The Curious Engineer

All blogs / AI / ML

Maggie Appleton

maggieappleton.com

Maggie Appleton's digital garden of visual essays, notes, and patterns about programming, design, anthropology, and software.

AI / MLSoftware / engineering practiceEssays / personal

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
142 from 20 Jan 2019 to 14 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://maggieappleton.com/rss.xml

2026 6

  1. Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
  2. August 2026
  3. In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors
  4. One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
  5. Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale
  6. January 2026

2025 14

  1. A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment
  2. Vibe Code is Legacy Code
  3. May 2025
  4. Statistically, When Will My Baby Be Born?
  5. ChatGPT Would be a Decent Policy Advisor
  6. March 2025
  7. Humanity's Last Exam
  8. DeepSeek
  9. Common Misconceptions in AI
  10. Undetected AI Exam Answers
  11. Unbaited
  12. Smidgeons
  13. How to Import Academic Papers from Zotero into Tana
  14. Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks

2024 11

  1. December 2024
  2. Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh
  3. Leaving Elicit
  4. July 2024
  5. Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
  6. Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History
  7. On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
  8. Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis
  9. A Collection of Design Engineers
  10. Gathering Structures
  11. Speculative Calendar Events

2023 11

  1. Ambient Co-presence
  2. Historical Trails
  3. December 2023
  4. September 2023
  5. Squish Meets Structure
  6. Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots
  7. June 2023
  8. The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
  9. Computational Notebooks
  10. Teenage Skeuomorphic Desktop Designs
  11. Reverse Outlining with Language Models

2022 15

  1. The Dark Forest and Generative AI
  2. Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI
  3. Command K Bars
  4. November 2022
  5. Programming Portals
  6. Folk Interfaces
  7. Joining Ought
  8. July 2022
  9. The Block-Paved Path to Structured Data
  10. Daily Notes Pages
  11. A Picture Worth a Thousand Programmes
  12. Programmable Notes
  13. Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups
  14. Spatial Web Browsing
  15. Assumed Audiences

2021 18

  1. The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays
  2. Epistemic Disclosure
  3. Metaphors We Web By
  4. Algorithmic Transparency
  5. October 2021
  6. Plebeian Programming with Keyboard Maestro
  7. The Cultural Anthropology of React
  8. August 2021
  9. Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
  10. Paleolithic Nostalgia
  11. Natureculture, Moral Purity, and Cultural Boundaries
  12. The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps
  13. Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks
  14. The Echo & Narcissus Writing Club
  15. Pink, Soft, Glittering Developers
  16. Fetishism & Mechanical Keyboards
  17. Making Programming Visual, Spatial, and Learnable
  18. Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams

2020 48

  1. Organic, Local, Artisan Data Storage
  2. Positioning Elements & Scrollytelling in CSS
  3. Painting Roam Research with Custom CSS
  4. A Digital Anthropology Reading List
  5. The Eponymous Laws of Programming
  6. A History of Cyborgs
  7. Neologisms
  8. A Brief Introduction to Digital Anthropology
  9. GreenSock Animations with React Hooks
  10. Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
  11. The Bare Essentials of Greensock
  12. September 2020
  13. Illustrating Gatsby's Key Concepts
  14. Why You Own an iPad and Still Can't Draw
  15. Problematic Proteins
  16. New Harvest & Illustrating the Cultivated Meat Podcast
  17. The Gift Economy
  18. Synecdoche: Drawing the Part for the Whole
  19. A Meta-Tour of This Site
  20. Douglas, Dirt, and Matter Out of Place
  21. The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu
  22. Growing the Evergreens
  23. The Knowledge Hydrant
  24. Frequently Asked Questions
  25. A Naïve Exploration of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
  26. Silent Synchronous Reading Sessions
  27. What the Fork is React Suspense?
  28. Visually Workshopping the AWS Cloud
  29. Are Data Unions the Future of Data?
  30. A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
  31. Pattern Languages in Programming and Interface Design
  32. A Metaphorical Reading Collection
  33. Tending Evergreen Notes in Roam Research
  34. Fixing Common Git Mistakes
  35. What App is That?
  36. Tracking Humanity
  37. A Short History of Bi-Directional Links
  38. The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web
  39. Drawing the Invisible: React Explained in Five Visual Metaphors
  40. A Chat with Henry Zhu on OSS & Gift Economies
  41. Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes
  42. How to Become a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg
  43. Defend Your Cookies with Essential Web Security Tactics
  44. How to Draw Invisible Programming Concepts: Part I
  45. What the Fork is xState?
  46. A Journey into Vue-Router
  47. What the Fork is Rust?
  48. The Art and Craft of Gatsby Themes

2019 19

  1. JavaScript Bits You Skipped the First Time Around
  2. Meat Planet: The Illustrated Notes
  3. Building Custom React Hooks
  4. Immutable Data with Immer and Personal Assistant Bots
  5. Speaking the GraphQL Query Language
  6. The Best Illustration Books and Courses
  7. A Fresh Serving of JavaScript ES2019
  8. The JAMStack, Gatsby & Contentful
  9. Instachatting with Vue & Socket.io
  10. Building VR Apps with React360
  11. Testing Apps with Cypress
  12. How Are Compilers & Transpilers Different?
  13. Meet the Robowaiter APIs Serving Us Data
  14. A Shelfish Starter Guide to Databases
  15. A Fruitful Guide to JavaScript's Comparison Operators
  16. What the Fork is Babel?
  17. JSX is a Lovechild
  18. What the Fork is the React Virtual DOM
  19. JavaScript's ...spread Operator