In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors
A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering
Maggie Appleton
Essays on programming, design, and anthropology
Latest posts
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 is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can be after months of chronic sickness, broken sleep, and parental troubleshooting. I am very tired and full of stoic perspective, but still savouring the baby babble sounds, tiny…
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 uncomplicated c-section. Parenthood has been predictably overwhelming, exhausting, and existentially glorious. My days are now spent holding a sleeping newborn on my chest, timing wake windows, picking up the dropped pacifier for the 19th time, trying to…
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. Despite running for a decade and working with almost every major tech company, client work slowed down and the founders decided to close up shop. It's been a sad time. Everyone I worked with there was exceptionally talented and kind. I'm thankful I got…
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 Watcham, Alasdair Clarke, Etienne Roesch
Unbaited
Unbaited by Daniel Petho
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 time tinkering on side projects and laying on the couch eating handfuls of Twiglets. For the last couple weeks I've been plodding through an overdue and much needed migration of this website from Next.js to Astro . No shade on Next, but it wasn't the…
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 temporarily funemployed and thoroughly enjoying doing almost nothing. I decided to leave Elicit back in April, and worked my last day there in June. The team was lovely, but living a life halfway between San Francisco and London was not. I realised I…
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 chaotic, overstimulating family visits and sit amidst my pile of gifts, half-unpacked bags, and leftover chocolate, wondering what in the world I used to do with my days. I've long forgotten what it's like to have any semblance of life structure.…
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 a bunch of time in Maine, New York, and San Fransisco. A mix of long back porch hangouts with family, collaborator coffees, and in-person problem-solving with the Ought team. But the Ought team are no longer the Ought team. We've changed names! And…
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 keeping up with work, I ended a long-term relationship and moved across London. My writing took a hit – I haven't published much this year. I feel like I'm still trying to figure out what to do when I get up every morning. Having everything thrown out of…
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 cross-posting there as well: indieweb.social/@maggie . The Elon-escapades only drive home how important it is to own and control the platform you're publishing to. Which means writing on your own website first and cross-posting to external platforms.…
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 support open-ended reasoning and research. At the moment their main focus is building Elicit an AI research assistant that helps automate literature reviews. The long-term vision is to develop tools and techniques that mitigate AI alignment risks.…
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