Robin Sloan

Unrelated, but I highly recommend this short sci-fi-ish story by Robin Sloan :) https://www.robinsloan.com/stories/sleep-consultant/

https://worrydream.com https://macwright.com/ https://www.petemillspaugh.com/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/ https://www.robinsloan.com/ https://thesephist.com/ https://wattenberger.com/ http://conal.net/ https://www.todepond.com/ https://devonzuegel.com/ https://nadia.xyz/ https://adamwiggins.com/ http://glench.com/ https://ncase.me/ Classic from my old Haskell professor: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the…

Glad you took it in the stride... I wasn't trying to be harsh. TBH, I think it is worthwhile to build an app for yourself first. For a user base of n=1. You might have heard of the Barefoot Developer by Maggie Appleton[1], and also by Robin Sloan[2]. I subscribe to that point of view. I actually like your app idea.. mainly because of my workouts. Except that for my purposes I would want to build one with my analytics in consideration. I am currently noodling over the idea (among my several side projects) [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software [2] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

I love Robin Sloan's idea of apps as home-cooked meals. This is the only thing about AI that doesn't make me want to burn a datacenter to the ground. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

> (The use of such cottagecore terminology for a process that requires being an ongoing client of a hundred-gigabuck, planet-burning megacorporation rubs me in many wrong ways.) I hadn't noticed this - great point. To be fair the "home cooked meal" metaphor comes from 2020, predating genAI coding[1]. But even then, CPUs themselves are so normalised that we just kind of... forget how vertiginously complex the entire supply chain is. [1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Robin Sloan has called this “ventilated prose”, a phrase I love. (I seem to recall “aerated prose” having also been deployed) See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/

Vibe coding is a great for 'home cooked software.' Lots of people are making tools that fill a particular need for themselves. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ As for sharing a tool that someone else has made that's useful, I don't think most people are advertising that the tools they've built are vibe-coded, so it would be hard to know what to share.

I would expect nothing less from Robin Sloan! I absolutely loved reading "Sourdough." https://www.robinsloan.com/books/sourdough/

Loved this. Love to build. Build to love. Reminded me of Wordle and a few more projects like https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ It's always wonderful to see projects we build for love. Haha. Cheers OP.

In the same vein, I recommend reading this post by Robin Sloan https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

If you press “set” on a keyboard or tap the screen with three fingers a settings screen appears that lets you switch on a position indicator. Sorry it’s inducing tension but that’s sort of the point. To build suspense in the story. It’s based on Robin Sloans tap book idea. https://www.robinsloan.com/fish/ The whole project is an attempt to allow people to make worthwhile digital artifacts easily. Thanks for taking a look.

I enjoyed the "Colophon" page almost as much as the article https://www.robinsloan.com/colophon/ I love the built-in style guide. I'm totally stealing some ideas from that...

Looking further into your website, I find the content you write about extremely compelling and well written. The subtle insights about revisions here are great: https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/mortal-after-all/

I love this! Robin Sloan has been encouraging people to think in these directions this year, and is trying to help these inventors find each other: https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/ I have my own contribution to this conversation but I want to explain it in a big splashy blog post.

Author here. FWIW I 100% agree with your assessment. This would be a horrible choice for anything resembling production code and I hope nobody considers it. I'm not really even sure I'd recommend anybody other than me use the language for anything; there are a lot of decisions informed by how I, specifically, think about and write code. For me, this language works well when I want to write scripts that are <100 lines or so, and for that alone I think it's achieved its purpose. I think of it as a "home-cooked" programming language, a la <https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/>.

iirc this doesn't work in Firefox? or at least it doesn't work the same way as in Chrome. I developed a tiny home-cooked app[0] that depended on this behavior using desktop Chrome which then broke when I tried to use it on mobile Firefox. I then switched it to using document.getElementById like I should have and everything worked fine. Like others in this thread, I recommend not relying on this behavior. [0]: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

> an app can be a home-cooked meal. I second a recommendation to that article: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

The author (of both the book in the demo and this software itself) is Robin Sloan. He publishes a couple email newsletters, all of which I recommend. Most recently he's been writing a development diary for a video game he's working on[0]. He published a handful of GPT-2 generated city descriptions based on a corpus of fantasy literature that was a lot of fun[1]. There's great content about the illustration style as well[2]. I recommend the follow. [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/ [1] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/week/5/ [2] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/week/3/

Ahh, Robin Sloan's blog is such a treasure! I still deeply enjoy Dancing the Flip Flop ([0], but also linked in this essay) every time I think about it, never mind actually read it. Robin's perceptiveness and storytelling reminds me of Bret Victor's work as well, and they are both so great at it [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/flip-flop/

Yep! I'd recommend reading the short story, skipping the novel: https://www.robinsloan.com/books/penumbra/short-story/ I felt like the book was mostly filler added after the popularity of the short story.

I have a bunch of these. They are my favorite things to make. I've been making things like this for a long time but I only recently started to appreciate them after discovering this article. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ - I have a disability and require daily personal care so I made a system for recruiting and hiring caregivers. (https://blakewatson.com/journal/a-home-cooked-app-for-hiring-personal-… - I need to track those caregivers' hours so I can make sure timesheets are accurate, and I wanted to do it with minimal effort. So I created a plain text syntax readable by a web app I created that takes that syntax and outputs exactly what should go on the timesheets. - Sometimes the government agency that runs the program doesn't send me enough timesheets, so I created a "forgery" of their timesheets in CSS where all of the values are interchangeable via JavaScript. Now I can print any timesheet for any one of my caregivers for any time period on demand. - I made my own web-based bookmarking tool to replace my Pinboard account. It automatically sends every bookmark to the Wayback Machine. (I wrote about that one and a couple of others https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-joys-of-home-cooked-apps/) - Sadly I'm no longer able to use this one because of decreasing strength, but I once created a custom mobile-based keyboard for typing on my Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pre6EQGIuKY - I wanted to be able to share my plain text notes so I…

> In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog" is the right answer. My blog has sections for articles and tutorials, even a section for documenting how broken a lot of the software out there is and I'd say that overall it's been a pleasant experience throughout the years. On one hand, it helps me jot down how to do certain things in a structured way, other times to practice expressing my views and experiences in a reasonably structured way and to just get better at writing. I recall someone saying the following in a conference, which stuck with me (paraphrasing): "If you write something down and nobody ever reads it, those keypresses are sort of wasted." So, I occasionally write. A lot of it is sub par but has resulted in a few job offers (which I admittedly didn't take at the time), or just nice e-mail conversations with other people. Here's a brief look at the blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/ As for personal sites, while I don't see myself having one of those super artistic portfolio sites that some lovely people out there do, I at least have a way of writing down some of the things that I've worked on over the years, my views, others' feedback and so on: https://kronis.dev/ Is it a super optimized and effective way at getting income, job interviews, clout or whatever people care about? Not really. Could someone call it a waste? Sure, but then again, a lot of the stuff we do as human beings is a bit of a waste when you think about it: watching shows or…

I would love to see an actual business modeled after The Black Danube, in Robin Sloan's novella Annabel Scheme: http://robinsloan.com/annabel-scheme (Read the whole thing, it's an awesome story) Directly from the book (don't worry, it's CC): ----- They showed me a coffee shop stretched out to warehouse scale. There was a long, foreshortened espresso counter up front. The rest of the concrete floor was dotted with wooden tables, dozens of them, all different shapes, spaced evenly through the field of gray. Every single one was occupied. Men in shiny suits and long coats—one in white New Fleet livery—milled from table to table like customers at a flea market. [...] All of the tables at this coffee shop were reserved for new internet companies. The price was a nine percent stake in your new venture, but you’d happily give nineteen or ninety-nine. With a table, you got, in addition to the simple, precious space: a thick, luxurious fiber-optic connection to the internet; a server or two or sixteen in the data center next door; and, most important by far, the attention of Octav Erdos. I saw him at a table near the front. He was tall and wide, bald, wearing gray overalls. He could have been an auto mechanic. He was blustering at the semicircle of skinny faces around the table, tracing his fingers in little spirals, drawing something in the air. Everyone was nodding. Octav was more than an espresso impresario. He was also the director of Black Danube Ventures, and he spent…

It's interesting to think how nearly-e-waste level hardware could combine with something [home-cooked](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/) to be really cool, especially for folks who might have been intimidated by this kind of development before.

The target audience of the app is me and my wife. This is a "home-cooked meal" app.[0] If it's useful to other people, I'm glad, but I'm primarily building it for myself for the pleasure of building and the satisfaction of a tool that works exactly how I want it to work. You could approximate it with email, but I want things that you can't do with email like letting recipients control the frequency of emails, making high-res images available without bloating everyone's inboxes. [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

I don't think that will happen. Sure for a minority of users the same as people running linux for their daily driver, and I definitely support it! It's possible that we get to a place where everyone cooks their own meal (vibe coded app), and only goes out to eat sometimes (official app store). Spreadsheets are the same, you can get a lot of milage, and most still buy and use closed source software. Reminds me of this: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

An example of why you need to explain what you mean by AGI is: https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/agi-is-here/

I've been working on https://booplet.com. It's like Lovable but for desktop apps and heavily inspired by Robin Sloan's home-cooked app essay [1][2]. The idea is to let anyone, especially non-technical folks, build and use personal apps. Instead of cloud deployment, we focused on a local-first setup so that users can fully own their apps and data. [1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ [2] https://booplet.com/blog/anyone-can-cook

An app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Robin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/