2026-08-18 08:00:00
I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country, covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the mustard armchairs, the dark wooden panels along the walls. I'm three teas deep and have a few hours of quiet to think for the first time in many months.
Over the summer my baby became a rambunctious toddler, barrelling around the house and narrating our lives in his own language. My family bought and moved into our first real home after crappy-rental-hopping for years. I've now been on the GitHub Next team for the better part of a year and feel settled.
My husband and I both work full-time, so with a small child and a new house, one that is in fact a very old house, with broken doorknobs, peeling wallpaper, jammed windows, and rising damp that needs to be fixed, we acutely feel the lack of time these days. It's a stretch to meet everyone's basic needs and keep the dish piles and dirty clothes from drowning us, let alone fix floorboards. I end up thinking a lot about people married to housewives and SAHMs. And the 1971 classic essay I Want a Wife by Judy Brady. An excerpt:
"I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children, a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals. I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do my studying."
Turns out my husband and I would also like a wife. But not in the polyamorous sense. In the does-the-invisible-unpaid-household-labour sense. Thanks to an incurable case of feminism, it was never going to be me.
I am genuinely hopeful agents might put a dent in this problem, in the same way washing machines and dishwashers did. While they can't physically do our chores, I expect we can outsource a good chunk of the mental load to always-on agents like Hermes and OpenClaw: pre-emptively buying the next size of kids' shoes, planning weekend outings, making menus and ordering the groceries, researching and contacting local roofers, balancing family calendars stuffed with school outings and football matches and work trips.
But for the moment, autonomous agent systems are a PITA to set up securely. The moment you give them access to the necessary tools like your email, calendar, and a debit card, you've opened a security hellhole. The amount of context these systems need to be genuinely "smart" in the way a human helper would be is non-trivial to configure, and impossible to do safely. This is a "check back next year" technology.
For the moment we're resigned to eating lots of cheese on toast and cereal for “meals,” and living in a Montessori-themed construction site. I also think about this hilarious Instagram meme a lot:
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There is much angst in my circles over the impending mass unemployment of humans. There is much concern over what people will do with their time when all the work of the world disappears, reassigned to agents.
What is the work of the world in these conversations? Accounting, sure. Paralegal research. Much of software development. Data entry. Translation. Transcription. Financial advice. Everything listed in these sorts of reports. I've no beef with the argument that most repetitive knowledge work is low-hanging fruit for agent labour.
And yet there is so much labour to be done. Obviously, my dishes. Frankly, all of my household tasks. Home maintenance. Childcare. Elderly care. End-of-life care. Social care. Everything that has historically been done for free, by women, unaccounted for in any economic calculations like GDP.
And then there's the public service labour that everyone would benefit from but has no clear buyer: retrofitting cities to adapt to a changing climate. Installing solar panels and heat pumps. Planting trees and putting up shade covers. Building and maintaining safe bike paths. Farming seaweed for sequestering carbon. Digging a bunch of new reservoirs so my tiny, rainy island doesn't ironically run out of water.
There is no shortage of physical, social, educational, and cultural work that we need humans to do for one another that cannot, in any wild imagining of agent capabilities, be done by our current or near-future robots. We just can't figure out how we would pay people enough to do these jobs. There is plenty of need, but not enough ability or willingness to pay. I find myself twisting my small brain into knots and googling basic economic theory trying to understand how we're going to solve this riddle under modern capitalism. Other than, you know, UBI funded by aggressively taxing tokens.
In a very basic bitch move, I've started listening to the audiobook Economics: The User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang in an attempt to backfill all the economics I never learned and understand more about market dynamics. It feels irresponsible to watch the coming tsunami of AI abundance and not, at least theoretically, understand how it will smash into jobs, wages, and labour. And manifest the permanent underclass we keep hearing about.
<a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/187172/economics-the-users-guide-by-chang-ha-joon/9780718197032"><strong>Economics: The User's Guide</strong></a> by Ha-Joon Chang
An accessible introduction to economics for readers with no background in the subject. Chang covers classical, Keynesian, Marxist, and half a dozen other schools of economic thought side by side, showing where each one is useful and where it falls apart.
Also, while we're on the topic of domestic labour and women's economic freedom, I recently read Yesteryear and loved it, just like everyone else. Strong recommend.
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238226942-yesteryear"><strong>Yesteryear</strong></a> by Caro Claire Burke
Natalie is a tradwife influencer with a picture-perfect farmhouse life, until she wakes up trapped in an actual 19th century, minus the nannies, producers, and industrial ovens propping up her aesthetic. It's a darkly funny, genuinely unsettling read about tradition, fame, and the performance of womanhood.
2026-07-18 08:00:00
A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering
2026-04-13 08:00:00
Why we need collaborative AI engineering and a tour of Ace: the multiplayer coding workspace
2026-01-23 08:00:00
On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code
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
