud@masto.nyc
    Jul 2, 2026, 6:12 PM

    @inthehands

    I think this is a problem where home assistant is doing pretty well today. Better than any other modern system I've seen, at least.

    I talk about that project a lot but I do find that the level of ownership it gives users is what got me back to actually enjoying personal projects.

    I have joked with my wife (we're both programmers) that we will teach our daughter programming by suggesting that she rewrite any automations that annoy her.

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  • Dave bauerdavebauerart@mastodon.social
    Jul 2, 2026, 6:24 PM

    @inthehands I keep coming back to these ideas, and always imagine that allowing people to customize their environment and solve their own problems was the goal of teaching everyone to program. Same thing with giving folks access to the creative problem solving of making things, even doing it badly, because the process is inherently human.

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  • John Maxwelljmaxsfu@hcommons.social
    Jul 2, 2026, 6:26 PM

    @inthehands Nice thread, Paul.

    Both LOGO and HyperCard are quite close to SmallTalk historically: LOGO because it was a direct influence on Kay's thinking. And HyperCard because it was partly designed by Ted Kahler, who was also part of Kay's team in the early 80s.

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  • David SmithCatfish_Man@mastodon.social
    Jul 2, 2026, 7:43 PM

    @inthehands my, perhaps hot, take is that a tremendous amount of this conflict between clay-like and rigid computing is essentially an immune disorder in the response to fascism’s downstream effects.

    Much of the difficulty of modifying a modern computer is because of the difficulty in distinguishing the user from the NSA, or from the organized crime that thrives in high-corruption low-quality-of-life environments.

    Our defensive rigidity isn’t selective.

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  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Jul 2, 2026, 7:48 PM

    @Catfish_Man

    I don’t think that’s the whole story, or even the primary story.

    But it’s certainly a significant part of it.

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  • wrosecranswrosecrans
    Jul 2, 2026, 6:07 PM

    @inthehands Spreadsheets are definitely the one thing in the history of computing where the urge to turn a workload
    into "not really computer programming" was 100% successful.

    In retrospect, it's surprising that Excel wasn't invented as soon as interactive terminals.

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  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Jul 2, 2026, 6:16 PM

    @wrosecrans

    I’d quibble with the “100% successful:” many a spreadsheet has turned into a complex computing system that is in every real sense software with software maintenance problems / nightmares, and that •is• really computer programming. But spreadsheets certainly are a huge winner in the combination of low barrier to entry + useful mileage achieved after entry!

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  • dasparadoxontomtrottel@mastodontech.de
    Jul 2, 2026, 7:39 PM

    @inthehands ( removing barriers to user-designed automation... I still think that finding a way for non-super-users to automate things would have been the task for microsoft for example the last 25 years. but not with AI. )

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