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2025-03-31 Patron letter - A startling glimpse of malleable software: LLM-generated Obsidian plugins

andymatuschak.org · 4,594 words · saved by 1 readers

One of the great dreams of the personal computing revolution was that we’d all have not only our own computers, but also our own software, exquisitely tuned to our own purposes. Instead, we got the application model. Software is expensive to build, so developers try to capture as large a market as possible, creating one-size-fits-all packages. You can only change what the developer gives you knobs to change; you can only combine apps at junctions the developer has provided. In short, our workflows often don’t work the way we wish they did. People have been trying for decades to break us free of the siloed application model (for a review, I recommend Marcel Borowski’s doctoral thesis, p31-44). One approach has been to let people make their own computational tools, without any complicated programming. That has turned out to be difficult. Digital spreadsheets’ computed cells are usually cited as the major success story, but it’s hard to find others. Now we have large language models (LLMs

2025-03-31 Patron letter - A startling glimpse of malleable software: LLM-generated Obsidian plugins 2025-03-31 Patron letter - A startling glimpse of malleable software: LLM-generated Obsidian plugins One of the great dreams of the personal computing revolution was that we’d all have not only our own computers, but also our own software, exquisitely tuned to our own purposes. Instead, we got the application model. Software is expensive to build, so developers try to capture as large a market as possible, creating one-size-fits-all packages. You can only change what the developer gives you kno

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