Future of Coding Weekly

Making a little Obsidian plugin that lets you cook small apps right inside of your vault.

I find boilerplate annoying for little experiments, so I got rid of all of it. Each file is a standalone little app that automatically gets built and executed. Data persistence is also usually a pain, so it's nice to be able to just do it HyperCard style and have changes auto-save right to the file.

🎥 Screen Recording

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

I add a feature and add a toggle of state for it. Then I add another feature and add another toggle. Do I really need to handle 4 possible states now, or just 3, i.e. I have an enum in disguise 🥸? I keep making this mistake. Designing things up front is easy, but I find it impossible to reliably avoid mistakes when adding to an existing design.

Thinking Together

🗨️ Christopher Shank: 🎥 My Favourite Games from GMTK Game Jam 2025

🎥 My Favourite Games from GMTK Game Jam 2025

The theme of the GMTK Gam Jam was "loops" and there are lots of fun and novel explorations of affordances, interactions, and mechanics that feel applicable to the types of stuff explored here

My Favourite Games from GMTK Game Jam 2025

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-24

Anyone have experience with XSLT? The recent kerfuffle about removing it from the html spec and the episode of Igalia Chats about it were both quite interesting to me. A declarative tree-transformation language!? Sounds like the sort of thing you could build a web app engine around ;)

Linking Together

🗨️ Pablo Donato: 🗃️ Grist: Organize your data, your way

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-20

Not sure if it was already shared here before, but Grist looks like a good contender in the No Code/Relational Spreadsheet game. It seems to be to Airtable what Zulip is to Slack: an open-source, self-hostable, and more customizable alternative.

Learn about all of Grist's powerful spreadsheet-database product and its many features.

Product | Grist

🗨️ Eli:

Ends in what is likely a fun question for these parts:

In the 1970s, you could launch a new language with a paper and a maybe a compiler and/or interpreter. In 2025, you need an integrated product, a narrative, and enough momentum to bootstrap an ecosystem and on top of that a huge corpus of code that can only be created through sustained use. Modern langdev is daunting to say the least.

Where do languages go from here?

Languages could be shaped by physical and purpose-specific constraints once again. Tomorrow’s interesting languages may target IoT, SBCs, edge devices, Blockchain, GPUs, and let’s not forget that the world still runs on microcontrollers.
Python is the lingua franca of AI, which means it’s the lingua franca of LLM-generated code. Eventually Python will force LLMs to eat their own tail, but more immediate an over-reliance on AI-generated code will expose inherent weaknesses in the technology. We’re seeing real problems with an increased lack of rigor and there are novel problems that LLMs simply cannot solve. These short-comings are opportunities.
Future innovations may look more like a new operating environment with integrated semantics across distributed systems, or programmable infrastructure that blurs the line between language and runtime.

🗨️ Jon Tran: Open-source geometric constraint solver

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-21

A while back, when I saw the Inkling presentation I said that my company was working on designing a constraint solving system for CAD. It's just getting started and still very much a work in progress, but it's happening. https://github.com/KittyCAD/ezpz

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 📝 Google is killing the open web

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-22

A statement I frequently hear is that no platform is as stable as the Web platform, because everyone makes an effort to keep old Web sites functional. The current XSLT debate suggests that this stability may soon end, as part of another enshittification campaign.

📝 Google is killing the open web

The juggernaut is taking advantage of its dominant position to enclose and destroy the commons.

🗨️ Jimmy Miller: 💡 Icepath: a 2D Programming Language

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-23

https://healeycodes.com/icepath-a-2d-programming-language

A little 2D programming language called Icepath. Named after the ice puzzles in Pokémon Gold and Silver. The vibe I was going for was sliding around a cave and hitting opcodes.

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/08 Week 3

2025-08-17 23:33

🛸 A moldable Common Lisp object inspector 🧑‍🔬 Trying out "Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning" 📄 Hierarchical File Systems are Dead

Share Your Work

🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 De-Spaghettifying Control Flow & 📝 Towards Asynchronous Programming Workflows and Languages

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-11

In my mind, CPUs implement subroutines, and, "functions" are but artificial constructs built on top of subroutines. Here are some more attempts to explain this hardware-centric view (see, also, the playlist of short videos in the first article).

📝 De-Spaghettifying Control Flow

📝 Towards Asynchronous Programming Workflows and Languages

🗨️ Robin Heggelund Hansen:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-17

I'm working on a language called Gløgg, which is a fully declarative, relational language where the source code is stored in a sqlite3 database as AST.

I now just got vite support and (proof of concept) dom integration working.

I'll be doing a whole presentation on Gløgg at the upcoming JavaZone conference (september 3-4).

🎥 glogg

🗨️ Scott: 📝 The System Inside the System

I've been thinking about the Viable System Model as a framework for AI agents since I came across it, mentioned it here actually: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1748381760844169

Finally put together some rubygems to explore it - vsm the framework and airb a CLI-based agent built with it and wrote up some more detailed thoughts about them on my newsletter:

📝 The System Inside the System

Announcing two new Ruby gems: vsm and airb

The System Inside the System

DevLog Together

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 🛸 A moldable Common Lisp object inspector based on CLOG

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-11

I finally implemented dataflow-based reactive views for my moldable inspector for Common Lisp. It's much shorter than the limited input handling I had before, and also more versatile. I am working on a demonstration/example, stay tuned...

There seem to be two widely used dataflow implementations for Common Lisp, out of which I picked the simple one (https://github.com/kchanqvq/lwcells) over the complex one (https://github.com/kennytilton/cells).

In the process, I ran into my first experience with ambiguities in the Common Lisp specification, with one of my new indirect dependencies.

clog-moldabl-inspector

Thinking Together

🗨️ Joel Neely:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-17

The clean way that the if/fi and do/od constructs embraced non-determinism still looks cleaner to me than the contemporary toolkits of various mainstream languages and frameworks.

Linking Together

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-11

Let's have a discussion that'll hopefully generate lots of links.

Microsoft have just placed GitHub under AI in their org chart.

If I don't want to stick around and find out what fresh hell comes next, where should I go instead? Gitlab? Codeberg? Sourceforge? Send me links to your favourite social network for git repos!

🗨️ Bill Mill:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-13

a semi-related opinion that I don’t want to clutter that thread with:

self-hosting is awful* and there’s a big opportunity to develop structures for community-hosting things like git forges, chat servers, &c. Spread the load and develop social experience for sharing resources

*: too much work for too little use, too expensive, nobody wants to be on the hook all the time for maintenance so it rots

🗨️ Chris Knott:

I thought I would hate this paper (Hierarchical File Systems Are Dead) because I actually zealously love the hierarchical directory metaphor and hate the modern broth of files approach. In fact it is basically neutral on the user facing metaphor, recognises the necessity of replicating posix if anything will ever get traction, and is overall very good.

More like - how do we reify semantic search and tagging to the lowest level of the OS

📄 Hierarchical File Systems are Dead

AI

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy: 📝 Trying out "GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning"

🧑‍🔬 Trying out "GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning"

I completed a toy setup of GEPA with some fricken good results! I am very happy to have a methodology that removes some of the guess work with prompt design. Its a really simple algorithm that orchestrates a genetic evolution where the mutation operator is asking a LLM to improve the prompt based on the diagnostic trace your evals. So simple! I also enabled websearch during reflection so it can actually do its research when improving the prompt. This means it would adapt the web documentation to suit the prompt format automatically. Very good, been looking for something like this and it did not disappoint.

Present Company

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-06

We still have nobody offering to demo this month at the weirdly timed meetup (North American Tuesday Evening, or NATE). If nobody volunteers I'll have to get weird with the format. We need your help to make sure that doesn't happen: 👉 Call Now 👈

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/08 Week 2

2025-08-10 22:54

🔌 Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture 🎥 Virtual Meetup 13 • July 2025 🧑‍🔬 Notes from the Lab

Share Your Work

🗨️ guitarvydas:

reading When Leggett post caused me to write this article

🗨️ Marcin Ignac: 🔌 Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture: a technical case study

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-09

We have just published an in depth case study about our last generative (non genAI) art installation. All JS + WebGL baby! Check it out Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture: a technical case study. · Variable - new ways of experiencing data | https://variable.io

We used web technologies to power the Spirit Plant installation visuals in real-time.

Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture: a technical case study. · Variable - new ways of experiencing data | https://variable.io

DevLog Together

🗨️ Christopher Shank: 🧑‍🔬 Notes from the Lab - June & July 2025

Latest notes about what we've been working on with the folkjs project. Explorations include DOM sync, Desktop Interlay via Accessibility Trees, DOM interactions and instruments, HTML pipes, HTML attributes for syntax highlighting, LSPs, and reordering lists, and much more!

Notes from the Lab - June & July 2025

Thinking Together

🗨️ Joel Neely:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-09

I hadn’t thought about your before-and-after interpretation in quite that way. I’ll have to ponder a bit.
Regarding your reference to determinism, only some constructions in EWD’s wp-based notation are deterministic! While some cases (e.g. x := x-y) are, EWD’s reasoning makes some kinds of determinism a not-very-interesting special case. The “Aha!” moment for me was his solution for max in c := a max b.

if  
   a >= b -> c := a  
[]  
   b >= a -> c :- b  
fi

In the (again, uninteresting) special case that a = b, both guards are true it is perfectly valid to “perform” either of the two guarded commands.

Linking Together

🗨️ Jasmine Otto: 🕹️ too many gamedevs and only one game

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-04

ahaha, multiplayer bitsy in the wild at A MAZE (using MouseMux)

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-08-06

Prof Eric Hehner's April 2025 article on interpreting the Halting Problem:
https://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hehner/Boxes.pdf

📷 image.png

AI

🗨️ Jason Morris:

Happy GPT-5 day to those who celebrate. I got to play with it at work a bit, and it is impressive. I think having the AI generate symbolic representations of facts in text is going to be a lot more feasible going forward, which is going to be a game changer for people who can figure out how to use it.

Present Company

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 🎥 Virtual Meetup 13 • July 2025

Here's the video from last week's virtual meetup.

Virtual Meetup 13 • July 2025

🗨️ Ivan Reese: