Maggie Appleton

Spending a lot more time on Bluesky from now on. Handle is @maggieappleton.com Might still x-post occasionally, but most of the people I enjoy interacting with have moved over, which is all I needed. Come join us!

London tech and ai scene heatmap. Adding more now. Will sync to office spaces next week. londonmaxxxing.com

@benjitaylor Request for Github Copilot CLI and OpenCode tracking please 🙏

Readout 0.0.8 is live: new session transcript search tab, new tool usage tab, skill and agent customisation (add/edit/remove), cost projections, session handoffs, sidebar customisation, and most importantly, a cute new splash screen. → readout.org

Local-First Conf 2026 tickets are now on sale. July 12–14 · Berlin · 350 people · single track This year's theme: user empowerment in an age of fluid software. We're going beyond CRDTs to explore malleable software, peer-to-peer, self-sovereign identity, open-weight models, ATproto, and much more. If you're building for user agency, this is your conference. CFP is open. We want YOUR talk. 👇localfirstconf.com

GitHub issue/PR navigation is significantly faster recently. Large PRs also render so much better [on Safari, especially]. It is noticeably improving my day since I navigate between them with high frequency. Thanks to whoever made this happen. ❤️

@raul_dronca Nice - that's looking much better! Letting users click into each detail of the steps is also essential. As much transparency as possible. But with progressive disclosure so it's not overwhelming.

@Mappletons Thanks for the feedback and totally fair observation! This is just a pure animation/interaction exploration, not a real agent UI. But you're absolutely right that if it were a real agent, showing what's happening at each stage would be essential. Something like this:

Agent Flow

@max__drake We'll take whatever you've got

@Mappletons Absolutely! I wassss waiting to see if I was going to have time to add some extra goodies to them before signing up to demo but I’m sure I’ll be able to manage by then

The GitHub Next team is coming to London in March! We're hosting a meet-up for anyone interested in the next generation of software eng tools We'll show our recent work & research, but also have open spots for community demos March 3rd at 6pm Sign up → luma.com/v5eltkec

@max__drake Sign up to demo! Can we see fairies?

@Mappletons oooo looking forward to this

(And no, unfortunately/fortunately we don't have power over or insight into GitHub's uptime or the speed of the PR page. Sorry, not our work) We're a small R&D team exploring non-obvious futures; what's the post-PR, post-async-code-review, post-manual-git-management world like?

@thesolarmonk Sometimes :) splitting time between here and bluesky

@Mappletons omg are you back on twitter??

The meta design system organically growing

maggieappleton.com/forest-talk This is pretty much on track. But no one has taken "the filtered web" that seriously yet or built many tools and systems around web browsing to verify, validate, cut noise, filter, etc. All AI x browser efforts seem to optimise for prompt injection 🤷‍♀️

In early 2023 I did a talk on "the dark forest web" and AI – emerging repercussions of sharing a web with agentic systems. A slide I had to cut for time was like "marketplaces will develop where agents pay humans for meatspace chores" And it is wild/horrifying to see it happen..

@rich_cahill @doctorbaytas @mlfrg @meetgranola yes! that's where I got the idea from. came away realising I needed to do way more system design and way less direct design

@Mappletons @doctorbaytas + @mlfrg relevant to your @meetgranola design engineering talks

Designing designs < designing custom machines for designs

@wwwillchen Yup. External links still severely punished in the algorithm. Designed to keep you on site.

@Mappletons why do people not link in the original post? is it because of the algorithims?

I have Gas Town derangement syndrome and spent the last few weeks writing too many words on agent orchestration patterns; how they shift our bottlenecks and force us to ask whether and when we should stop looking at code (link below because this platform is still trash)

@uripont_ thanks! graphic were all done in figma and exported as SVGs

@Mappletons came here after the post just to say that indeed the graphics were top-notch, now a major inspiration source in terms of design language and use of colors. curious about the tooling used. congrats, you certainly should be proud of them!

If you tried to read the Gas Town post when it came out but struggled to put the sprawling cast of post-apocalyptic Hollywood movie characters together in your head into a working future vision of software development, I wrote this for you. There are good things under the madness

And I am unreasonably proud of making all the diagrams in this responsive on mobile. With no help from Claude. Lovingly hand-crafted only because agents are shit at visual explanations and graphic design. I am still useful for a while yet.