Welcome to puzzlespace

There are apps as home-cooked meals, and there are apps as per­sonal scaffolding, and lately I’ve been noticing just how many I have, how much I’ve built.

I print the ship­ping labels for zine orders with a Ruby script. I manage the details of the olive oil company’s annual sub­scrip­tion pro­gram with a Ruby script. I dis­tribute app noti­fi­ca­tions to my family with a Ruby script. I run my life on Yuk­i­hiro Matsumoto’s creation!!

It’s not that I have taken this prac­tice for granted … more that it has just seemed so natural, for so many years. But/and it’s inter­esting to step back and rec­og­nize how cool it is — how lit­er­ally empowering — that I can address prob­lems directly with code. They’re not even “prob­lems”; I roll my eyes at the lan­guage of product development, of “solving prob­lems”; that’s almost never (!) what soft­ware does. These are instead … puzzles? Opportunities. Niches! Inter­esting spaces.

I don’t know to what degree AI-built apps are a sub­sti­tute for per­sonal pro­gramming, but we’ll find out soon, because a lot of people are presently map­ping the space between one-off demo and load-bearing infrastructure. It’s totally pos­sible that AI can help in both regimes. I’m opti­mistic about the poten­tial for more people to expe­ri­ence this sense of autonomy and creativity — this pat­tern of encoun­tering a problem, or a puzzle, or what­ever it is, and thinking almost without hesitation, “What can I build for this?”