Basic | The Personal Computing Platform
We build products, tools, and standards to make computers more personal.
Malleable Software in the Age of AI - Geoffrey Litt
Perfect Software - Software for an Audience of One
We have many names to describe personal tools. Malleable software speaks to how it behaves. Home-cooked software speaks to who makes it.
The community-first software era
Some ideas about how to encode our values into the tools we use
Hey! I'm Isaac
I like building tools, breaking workflows, and putting them back together better.
Stop Begging Billionaires To Fix Software — Build Your Own
This is part one of a two-part series on using AI tools as one piece to fight back against tech company control of our lives. Part two shares the details of how I built my own task management tool …
A small matter of programming: perspectives on end user computing
A Small Matter of Programming asks why it has been so d…
Dive into Claude Code: The Design Space of Today's and Future AI Agent Systems
Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that can run shell commands, edit files, and call external services on behalf of the user. This study describes its comprehensive architecture by analyzing the publicly available TypeScript source code and further comparing it with OpenClaw, an independent open-source AI agent system that answers many of the same design questions from a different deployment context. Our analysis identifies five human values, philosophies, and needs that motivate the architecture (human decision authority, safety and security, reliable execution, capability amplification, and contextual adaptability) and traces them through thirteen design principles to specific implementation choices. The core of the system is a simple while-loop that calls the model, runs tools, and repeats. Most of the code, however, lives in the systems around this loop: a permission system with seven modes and an ML-based classifier, a five-layer compaction pipeline for context management, four extensibility mechanisms (MCP, plugins, skills, and hooks), a subagent delegation mechanism with worktree isolation, and append-oriented session storage. A comparison with OpenClaw, a multi-channel personal assistant gateway, shows that the same recurring design questions produce different architectural answers when the deployment context changes: from per-action safety classification to perimeter-level access control, from a single CLI loop to an embedded runtime within a gateway control plane, and from context-window extensions to gateway-wide capability registration. We finally identify six open design directions for future agent systems, grounded in recent empirical, architectural, and policy literature.
deta/surf
Personal AI Notebooks. Organize files & webpages and generate notes from them. Open source, local & open data, open model choice (incl. local).
Principles for crafting software
My principles for deciding what to work on and how to build it.
Tiny Tools Directory
A list of small, free, or experimental tools towards joyful digital creation.
My Thoughts on AI, Part 2: Agent Setup, Workflow, and Tools
My own personal AI development setup, workflow, and tooling
