Top all-time · #990
Geoffrey Litt
Personal blog · geoffreylitt.comprogrammingai
Geoffrey Litt's personal blog at geoffreylitt.com covers programming and ai. Since 2013, 66 different Hacker News readers have linked it 111 times, most often “Malleable software in the age of LLMs (2023)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (29) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Geoffrey Litt's blog for his work on malleable and home-cooked software, his thinking on AI HUDs versus copilots, and projects like Wildcard that turn spreadsheets into web views.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called the AI HUD reframing a great idea and the Wildcard project amazing; suggested browsing his work; listed among favourite blogs.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 29 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Malleable software in the age of LLMs (2023)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-03-27
- Wildcard: Customize HN using a spreadsheet view (2020)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-02-17
- Understanding Is the New Bottleneck6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-07-02
- AI generated tools can make programming more fun4 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-12-25
- Malleable Software in the Age of LLMs (2023)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-05-18
- Margin Notes: Automatic documentation with recorded examples from runtime (2018)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-09-07
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-05
- Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-27
- Avoid the Nightmare Bicycle3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-03
- Tweet threads cured my writer's block: Twitter as a medium for sketching3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-21
What Hacker News says?
This feels very related to the larger research project of “malleable software” that lets everyday people modify and author the software they use for their own needs: https://malleable.systems/ My friend Geoffrey Litt is heading the malleable software group at Ink and Switch: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/
Comment linking /
on “An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)”Submitted Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs as a story · 979 points
HN discussionHere are a bunch of things I use LLMs for relating to code. - Running micro-benchmarks (using Python in Code Interpreter) - if I have a question about which of two approaches is faster I often use this pattern: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/12/code-interpreter/ - Building small ad-hoc one-off tools. Many of the examples in https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/21/claude-artifacts/ fit that bill, and I have a bunch…
Comment linking /2024/12/22/making-programming-more-fun-with-an-ai-generated-debugger.html
on “Things we learned about LLMs in 2024”Submitted A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs as a story · 800 points
HN discussionI want a link to the GitHub for this[0] which he linked to. Makes Prolog quite interesting. [0]: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2024/12/22/making-programming-m...
Comment linking /2024/12/22/making-programming-more-fun-with-an-ai-generated-debugger
on “Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs”Submitted Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019) as a story · 596 points
HN discussionYes, there is value in memorizing things, as things in our memory are easier to work with for thinking than things we have to go out, search for, access, and then get into our memory. See for example Barbara Oakley's discussion on mathematical fluency: nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to-become-fluent-in-math-rp Or Feynman on the need for mathematical fluency to do physics: > What we have to do is…
Comment linking /margin-notes/
on “Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer”Submitted Bring Your Own Client as a story · 533 points
HN discussionCould one be able to upscale the video with a GAN like the following example? https://www.geoffreylitt.com/images/article_images/enhance/g...
Comment linking /images/article_images/enhance/gan-training.gif?1605540962
on “Atomic resolution video of salt crystals forming in real time”Submitted Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications as a story · 400 points
HN discussion> a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc. Here's an interesting toy-project where someone hooked up agents to calendars, weather, etc and made a little game interface for it. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-...
Comment linking /2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-ai-assistant-with-one-sqlite-table-and-a-handful-of-cron-jobs
on “How I program with agents”Submitted Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software as a story · 320 points
HN discussionPost author here! I wrote this post five years ago. Since then, my conviction in the value of customizable software has only grown, but I've also updated my thinking in a few ways: 1) AI AI is rapidly getting better at coding. Current AI is often bad at high-level architecture but is capable of making small local tweaks. Seems like a good fit for the kind of code you need to write a browser extension! I'm exploring…
Comment linking /2023/03/25/llm-end-user-programming
on “Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)”Submitted Code like a surgeon as a story · 285 points
HN discussionThere's a research project at MIT trying to do this - https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/salon2020/
Comment linking /wildcard/salon2020/
on “Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages”Submitted Wildcard: Customize HN using a spreadsheet view (2020) as a story · 115 points
HN discussionStrongly agree with the original article, and it's fun to see all the niche use cases that people are mentioning here. But I have a major frustration with user scripts: writing them requires experience with Javascript and reverse engineering websites. This is fine for the HN crowd, but locks out most web users, who can't program at all. I bet that if it were slightly easier to develop user scripts, there'd be 10x as…
Comment linking /wildcard/salon2020/
on “Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant”Submitted Malleable Software in the Age of LLMs (2023) as a story · 90 points
HN discussionSomething I find intriguing about Foam is that it's mainly a recommendation for how to stitch together existing tools into a nice integrated workflow, rather than a new piece of software built from scratch. I wrote a blog post about this idea of "Software as Curation", and how we might imagine more software being built in this way: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2020/07/19/tools-over-apps-for-...
Comment linking /2020/07/19/tools-over-apps-for-personal-notetaking.html
on “Foam: A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode”Submitted Malleable software in the age of LLMs (2023) as a story · 87 points
HN discussion1) I am a big fan of the general philosophy of Solid. But as others have mentioned, I've found it extremely difficult to understand specifics of the proposal or to see concrete progress, based on publicly available resources. The best place I've found is Ruben Verborgh's blog (he's a researcher who's affiliated with Solid). For example here's a nice post which goes into more detail on the ideas behind Solid: https:/…
Comment linking /wildcard/
on “Solid Project: All of your data, under your control”Submitted Margin Notes: Automatic code documentation with recorded examples from runtime as a story · 81 points
HN discussionFor people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces
Comment linking /
on “Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers”Submitted Building Waze for the Boston subway: my first adventure in civic hacking as a story · 81 points
HN discussionIf you're looking for more concrete details on what it's actually like to make things at Dynamicland, I recommend this writeup by Omar Rizwan. (from 2018, so doesn't reflect recent progress, but it's still helpful for getting a feel for the place): https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/ I also wrote a short explanation of some little experiments I did there when I visited a couple years ago: https…
Comment linking /projects/dynamicland.html
on “Dynamicland”Submitted The Nightmare Bicycle as a story · 67 points
HN discussionAlso your two year old post, Malleable software in the age of LLMs, https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2023/03/25/llm-end-user-program...
Comment linking /2023/03/25/llm-end-user-programming.html
on “Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps”Submitted Tweet threads cured my writer's block: Twitter as a medium for sketching as a story · 43 points
HN discussionIs Notion a company making "AI coding software" these days? If you want to learn more about Geoffrey I suggest browsing through https://www.geoffreylitt.com/#projects - I've been following his work for a few years, "UI prototyper" is him under-selling himself.
Comment linking /
on “Code like a surgeon”Submitted Margin Notes: Automatic documentation with recorded examples from runtime (2018) as a story · 40 points
HN discussion
