Future of Coding Weekly

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🗨️ When Leggett: 📝 for Server User-Agents

https://its.whenthetimeca.me/p/for-server-user-agents

So I spent most of last week in Mountain View for the 41st Internet Identity Workshop. While I was there, I was advocating for something that I've been calling Server User-Agents, and I think they're a fundamental missing piece of architecture

This week I spent time putting my notes and conversations together and wrote a deep article about the concept, although it is still very early and intentionally a loose sort of spec. Its more a call for participation.

📝 for Server User-Agents

Notes from the 41st IIW

for Server User-Agents

🗨️ When Leggett:

I think its relevant to this community too, although maybe a little outside the center

🗨️ Eli:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-01

Here is a little work in progress snippet of a thing. It applies a heat map kinda color scheme to git diffs, the idea being that its rules can be tuned to call out places in the code that need closer attention when reviewing the diff. The rules are very much still a work in progress, and I'm super duper open to suggestions for ways to approach creating these rules.

Rambling video, be warned. I apologies for having the crunchiest, noisiest mouse wheel ever in the history of the recorded universe. Its like an ASMR halloween nightmare.

🎥 video

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Notebook kit ships with themes, so I can reuse them for the Lopebook. I think they look better than the original!

Happy about how they are implemented, they use CSS imports, which resolve through es-module-shims, so I can serve them locally, and fallback to network. This means the local file includes just the current theme, and you do a network fetch only when changing themes, keeping the bundle size small and local-first.
Also thanks to the magic of es-module-shims, the CSS is fetched directly from Github raw URLs, as I can switch the content-type to test/css programatically. es-module-shims is so powerful for local-first stuff.

🎥 styles

Linking Together

🗨️ Tommy Palmer: 📝 Everything Is Television

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-29

I’m a bit of a lurker here (can’t even remember if I did an intro post) but I thought people might like this 📝 Everything Is Television

A theory of culture and attention

🗨️ guitarvydas:

a bunch of links to various books about smalltalk, maybe of interest (to me, part 4 of the blue book is quite interesting)

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 🎥 PROG Rock: Listening to old Lisp code

PROG Rock: Listening to old Lisp code

🗨️ Jon Tran: 📝 Five Pillars of Pipe

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-29

Folks who came out to the SF meetup, and others besides, might find this new pseudo-rebirth of cohost as a bunch of federated websites intriguing. I certainly do.

Present Company

🗨️ Jon Tran:

The company I work for has an open role to work on a programming language for mechanical CAD. The project was originally inspired by sketch-n-sketch, where you can draw/edit in the scene and it updates the code, and vice versa. We're also working on integrating a constraint solver. The GUI, interpreter, and solver are open source. I'll put details in the thread.

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

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/10 Week 4

2025-10-26 23:16

🌳 Cope and Drag: DSL for gradually improving diagrams 📝 Simple Assembler and Simple CPUs First 🎥 ROONS! A new marble computer

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🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 Simple Assembler and Simple CPUs First

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-26

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Nearly got the new serialisation format complete. Its self serializing and its forking fast!
The new foundations have less coupling to Observable. You can store files in it and read them using web APIs like fetch, XHR, dynamic imports and script tags. This is enough to boot Observable up and also to serve all its network calls in the std library locally without any modification to the 1st party source. I am considering spinning the serialisation format out as a separate project as its quite generic but I feel that would be a distraction so I will not but essentially it provides a virtual web inside a single static file. A bit like service-workers but without additional files or a webserver dependancy

🎥 forking fast

Thinking Together

🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 Efficient Function Nesting

🗨️ Jonathan Frederickson:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-20

Folks, I'm looking for help finding a project that I ran across a while back that's adjacent to some of the visual-programming stuff we like here. It was a node-and-wire style infrastructure deployment tool, I think specifically for AWS, that would take care of setting up IAM rules for communication between components with wires connecting them.
I feel like I might have run across it either here, or while looking up something about the now-gone node-and-wire web interface for Canonical Juju.
Also starting to feel like I might have dreamt it up though!

Linking Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Wow this has feels.
https://observablehq.com/@jwolondon/making-plot-sketchy

📷 image.png

🗨️ daniel g. siegel: 📝 Anticipate

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-21

Here's a take on how AI could really benefit and augment our thinking by exploring how it can support reflection and decision making rather than make choices for us: https://www.bigideainitiative.org/ideas/anticipate

This was done by a collaborator of ours, Niklas Muhs.

Anticipate explores how AI can augment design thinking by uncovering hidden assumptions and navigating uncertainty, leading to more informed and creative decisions.

Anticipate

🗨️ Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-26

"Cope and Drag" mini language for gradually constraining/improving diagrams 🍰. See paper for details but as usual with PLT blog, the post gives good background.

They built this in context of formal methods, but I think the mixed approach of "user can drag nodes + partially automate via constraints" has wider applicability.

📷 bildo.png

🗨️ Daniel Garcia: 🎥 ROONS! A new marble computer

ROONS! A new marble computer

Present Company

🗨️ Maikel:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-24

Next wednesday 29th October is our monthly FoC meetup (see the announcement channel for details).. we still have 2 spots for demo's left, who dares on this special edition?👻

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

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/10 Week 3

2025-10-20 10:08

🧬 Literate tracing 🧵 Undetermined Weaving with Machines 📑 Early Interpreters

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🗨️ Mariano Guerra: 🎥 vibecard: todo app speedrun using macros

live coding a todo app faster than the previous one with the help of a new vibecard feature: macros

vibecard: todo app speedrun using macros

🗨️ Matt Curtis: 🌐 Matt Curtis

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-13

since I'm starting my search for fulltime roles I did something I've managed to avoid doing for years now and made a (dundun) personal website

also trying to make more things that are sort of... just for me, you know?

anyway, idk if any of you have used Astro before (it's sort of similar to Gatsby, if you're familiar with that) but I used it for this and it's pretty neat. near first-class support for turning markdown into pages and querying and sorting collections of markdown. really great if you're building a text-heavy site. plus you can pull in components from your UI framework of choice, like React or Vue.

also got to play with a few SVG/CSS animation features I've never had the chance to fully use in a production site

would love to get any thoughts the folks here have! i feel like personal sites are sort of becoming more rare (might be just me, though)

The personal site of Matt Curtis

Matt Curtis

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

One lame issue is Notebook 2.0, it does not support importing other Notebook 2.0s which kinda breaks my plan.
Upvote the feature request here https://github.com/observablehq/notebook-kit/issues/96 (they will do it and its a matter of when)

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-19

Now that FoC stands for "feeling of computing", I can share this — I recently built a new website for Automerge, along with the absurdly talented designer Todd Matthews. The site includes an interactive demo and a bunch of illustrations that attempt to give newcomers a sense of what Automerge does. Like, on one level, we say what it does quite directly with words. But I think it's good to also try to, like, show that somehow, even though it's occasionally a bit abstract.

It was a deeply rewarding challenge, coming up with visuals where every detail (dash patterns, directions of lines, use of shapes) had to be both pleasing to look at but also true to the meaning, and consistent with the other meanings.

You can take something technical — "everyone has their own copy of the data, changes queue, you sync with your peers, everything converges on a consistent state" — and put that into imagery.

Now, of course, I want to actually use the imagery to do the technical thing.

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Been thinking how Observable Notebook 2.0 format helps me. I conclude, that kind of transformation should NOT be in the low level. To run Notebook 2.0 you need compilers, but to run Lopecode the format is the low level raw JavaScript so Notebook 2.0 format puts specialised parsers/compilers in the loading path. Compilers and language choices should be in userspace, where they can be changed by the user. So I will revisit Notebook 2.0 when I have fixed the lower layer. I think it be neat as a userspace module.

So I return to where I left off. Bugs in importing from the net. I am redoing the foundational technology. I ditched importmaps and moved over to es-module-shims. It has allowed me to fix a problem that locally loaded models could not be deduped with network imported ones, which ends up causing semantic issues. importmaps are 1-way doors, es-module-shims gives you total control over import semantics at any point in time. Its a really amazing piece of software I recommend learning how it works. It has a C written Lezer parser doing the minimum parsing possible in the fastest possible way to read source code and swap "import" for "importShim" thus enclosing all import calls with a wrapper for customization.

Anyway, in the process I noticed defining the stdlib in the system space was also questionable because half those libs are broken (duckdb) and it takes up 50% of the system overheads for a large amount of extraneous code. Notebook 2.0 redid the stdlib => stdlib is subject to churn. So by a similar argument the stdlib definition should be in userspace too.

I spent a weekend on it and got surprisingly far. I can display some things, es-module-shim dedupuing seems to work and I added a userspace boot module that defines the stdlib and then loads the main module which I think its an improvement and allows the serialization format bootstrap process to be very small (26Kb). In that 26Kb you get a hot swapping reactive runtime and total control over ESM import semantics in a local-file.

📷 image.png

Thinking Together

🗨️ maf:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-15

Re adversarial interoperability - just figured out a fun approach. Most devices can share their screen over Miracast / AirPlay / something similar (last resort is HDMI cable). Most devices can also receive input from Bluetooth devices (alternatively, through USB cable). So as an alternative to accessibility APIs (or X11, or WinAPI input injection), one might set up another device that would spoof a Miracast display, a bluetooth mouse & a bluetooth keyboard. Such reflector could be implemented in a very cheap form factor (like a tiny ESP32) and allows another app on the original device to effectively bypass all access controls that the OS-es (especially mobile) impose.

It's not a security vulnerability per-se, since it requires the device owner to cooperate - just an interesting way to interop.

📷 shapes at 25-10-15 19.15.08.png

Linking Together

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-15

Literate tracing [pdf]

Augments Literate Programming with primitives for running a program on specific inputs and probing the values of specific variables after.

Augments the markup language with some way to define custom pictures. But I can't quite tell what the markup for that looks like.

📷 literate-tracing.png

🗨️ Kartik Agaram: 🎥 Micro Maker Series: Underdetermined Weaving with Machines