Today I started in on blog revamp. Partly because I wanted to experiment with Matt Pocock's LLM skill workflow in a relatively conventional app (not a weird Constraint Systems experiment). Also because I've been feeling the edges of my current setup. Overall I'm thinking about how I want my software and computer to work in a world where LLMs make adding features/cheap.

Surface area

In the wave of LLM-assisted demos I think a lot about surface area. Adding features adds surface area. Particularly when the features are just kind of additional nice-to-haves. It can feel different if the features grow out of the center of the idea. That's like a tree growing out of a core. A bunch of ad-hoc features is a loosely connected collection of graphs, floating and tangling up into eachother.

It makes me want to make dense little slices of things - where the rules are constant all the way through. Things that mirror physical objects/toys where the rules are self-evident and the mechanisms visible.

This blog

This blog had bloated even before the coding assistants got really good. I edit it in a split view with a live preview, which is something I always wanted in a blog but now that I have it still feels a little sprawly. Lately I've been wanting to be able to edit blog posts in all kinds of places - separate little offline apps maybe - with one-click deploy. All doable! but requiring some thought.

Even more than the editor I don't like my logged-in experience. I set it so edit and add and special share buttons get added only for the logged-in view, and it always bugs me that I'm then looking at something different from what everyone else sees.

And lastly there's the kind of integrations. A key point of my early feed was automatic posts to twitter. I set up bluesky posts here but often rewrite them manually instead. I want to do a standard site atproto thing as well. All doable! But just thinking about them I shy away from the feeling of them being intertwined and annoying to iterate on or cut out (even if it's likely an agent that will do it).

Composition and cartridges

Another physical thing I think about often is game cartridges. The satisfaction and clarity of something being available when it's plugged in and totally gone if it's not. I'd love to do "automatic post to bluesky" and even "embedding search" as cartridges I can move in and out. Is this just plugins? Maybe. But I think there's something to the framing that's especially interesting to me.

Steps

So far I've got a rewritten blog rerendering in tanstack start. It's fast! Next I want to get styling in and then I'm going to think about what I want to do for an editor - maybe it will be an entirely separate app - maybe an electron-based app experience? Focused on calmer writing? And maybe there's opportunities to explore the plugin architecture (which is probably just an API) there. Or maybe I'll put it all back on the shelf. We'll see!