TI-83 BASIC while bored in class, iykyk Fun story: I made a prank calculator that gives subtly wrong answers, to install on my friends’ calculators… and then accidentally used it myself for a chemistry test

in my experience, agent skills can totally remain relevant over time / across model generations, *as long as they are more spec than step-by-step instructions* eg: specifying a good format for a doc output, a good flow for interviewing a human

Did a podcast interview organized by some awesome Stanford researchers! Among other things, discussed one of my favorite topics: once code is free to write, what are the infrastructure changes that need to happen to take full advantage of that democratization?

Notion runs one of the largest CRDT deployments in production, processing millions of operations every minute! We wrote about the data structures we adopted from CRDT research to make our text editor more collaborative, and how we built on those concepts to fit our block-based data model.

the best part of this launch is that this api is 100% compliant with the agent skills spec these skills are not just markdown! you can put code, reference files, images, spreadsheets, and anything else that might tailor your agents better for their task. ...which means that notion now has a new folder primitive that you can use to manage your accompanying files. this will hopefully be a useful new feature for you that you can use for skills and so much more!

# the document editor is the next IDE I've talked to a lot of non-engineers about AI skills recently, and it's *fascinating* hearing their perspective. A document with a prompt is now a unit of executable software! Just flip a bit. No need to go through an App Store. Just share the document and you're sharing the program. But then as people get deeper into using skills with their team, for real, they start hitting all the problems of, well... sharing executable software! Wait, how do we know the thing still works? How do we collaborate and make suggestions without messing up the running version? How do we discover useful existing modules? Who controls what ships? If you squint, these are classic software engineering concerns!! But emerging in a totally new medium... What excites me about the current moment is that we get a chance to reinvent tools for solving these problems, but without the baggage of professional software engineering workflows. That's why it's so interesting working at @NotionHQ right now. Working on collaborative document editors is a way to define the programming experience for a huge group of people. Today many of our users have already started using Notion to edit their skills and access them in all their agents. Now our goal is to follow our users deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, giving ever more powerful tools for sharing and improving skills. Because a document is a program now :D p.s. this also relates to a great 2010 academic paper which coins the term "end-user software engineering". In a nutshell, end-user programmers using tools like spreadsheets end up hitting all the classic needs of Software Engineering, and we can invent new tools to help them out!

Write agent skills in Notion, then install them into your coding agent with the skills CLI. No Git repository required. $ 𝚗𝚙𝚡 𝚜𝚔𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚜 𝚊𝚍𝚍 <𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗-𝚞𝚛𝚕>

heads up, skills aren't just for engineers anymore! everyone is using skills, and the whole team needs a place to collaborate on them. not a code hosting platform. some place a bit more familiar.....

IMO the essential difficulty of malleable software now boils down to “fork maintenance”. Let’s unpack that a bit. If you want to make your own custom tools or fork existing OSS, the cost of that is headed to zero. But… often we don’t want to start from scratch! We want to remix tools others have created. We want someone else to help us maintain stuff. We want to combine our ideas with others’. Now the moment you have multiple parties both updating the software… you hit gnarly problems! In a nutshell: happens if I modded something and it no longer meshes well with the latest updates from you? This is “fork maintenance”. (Traditionally this would be a centralized model where a “dev” is maintaining the software and you, the “user” might adjust settings or patch things. But even in a more decentralized setting we want to jam with our peers on our tools.) A classic approach here is to expose a stable plugin SDK. Works great because the dev can keep the surface maintained and plugins hopefully compose reasonably…. But only works as long as the plugin surface has what you need. Sometimes you end up hitting walls. If it’s OSS you can also literally fork. Maintaining a fork and merging edits from others is a huge pain. But maybe with enough smart cheap LLMs this is more viable now. You also need to consider data, not just code. Schema migrations are already a pain in the ass with normal software; when every user is doing customizations things get extra gnarly. I don’t think that there’s a perfect solution to this yet. Ideally I’d want something much deeper and broader than a typical plugin API - eg a language or framework designed for layered additive modification (think Harel’s behavioral programming as one reference.) I find it quite poetic that collaboration and working with others is where malleability gets really good but also where it gets hard. Same as many other things in life! For more on this, we go into quite some depth on this topic here:

I don't like that new tools are elevating a disengaged way of creating, like a boss who's too busy to care ("Just text your bot while out for a jog"). That we can do this now is amazing! But great work happens with our hands in the clay. The same tools can let us get deeper in.