9 posts tagged “geoffrey-litt”
2025
Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs. Geoffrey Litt reports on Stevens, a shared digital assistant he put together for his family using SQLite and scheduled tasks running on Val Town.
The design is refreshingly simple considering how much it can do. Everything works around a single memories table. A memory has text, tags, creation metadata and an optional date for things like calendar entries and weather reports.
Everything else is handled by scheduled jobs to popular weather information and events from Google Calendar, a Telegram integration offering a chat UI and a neat system where USPS postal email delivery notifications are run through Val's own email handling mechanism to trigger a Claude prompt to add those as memories too.
Here's the full code on Val Town, including the daily briefing prompt that incorporates most of the personality of the bot.
Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for exploring scenarios (via) Delightful UI experiment by Alex Warth and Geoffrey Litt at Ink & Switch, exploring the idea of a spreadsheet with cells that can handle multiple values at once, which they call "amb" (for "ambiguous") values. A single sheet can then be used to model multiple scenarios.
Here the cell for "Car" contains {500, 1200} and the cell for "Apartment" contains {2800, 3700, 5500}, resulting in a "Total" cell with six different values. Hovering over a calculated highlights its source values and a side panel shows a table of calculated results against those different combinations.
Always interesting to see neat ideas like this presented on top of UIs that haven't had a significant upgrade in a very long time.
Today's software ecosystem evolved around a central assumption that code is expensive, so it makes sense to centrally develop and then distribute at low marginal cost.
If code becomes 100x cheaper, the choices no longer make sense! Build-buy tradeoffs often flip.
The idea of an "app"—a hermetically sealed bundle of functionality built by a team trying to anticipate your needs—will no longer be as relevant.
We'll want looser clusters, amenable to change at the edges. Everyone owns their tools, rather than all of us renting cloned ones.
2024
Whether you’re an AI-programming skeptic or an enthusiast, the reality is that many programming tasks are beyond the reach of today’s models. But many decent dev tools are actually quite easy for AI to build, and can help the rest of the programming go smoother. In general, these days any time I’m spending more than a minute staring at a JSON blob, I consider whether it’s worth building a custom UI for it.
Towards universal version control with Patchwork (via) Geoffrey Litt has been working with Ink & Switch exploring UI patterns for applying version control to different kinds of applications, with the goal of developing a set of conceptual primitives that can bring branching and version tracking to interfaces beyond just Git-style version control.
Geoffrey observes that basic version control is already a metaphor in a lot of software—the undo stack in Photoshop or suggestion mode in Google Docs are two examples.
Extending that is a great way to interact with AI tools as well—allowing for editorial bots that can suggest their own changes for you to accept, for example.
It's hard to overstate the value of LLM support when coding for fun in an unfamiliar language. [...] This example is totally trivial in hindsight, but might have taken me a couple mins to figure out otherwise. This is a bigger deal than it seems! Papercuts add up fast and prevent flow. (A lot of being a senior engineer is just being proficient enough to avoid papercuts).
You Can Build an App in 60 Minutes with ChatGPT, with Geoffrey Litt (via) YouTube interview between Dan Shipper and Geoffrey Litt. They talk about how ChatGPT can build working React applications and how this means you can build extremely niche applications that you woudn’t have considered working on before—then to demonstrate that idea, they collaborate to build a note-taking app to be used just during that specific episode recording, pasting React code from ChatGPT into Replit.
Geoffrey: “I started wondering what if we had a world where everybody could craft software tools that match the workflows they want to have, unique to themselves and not just using these pre-made tools. That’s what malleable software means to me.”
2023
I think it’s likely that soon all computer users will have the ability to develop small software tools from scratch, and to describe modifications they’d like made to software they’re already using.
2022
SQLite Happy Hour—a Twitter Spaces conversation about three interesting projects building on SQLite
Yesterday I hosted SQLite Happy Hour. my first conversation using Twitter Spaces. The idea was to dig into three different projects that were doing interesting things on top of SQLite. I think it worked pretty well, and I’m curious to explore this format more in the future.
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