This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

Vision, at last

September 20, 2026

In my last post, I talked about the fun of making native macOS apps with AI agents. I have made a few macOS apps before, all on my own, but I found the process very taxing; I simply don’t know the idiom. But, I love a good, simple, fast desktop app! So this new power has been very exciting.

And, it has made me think: one could, at last, acquire a stupid, brilliant, dorky, glo­rious Vision Pro … and escape the trap of “there are no inter­esting apps, because there aren’t enough users, because there are no inter­esting apps” … by simply making one’s own. I am 100% sure the AI agents would bang this out. The process would be more “collaborative” (cybernetic scare quotes) because the AI agents would have a tough time “seeing” what was hap­pening in the app. But … good! That’s a better process, anyway.

I imagine adding a third app to my custom note­taking col­lection, a labyrinth of ideas to explore in 3D … 

I am not really going to do this. I don’t need more gear, or more notes apps, for that matter. Maybe, MAYBE, if Apple dis­con­tinued the Vision Pro, and if it there­fore became a strange, high-tech relic, for­ever ahead of its time … a 2020s DeLorean, the better to build a time machine … maybe then.

But prob­ably not.

Probably.

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