2026-01-02 08:00:00
I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can be after months of chronic sickness, broken sleep, and parental troubleshooting. I am very tired and full of stoic perspective, but still savouring the baby babble sounds, tiny fingers on my face, and three-teeth grins.
When people ask me how parenting is going, I've taken to saying that on paper my life sounds terrible, but in lived reality I'm happier than ever been. I'm certain I'll soon yearn for these early morning hours, curled up with a tiny, snoring infant on my chest.
Parenthood is a predictable source of exhaustion. But there's a second, far less expected source in my life right now. And it doesn't come with a cornucopia of adorable noises to take the edge off.
Agents. AI agents are all I can see, read, build, and think about these days. Coding agents. Research agents. Planning agents. Sub-agents. Multi-agent swarms. Orchestrator agents. Agentic memory. Agentic context management.
This agentic immersion is almost entirely voluntary and specific to my situation. I started a new job at Github Next at the beginning of October; a team tasked with researching and building the next generation of tools for software developers. Which at this point in history unquestionably means agents.
The pace of change in agent world makes JavaScript fatigue look quaint. It's hard to think of historical parallels where a field changed this rapidly in such an unrelenting and distributed way. Even Andrej Karpathy feels behind
<img src="https://maggieappleton.com//images/posts/now/karparthy_behind.png" alt="Tweet by Andrej Karpathy saying he has never felt this behind as a programmer. The profession is brin dramatically refactored. He has the sense he could be 10X more powerful is he just properly strings together all the tools and capabilities that have become available over the last year." />
I am not trying to add to the hype and FOMO here. Only to be honest about what it feels like inside my particular information bubble. I am becoming a product of my X feed, which is unintentionally finely tuned to show an infinite stream of developer-flavoured AI panic anxiety that looks something like this:
You might suggest that I spend less time on X, but I'm not inclined to look away just as the train gets up to full speed. Sure it's a distorted reality, but it points to real ground truth: even if progress on language models slows this year, we are still far behind in using what already exists to reshape software design and engineering.
To be clear, I am tired, but thrilled by the capabilities overhang. No one has the full context of what is happening around us. Pick any piece of it to work on in earnest and you'll find bushels of low hanging fruit.
I am not a resolutions person, but it's hard to enter a new year without stopping to take stock and strategise a bit. My policy for the first year of my kid's life is that I get a free pass at everything; eating too many chocolate Hobnobs? Free pass. Not reading enough books? Free pass. Haven't cleared out that pile of crap in the hallway? Free pass. This excuses me from most new-years-shaped personal improvement goals.
But the one thing I've lost over the last year that I urgently need to find again is my belief that anything I write matters. It's been hard to know what to say with a landscape changing this fast. It's hard to gather my thoughts in a resource depleted state. It's hard to believe my opinions have any legitimacy compared to the people working inside the foundation labs, while I scrabble together information in between 3am feeds and nursery runs. I've lost a little of my confidence as a researcher and contributor to The Discourse. My intention for this year is to take my own advice and pick some low hanging fruit.
2025-08-05 08:00:00
On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions
2025-08-02 19:31:48
A lovely little write-up by my friend Steve Krouse on how vibe code and legacy code are roughly the same thing; “code that nobody understands.”
I particularly like this graph which illustrates the relationship between vibe code and understanding:
<img src="https://maggieappleton.com//images/smidgeons/vibe-code.png" alt="A line chart with vibe on the Y axis and understanding on the X axis with a downwards diagonal line" />
This type of discussion feels helpful in a moment where the term “vibe coding” is being tossed around in vague and unhelpful ways. It rings true to me that it's a continuous spectrum, and no professional developers are sitting at the all-vibes end of it.
As many have pointed out, not all code written with AI assistance is vibe code. Per the original definition, it's code written in contexts where you “forget that the code even exists.” Or as the fairly fleshed-out Wikipedia article puts it: ”A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.”
Like many developers, I'm constantly grappling with how much understanding I'm willing to hand over to Cursor or Claude Code. I sincerely try to keep it minimal, or at least have them walk me through the functionality line-by-line if I feel I'm out of my depth. But it's always easier and faster to YOLO it – an impulse I have to actively keep in check.
Our AI minions are also exceptional tools for learning when you move too far towards the high-vibes-low-understanding end of the spectrum. I particularly like getting Claude to write me targeted exercises to practice new concepts when I get lost in generated functions or fail to implement something correctly sans-AI. Even though doubling-down up on engineering skills sometimes feels like learning to operate a textile loom in 1820.
2025-05-25 08:00:00
In a wonderfully dramatic change to my life, I became a mother two months ago. My son was born at the end of March via an unplanned but otherwise uncomplicated c-section. Parenthood has been predictably overwhelming, exhausting, and existentially glorious.
My days are now spent holding a sleeping newborn on my chest, timing wake windows, picking up the dropped pacifier for the 19th time, trying to eat with 0.5 hands free, and watching an eternal stream of Gilmore Girls episodes on a precariously balanced iPhone while feeding/burping/soothing/rocking/patting this tiny human. It swings between hard physical labour with high cortisol levels, to extremely chill, serene, and joyful a dozen times throughout the day and night.
I had doubts about becoming a mother when I was younger. Mostly related to systemic gender inequality, believing I would need to sacrifice my whole career for it, and thinking myself incapable of bearing the responsibility (which, to be fair, I was before age ~28). I spent a solid year in angst and turmoil trying to figure it out. All the parents around me only shared details of how stressful, sleep-deprived, expensive, and burdensome their new lives were. Perhaps because it felt too trite or vulnerable to put into words the love, joy, and purpose that comes with it.
Being on the other side, I now realise there was no calculation or algorithm or pro/con list or financial spreadsheet that could have helped me understand what it would feel like. Nothing that would do justice to the emotional weight of holding your sleeping baby that you made with your own body. Of watching them grin back at you with uncomplicated joy. Of realising you'll get to watch them grow into a full person; one that is – at least genetically – half you and half the person you love most in the world. Of watching them trip out as they realise they have hands.
I can now say with certainty I am evolutionarily wired for this. Perhaps not everyone is. But everything in me is designed to feel existential delight at each little fart, squeak, grunt, and sneeze that comes out of this child. Delight that is unrivalled by any successful day at work, fully shipped feature, long cathartic run, or Sunday morning buttery croissant – the banal highlights of my past life. When I think back to my pre-baby self, trying to calculate herself into a clear decision, I wish I could let her feel for one minute what it's like to hold him. And tell her I can't believe I ever considered depriving myself of this.
In other news, I've read no books (other than Your Baby Week by Week and Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer), had few higher-order thoughts, and binge watched all of Motherland. As this child learns to sleep in more predictable ways, I'm looking forward to being less of a zombie and engaging with the world again.
2025-03-24 08:00:00
A tiny tool to calculate when your baby might arrive
2025-03-14 00:30:58
Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice
The New Scientist used freedom of information laws to get the ChatGPT records of the UK's technology secretary.
The headline hints at a damning exposé, but ends up being a story about a politician making pretty reasonable and sensible use of language models to be more informed and make better policy decisions.
He asked it why small business owners are slow to adopt AI, which popular podcasts he should appear on, and to define terms like antimatter and digital inclusion.
This all seems extremely fine to me. Perhaps my standards for politicians are too low, but I assume they don't actually know much and rely heavily on advisors to define terms for them and decide on policy improvements. And I think ChatGPT connected to some grounded sources would be a decent policy advisor. Better than most human policy advisors. At least when it comes to consistency, rapidly searching and synthesising lots of documents, and avoiding personal bias. Models still carry the bias of their creators, but it all becomes a trade-off between human flaws and model flaws.
Claiming language models should have anything to do with national governance feels slightly insane. But we're also sitting in a moment where Trump and Musk are implementing policies that trigger trade wars and crash the U.S. economy. And I have to think "What if we just put Claude in charge?"
I joke. Kind of.
