August 2026 🔗
I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country, covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on [...]
Maggie Appleton
Posts
In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors 🔗
A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering [...]
One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment 🔗
Why we need collaborative AI engineering and a tour of Ace: the multiplayer coding workspace [...]
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale 🔗
On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code [...]
January 2026 🔗
I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby [...]
A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment 🔗
On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions [...]
Vibe Code is Legacy Code 🔗
Vibe code is legacy code by Steve Krouse [...]
May 2025 🔗
In a wonderfully dramatic change to my life, I became a mother two months ago. My son was born at the end of March via an unplanned but otherwise unco [...]
Statistically, When Will My Baby Be Born? 🔗
A tiny tool to calculate when your baby might arrive [...]
ChatGPT Would be a Decent Policy Advisor 🔗
Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice by Chris Stokel-Walker for the New Scientist [...]
March 2025 🔗
Well, I've had a dramatic start to the year. Normally, the design agency I joined a short eight months ago, unexpectedly closed down in January. Despi [...]
Humanity's Last Exam 🔗
Humanity's Last Exam by Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI [...]
DeepSeek 🔗
If you're not distressingly embedded in the torrent of AI news on Twixxer like I reluctantly am, you might not know what DeepSeek is yet. Bless you. [...]
Common Misconceptions in AI 🔗
Common Misconceptions About the Complexity in Robotics vs AI by Dan Ogawa [...]
Undetected AI Exam Answers 🔗
A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study by Peter Scarfe, Kelly Watch [...]
Smidgeons 🔗
Welcome to the smidgeon stream. This is a new kind of content on the Garden. One that was [...]
How to Import Academic Papers from Zotero into Tana 🔗
How to use Zotero's translator and Tana Paste formatting to easily import papers into Tana [...]
Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks 🔗
Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it [...]
December 2024 🔗
We're back in that glorious post-Christmas, pre-New-Year's liminal period when the days blur together and I'm allowed to spend inordinate amounts of t [...]
Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh 🔗
My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup [...]
Leaving Elicit 🔗
Reflections on two years of working at Elicit and why it's time to leave [...]
July 2024 🔗
Despite the regular drizzle, this summer is looking splendid. The tories are out of power. London is out in force enjoying the warm weather. I'm tempo [...]
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers 🔗
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it [...]
Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History 🔗
Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse [...]
On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars 🔗
How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars [...]
Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis 🔗
Gaining a strange disease and losing my ability to see straight [...]
A Collection of Design Engineers 🔗
Collecting people I know who work at the intersection of design and engineering, in an attempt to figure out what a design engineer is [...]
Gathering Structures 🔗
How to gather people and create communities in ways that are low-stress and high-payoff [...]
Speculative Calendar Events 🔗
Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems [...]
Ambient Co-presence 🔗
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web [...]
Historical Trails 🔗
Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey [...]
December 2023 🔗
The limbo-like lull in-between Christmas and News Years is my favourite period of the year. I never know what to do with myself. I arrive back from ch [...]
September 2023 🔗
London flipped from sweltering summer back to drizzling grey yesterday. Autumn was overdue. Summer was a little too manic for my taste anyway. I spent [...]
Squish Meets Structure 🔗
Designing with Language Models [...]
Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots 🔗
Sketchy ideas for interfaces that play with the novel capabilities of language models [...]
June 2023 🔗
The last six months have felt like a disorientating blur. While bouncing between overseas trips, writing conference talks, organising events, and keep [...]
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI 🔗
An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content [...]
Computational Notebooks 🔗
Shareable, browser-based documents that can compile and run code [...]
Teenage Skeuomorphic Desktop Designs 🔗
An archive of my high school desktop designs, circa 2009 [...]
Reverse Outlining with Language Models 🔗
Using language models to generate reverse outlines of writing drafts [...]
The Dark Forest and Generative AI 🔗
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content [...]
Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI 🔗
On the fuzziness of calling things “artificial intelligence” and moving the goalposts [...]
Command K Bars 🔗
Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut [...]
November 2022 🔗
It's a weird week. Twitter is (possibly) entering a slow death march and much of my community is reluctantly slouching over to Mastodon. I've started [...]
Programming Portals 🔗
Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes [...]
Folk Interfaces 🔗
People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems [...]
Joining Ought 🔗
A new role at an AI research lab working on tools for open-ended reasoning [...]
July 2022 🔗
I've decided to join Ought, a non-profit research lab. I wrote about the move here, but TLDR: Ought is exploring how machine learning techniques can s [...]
The Block-Paved Path to Structured Data 🔗
How block-based interfaces can help us create more structured data on the web [...]
Daily Notes Pages 🔗
Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems [...]
A Picture Worth a Thousand Programmes 🔗
Bringing visual explanations and embodied knowledge to programming tools [...]
Programmable Notes 🔗
Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows [...]
Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups 🔗
Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web [...]
Spatial Web Browsing 🔗
Adding spatial affordances to the experience of browsing the web [...]
Assumed Audiences 🔗
Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations [...]
The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays 🔗
Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium [...]
Epistemic Disclosure 🔗
Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content [...]
Metaphors We Web By 🔗
A history of our metaphorical understanding of the web [...]
Algorithmic Transparency 🔗
Algorithms that make their reasoning visible [...]
October 2021 🔗
After five years of working with egghead, I decided it was time to move on. I started as an illustrator in early 2016. By 2018 I had moved into an art [...]
Plebeian Programming with Keyboard Maestro 🔗
How to write macros without touching the terminal [...]
The Cultural Anthropology of React 🔗
An anthropological look at the cultural norms of the React community [...]
August 2021 🔗
With lockdown easing in London I've spent most of summer outside throwing tennis balls around in the park, rather than sitting in front of screens wri [...]
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects 🔗
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens [...]
Paleolithic Nostalgia 🔗
Longing for the paleolithic past in the Anthropocene [...]
Natureculture, Moral Purity, and Cultural Boundaries 🔗
Why there is nothing natural about the idea of 'nature' [...]
The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps 🔗
What we lose when our digital notes remove the freedom to move [...]
Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks 🔗
How to build a digital garden without touching code [...]
The Echo & Narcissus Writing Club 🔗
A Hyperlink Academy writing club where we mimic the work of others [...]
Pink, Soft, Glittering Developers 🔗
A collection of observations on the rise of soft, sparkly, baby pink aesthetics among developers [...]
Fetishism & Mechanical Keyboards 🔗
Developer self-expression through coloured switches, keystroke actuation, and LED light displays [...]
Making Programming Visual, Spatial, and Learnable 🔗
What's wrong with linear, static programming mediums and how might we improve them? [...]
Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams 🔗
The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web [...]
Organic, Local, Artisan Data Storage 🔗
Data is currently dislocated – our narratives and metaphors around it try to convince us it is immaterial [...]
Positioning Elements & Scrollytelling in CSS 🔗
Notes on how to use the position property in CSS to make scrollytelling stories [...]
Painting Roam Research with Custom CSS 🔗
How to customise Roam Research with your own CSS themes [...]
A Digital Anthropology Reading List 🔗
A few favourite books from the field of digital anthropology [...]
The Eponymous Laws of Programming 🔗
A collection of laws named for specific people in the field of programming [...]
A History of Cyborgs 🔗
Notes on the history of cyborgs and why the idea still holds historical weight in Western narratives [...]
Neologisms 🔗
A collection of interesting words that have recently been coined [...]
A Brief Introduction to Digital Anthropology 🔗
A discipline at the intersection of cultural anthropology and binary logic [...]
GreenSock Animations with React Hooks 🔗
How to use the Greensock animation library inside React using React hooks [...]
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects 🔗
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens [...]
The Bare Essentials of Greensock 🔗
Notes on the basics of the Greensock animation llibrary [...]
September 2020 🔗
Digging into the work of Barbara Tversky and reading the literature around embodied cognition. I've been a long time fan of George Lakoff so much of i [...]
Illustrating Gatsby's Key Concepts 🔗
Illustrated notes on the key concepts of how Gatsby.js works [...]
Why You Own an iPad and Still Can't Draw 🔗
The failure of drawing materials without mediums and meat [...]
Problematic Proteins 🔗
How to offend everyone with boundary-crossing steak and nuggets [...]
New Harvest & Illustrating the Cultivated Meat Podcast 🔗
Illustrations made for a set of episodes of the Cultivated Meat podcast [...]
The Gift Economy 🔗
Illustrated notes on the idea of Gift Economies and cultural historys of economic exchange [...]
Synecdoche: Drawing the Part for the Whole 🔗
Notes on the metaphorical varieties of synecdoche and metonymy [...]
A Meta-Tour of This Site 🔗
A video tour through how I build the old version of this site [...]
Douglas, Dirt, and Matter Out of Place 🔗
Mary Douglas defined dirt as matter out of place – the crossing of boundaries [...]
The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu 🔗
Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project [...]
Growing the Evergreens 🔗
Illustrated notes on the concept of 'Evergreen notes' and how to write them [...]
The Knowledge Hydrant 🔗
Illustrated notes on the Knowledge Hydrant guide to collaborative learning [...]
Frequently Asked Questions 🔗
Questions I am often asked to answer [...]
A Naïve Exploration of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 🔗
Notes on the academic field of CSCL and major papers in the discipline [...]
Silent Synchronous Reading Sessions 🔗
Notes on how to run silent meetings and reading sessions [...]
What the Fork is React Suspense? 🔗
Illustrated notes on how React suspense works [...]
Visually Workshopping the AWS Cloud 🔗
Some insights into how I collaborative with experts to create illustrated notes on technical topics [...]
Are Data Unions the Future of Data? 🔗
Illustrated notes on how data unions work and what problems they might solve [...]
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden 🔗
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web [...]
Pattern Languages in Programming and Interface Design 🔗
Notes on pattern languages and Christopher Alexander's legacy on software programming [...]
A Metaphorical Reading Collection 🔗
A collection of my favourite books on conceptual metaphor theory [...]
Tending Evergreen Notes in Roam Research 🔗
A walkthrough of how I manage and tend Evergreen notes in Roam [...]
Fixing Common Git Mistakes 🔗
Illustrated notes on common mistakes people make in Git, and how to fix them [...]
What App is That? 🔗
A guide to the apps and tools I use to create illustrations [...]
Tracking Humanity 🔗
The introduction to my thesis on the Quantified Self movement and the culture of self-tracking [...]
A Short History of Bi-Directional Links 🔗
Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create two-way, contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web? [...]
The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web 🔗
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web [...]
Drawing the Invisible: React Explained in Five Visual Metaphors 🔗
Explaining React through visual metaphors [...]
A Chat with Henry Zhu on OSS & Gift Economies 🔗
Notes from my podcast episode Open Source and Gift Economies on Maintainers Anonymous [...]
Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes 🔗
Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course [...]
How to Become a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg 🔗
A lightening talk on second brains and cyborg embodiment [...]
Defend Your Cookies with Essential Web Security Tactics 🔗
Illustrated notes on the essentials of web security [...]
How to Draw Invisible Programming Concepts: Part I 🔗
A case study showing how I make illustrations for abstract programming concepts [...]
What the Fork is xState? 🔗
Illustrated notes on how to build state machines with the xState library [...]
A Journey into Vue-Router 🔗
Illustrated notes on how routing works in Vue.js [...]
What the Fork is Rust? 🔗
Illustrated notes on the core concepts in Rust [...]
The Art and Craft of Gatsby Themes 🔗
Illustrated notes on building Gatsby themes [...]
JavaScript Bits You Skipped the First Time Around 🔗
Illustrated notes on advanced but fundamental topics in JavaScript [...]
Meat Planet: The Illustrated Notes 🔗
Visualising the cultural narratives around cultured meat [...]
Building Custom React Hooks 🔗
Illustrated notes on building custom React hooks [...]
Immutable Data with Immer and Personal Assistant Bots 🔗
Illustrated notes on how work with immutable data in the Immer state library [...]
Speaking the GraphQL Query Language 🔗
Illustrated notes on the basics of the GraphQL query language [...]
The Best Illustration Books and Courses 🔗
My favourite resources for learning to draw and developing your visual thinking skills [...]
A Fresh Serving of JavaScript ES2019 🔗
Illustrated notes on the new language changes in JavaScript ES2019 [...]
The JAMStack, Gatsby & Contentful 🔗
Illustrated notes on the JAMstack, Gatsby & Contentful [...]
Instachatting with Vue & Socket.io 🔗
Illustrated notes on how to implement web sockets with Vue.js and Socket.io [...]
Building VR Apps with React360 🔗
Illustrated notes on building VR web apps with React360 [...]
Testing Apps with Cypress 🔗
Illustrated notes on how to test web apps with Cypress [...]
How Are Compilers & Transpilers Different? 🔗
Illustrated notes on how compilers and transpilers are different [...]
Meet the Robowaiter APIs Serving Us Data 🔗
Everything you need to know about what API's are and how they work [...]
A Shelfish Starter Guide to Databases 🔗
The absolute minimum you need to know about data storage [...]
A Fruitful Guide to JavaScript's Comparison Operators 🔗
Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's comparison operators work [...]
What the Fork is Babel? 🔗
Illustrated notes on how Babel works [...]
JSX is a Lovechild 🔗
Illustrated notes on how JSX in React works [...]
What the Fork is the React Virtual DOM 🔗
Illustrated notes on how the React virtual DOM works [...]
JavaScript's ...spread Operator 🔗
Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's spread operator works [...]