Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

69 points by mpweiher


alterae

some of this feels very good, but other bits (especially the way they use and discuss “AI”) make me think they have a very, very different idea of what they actually want from a software system than i do

which like. fair? but something about it all just feels… off, to me, in a way i struggle to explain.

i think bc for me the phrase “malleable software” brings to mind something like a FORTH system, more than… the poorly-defined interactive networked multimedia workspace thing with unclear but seemingly complicated technological foundations that they seem to be using?

minimax

Smalltalk got a mention, but an unfortunately superficial one. This is what Alan Kay’s whole career was about, if you ask him.

And at the end, they mention “Business models” and “Culture” as “big challenges we’ve mostly left out of scope”. Good for at least acknowledging those, but… I’ve come to see economic incentives and related cultural factors as not just the crux, but in some sense the entire struggle. It’s relatively easy to whip up another hopeful low-code/no-code product or starry-eyed FOSS project, but shallow techno-solutionism isn’t going to fix any of this.

adamshaylor

I applaud the vision and the prototypes. I don’t think computing will ever fully resemble a luthier’s workbench, but in some ways it actually already does. There are many open standard formats and tools for working with and converting between them, the existence and value of which are under-acknowledged, both by users in general who are only now beginning to appreciate the consequences of modern vendor lock-in, and the latest batch of startups that would be perfectly happy to lock their users in for as long as users don’t demand portable data. Things are actually better than they seem. We are living in an era of greater portability (or at least potential for it) than ever. Anyone remember the desktop OS wars and asking what format the floppy disk was in? Or when most viable programming languages and tools were commercial software you had to buy, pay to upgrade, and pay for the documentation?

The article mentions Google Maps as an example of modern lock-in. There is in fact a lot of work that has already been done and is ongoing to liberate maps from the handful of commercial sandboxes that used to dominate them. Some of the best base map data comes from OpenStreetMap, which is quickly turning into the Wikipedia of maps and one can now self-host in crisp vector format with Protomaps. Also check out OGC 3D Tiles, which you can see with stunning atmospheric scattering in Takram’s three-geospatial project. More recently, MapLibre Tiles is aiming to succeed MVT, which itself is an open source standard.

Finally, at the risk of quibbling, I think this is backward:

Bringing AI coding tools into today’s software ecosystem is like bringing a talented sous chef to a food court. If you’re used purchasing meals from a menu, a skilled chef can’t do much to help you. Similarly, if you’re using closed-source software from an app store, an AI coding assistant can’t do very much to help you as a user. To fully take advantage of the capabilities of AI, we need to move past the food court to something more like a kitchen—a site of open-ended creation.

AI tools are the food court food prep employees. We humans are the chefs. If the goal is open-ended creation, we need something better than agents that repackage whatever content they scraped off the web. We need to understand what our ingredients are and where they come from, or we are participating in the erosion of our own supply chain.

mccd

I think this is a great initiative. Somewhere UX became about getting people from A -> B and providing a “service”, rather than helping people help themselves. It works when your interests are aligned but in this geopolitical landscape I think societies begin to understand that that is not always the case.

rtpg

Salesforce and Jira exist right? Salesforce in particular to me feels extremely malleable. Enterprise software feels like it matches things here and if anyone cares about this I highly recommend going through the Salesforce training things (I think it’s called campsite?) and you can see that it’s a full system.

These tools end up getting very locked down though, because there’s such a huge blast radius in mis-configuring bulk actions on shared data… but also just because of aggressive use policies.

There’s also just a bit of “I don’t know how to express what I want” problem, that I think some of the AI toolign can help out with. I think it would be worth actually doing a case study on the existing malleable tooling out there, because it exists.

EDIT: my glib pitch for the value of staring at salesforce is “it’s spiritually a smalltalk environment”