Glamorous Toolkit

Malleable software

computing environments where anyone can mold their tools to their own unique needs.That definition is by [[Geoffrey Litt]], who wrote [[Malleable software ...

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.

Designing and Programming Malleable Software

User needs for software features and interfaces are diverse and changing, motivating the goal of making it as easy as possible for users themselves to change software, or to have it changed on their behalf in response to their developing needs. However, in my opinion, current approaches do not address this issue adequately: software engineering promotes flexible code, but in practice this does not help end-users effect change in their software. End-user and live programming systems help users customize their interfaces by accessing and modifying the underlying source code. I take a different approach, seeking to maximize the kinds of modifications that can take place through regular interactions, e.g. direct manipulation of interface elements. I call this approach malleable software. To understand contemporary needs for and barriers to modifying software, I study how it is produced, maintained, adopted, and appropriated in a network of communities working with biodiversity data. I find that the mode of software production, i.e. the technologies and economic relations that produce software, is biased towards centralized, one-size-fits-all systems. This leads me to propose a long-term, interdisciplinary research program in reforming the tools of software development to create infrastructures for plurality. These tools should help multiple communities collaborate without forcing them to consolidate around identical interfaces or data representations. Malleable software is one such infrastructure, in which interactive systems are dynamic constellations of interfaces, devices, and programs assembled at the site of use. My technological contribution is a reconstruction of the programming mechanisms used to create interactive behavior. I generalize existing control structures for interaction as entanglements, and develop a higher-order control structure, entanglers, which produces entanglements when particular pre-conditions, called co-occurrences, are met. Entanglers cause interactions to be assembled dynamically as system components come and go. I develop these mechanisms in Tangler, a prototype environment for building malleable interactive software. I demonstrate how Tangler supports malleability through a set of benchmark cases illustrating how users can modify systems by themselves or with programmer assistance. This thesis is an early step towards a paradigm for programming and designing malleable software that can keep up with human diversity.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

Changing Devtools Is Cheap. Owning Them Isn’t.

AI makes devtools cheap to customize, but personalized forks still demand ongoing attention and ownership.

Differ - Adaptive Software

Build software that adapts to each user — without forks or feature flags. One codebase, infinite variants.

Differ - Adaptive Software

Build software that adapts to each user — without forks or feature flags. One codebase, infinite variants.

FOSDEM 2025 - Goblins: The framework for your next project!

Building peer-to-peer decentralised applications remains difficult and error-prone. Most attempts at this either abandon collaborative features entirely or fall back on centralised architectures. The Spritely Institute is working on this challenge by creating (among other things) Goblins, a Guile framework that makes secure, fault-tolerant peer-to-peer applications accessible to developers. These tools are especially valuable for developers building secure collaborative applications that aim to foster healthy online communities. This talk walks you through Goblins’ most powerful features, including the actor model, object capability security, networking, time travel debugging, and persistence.

Building personal tools by programming

The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes

From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.

Devtools must be open source - exe.dev blog

The age of personalized software is here.

sugarcube

Design tokens, generated CSS, and optional components. Build front ends on strong, reusable foundations.

Malleable software in the age of LLMs

All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?

Malleable software in the age of LLMs

All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?