(2026-04-04) Matuschak Apps And Programming Tyrannies

Andy Matuschak on Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies

New talk! You can watch/read here, but it's not public yet—please don't post that link.

This talk brings together three big ideas which have been circulating in my writing here over this past year:

Malleability for very complex interfaces (UI, malleable software). Coding agents go a long way towards end-user programming, but if you want to add a new kind of drawing tool to Photoshop, you're out of luck. We need a way to extend the kind of complex interfaces that experts live in all day. I show how coding agents make possible a new approach. Along the way, I demo some elaborate Obsidian plugins for augmented reading.

Malleable reading environments. Where's my AutoCAD for scholarship? Where's my Logic? Why is reading software so impoverished? I suggest that a key first step is to make a highly malleable reading environment, and I demo a prototype inspired by the architecture in the first part.

The tyranny of programmers. Composability isn't enough—I want more imagination, too. An abridged and adapted version of my recent essay.

As with How Might We Learn?, I've presented this talk in browsable hypermedia form. Please let me know if you find bugs or errors.

This talk was presented as the MIT HCI seminar a few weeks ago. That's a lovely honor, but preparing this alongside my augmented attention work ate my nights and weekends all year. I'm still figuring out how/whether I can balance big writing projects with my primary creative work. In any case: I'm very excited to have this out in the world.