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!

👋 The team has been building a new agentic experience for managing your GitHub work: prototyping, coding, reviewing, triaging, automations, and more. Plus you aren't tied to a single model: Claude, GPT, Auto… We've been testing it with some end users for more than a month and it's becoming a productivity booster. Sign up and ping us with feedback!

@VivaLaPanda Yay! Maybe we can entice @james_elicit up to the big city too? Elicit reunion!

@Mappletons I’ll be there in like a week!

UK is pretty good

@joelhooks Happy birthday! 🎂 🎉 Many good ones still to go

52, still at least a couple good years left 🎈

how do I get exposure to @mattpocockuk pre IPO?

Anyone found this style of forced connection and inferred insights actually helpful? I've found it lands ~30% of the time. But overall gives me less faith in Claude's second order reasoning.

Through one lens, very impressive! Remembers facts about me and infers values. Through a more ambitious lens, a failure. The inferred values/facts aren't very accurate. I come away with the "this thing is so dumb" aftertaste. Thrust of memory like this is good, experience is meh

I get a flavour of well-intentioned but irrelevant "helpful memory" connections often in Claude. This morning researching KiloClaw vs self-hosted openclaw, Claude injects an unrelated memory, tries to square the circle. Memory features still in infancy? Hard to teach relevance?

Have you ever wondered how I make some of the illustrations for makingsoftware.com? Well, I made a video walking through some of the tooling I've made. Hopefully its interesting.

If the community wants to save contemporary GitHub we should rally around @kdaigle becoming independent CEO. He has been there since the old days. Knows the soul of the product and knows how to do it.

@samlambert @kdaigle Approved!

Such a lineup at the upcoming "Beyond the Prompt" conf! @DavidKPiano on making AI workflows more deterministic (a needed exploration!), @philhawksworth hosting, plus all the good Matts: @mattpocockuk and @genmon May 19th in London: ag-grid.com/campaigns/beyo… I do love a mini conf

@vidimitrov Adding new context docs or editing existing ones just makes new commits to that branch. We'll add more sophisticated search and retrieval work (graph rag, etc.) on top of this later, but for the moment we're keeping it simple. Staying focused on the core UX before we expand.

@vidimitrov Any data in the repo itself is of course available to the agent, but we have a docs store that uses an isolated branch of the repo to hold non-code context files So it doesn't clutter up your main branch, but it's stored in git and on GitHub alongside the code.

alignment is the bottleneck! amazing talk and demo by @Mappletons highly recommend 🙌 i'm really surprised how you could fit so many good concepts into a single interface... great work from the @GitHubNext team

@ToddNorthrop You, personally, appear to be "the public" in this scenario. I'm not fully aware of what narratives you've constructed around BlueSky. I have no idea what you read and see. But you appear to live in a fairly thick bubble of your own making.

@Mappletons I suspect you are fully aware of what the public thinks of Bluesky. If you interacted with someone who claims they "just hang out with their friends" on 4chan, would you have some idea of who you're dealing with, or is that a big mystery too?

I don't work on reliability & scaling at GitHub, but the people who do aren't bad at their jobs. They're dealing with unprecedented scale from agents. It's easy to shit on GitHub from the outside if you're not in charge of 30X-ing capacity within a few months. Have some grace.

@ToddNorthrop Huh, this is a fascinating take to me. My BlueSky is 90% with people I know IRL (as in, humans I've met!), and who are at best moderate left - roughly Labour party in the UK. Some mod right though. No one that political. Mostly JavaScript & web dev people. Hardly Stalinists.

Lots of people hate Elon and misogynists. But being on Bluesky says more about things you like, because in order to tolerate hanging out there a lot, it requires looking at the world in an extreme far-left manner. Like maybe 80-90 percentile far-left.

@ToddNorthrop You could infer I hate Elon Musk and misogynists. And I sincerely miss Twitter.

I guess if I were discussing this with someone from the wilderness who had no knowledge of the Internet or social media I could accept that you don't know what I'm talking about. Absent that, it doesn't serve well to feign ignorance. You tell me: what inferences could I make about someone who makes it a point to reference Bluesky in their X profile? If you're following along, do you not understand that this kind of subtle but pointed messaging on your social media will naturally turn off a significant number of people?

@aleattorium Yeah agree the communication piece has been fumbled a lot. Seems like the leaders and dev rel team know that part has to improve. I'm not part of those teams. Mostly posting as an individual, not of behalf of GH, but obviously with a horse in the race.

@Mappletons The problem is how they're being communicated, the brand reputation is really hurting when a coo comes online to say the problem was small

@ToddNorthrop It means I mostly hang out on BlueSky. Unclear how that's related to having some empathy for the systems stability folks at GitHub. But feel free to elaborate? Genuinely lost

@Mappletons I was feeling some sympathy but then saw on your profile "Mostly on Bluesky these days", so I know what that means... and lost my sympathy