Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

> "The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it should be the other way around."

I already have objections: User and businesses overwhelmingly voted with their wallets that they want appliances. The big evil megacorps didn't convince them of this - Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it. The Nintendo Switch sold 152 million units, the malleable Steam Deck hasn't broken 6.

Software that isn't malleable is easier to develop, easier to train for, easier to answer support questions for, and frequently cheaper. Most users find training for what's off-the-shelf already difficult - customizing it is something that only a few percent would even consider, let alone do. Pity the IT Department that then has to answer questions about their customizations when they go wrong - user customizations can easily become their own kind of "shadow IT."

The send off is also not reassuring:

> "When the people living or working in a space gradually evolve their tools to meet their needs, the result is a special kind of quality. While malleable software may lack the design consistency of artifacts crafted behind closed doors in Palo Alto, we find that over time it develops the kind of charm of an old house. It bears witness to past uses and carries traces of its past decisions, even as it evolves to meet the needs of the day."

If you think this is okay, we've already lost. People simply will not go back to clunky software of the 2000s, regardless of the malleability or usability.

For something as complex as software, it's sad, but it's almost... okay? Every industry has gone through this; there was a time when cars were experimental and hand-assembled. Imagine if Henry Ford in the 1920s had focused on democratizing car parts so anyone can build their own car with thousands of potential combinations; I don't think it would have worked out. It is still true that you can, technically speaking, build your own car; but nobody pretends that we can turn everyone into personalized car builders if we just try hard enough.

On that note, Robin Sloan has a beautiful post about software as a home cooked meal…

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

That said, I think talking about cars may be stronger ground for the argument you’re making. Mass production is incredible at making cheap uniform goods. This applies even more in software, where marginal costs are so low.

The point of our essay, though, is that the uniformity of mass produced goods can hinder people when there’s no ability to tweak or customize at all. I’m not a car guy, but it seems like cars have reasonably modular parts you can replace (like the tires) and I believe some people do deeper aftermarket mods as well. In software, too often you can’t even make the tiniest change. It’s as if everyone had to agree on the same tires, and you needed to ask the original manufacturer to change the tires for you!

Already with AI we are seeing a huge uptick in people's expectations that agents operate across apps. The app is losing its monopoly of power, is losing its primacy as the thing the user touches. See How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet which is an article about a lot of factors, many more Conway's Law & corporate fiefdom oriented, but which touches repeatedly in the need to thread experiences across applications, across domains, and where the historal "there's an app for that" paradigm is giving way, is insufficient. https://www.mihaileric.com/posts/how-alexa-dropped-the-ball-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40659281

AI again is an interesting change agent in other ways. As well as scripting & MCP'ing existing tools/apps, the ability to rapidly craft experiences is changing so quickly. Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers talks so directly to how this could enable vastly more people to be crafting their own experiences. I expect that over time frameworks/libraries themselves adapt, that the matter of computing shifts from targeting expert developer communities who use extensive community knowledge to do their craft, to forms that are deliberately de-esotericized, crafted in even more explicit compositional manners that are more directly malleable, because ai will be better at building systems with more overt declarative pieces. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029

Right now the change is symbolic more than practical, but I also loved seeing Apple's new Liquid Glass design system yesterday, in part because it so clearly advances what Material set out to do: constructs software of multiple different layers, with the content itself being the primary app surface. And in Liquid Glass's case extending that app surface even further, making it practically full screen always, with tools and UI merely refractive layers above the content. This de-emphasizes the compute, makes makes the content the main thing, by removing the boxes and frames of encirclement that once defined the app's space, giving way to pure content, making the buttons mere layers floating above, portals of function floating above, the content below. In practice it's not substantially different than what came before, yet, but it feels like the tools are more incidental, a happenstance layer of options above the content, and is suggestive to me that the tools could change or swap. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226612

There's such a long arch here. And there's so many reasons why companies love and enjoy having total power over their domain, why they want to be the sole arbiter of experience, with no one else having any say. We've seen collapses of interesting bold intertwingular era API-hype hopeful projects, like Spotify desktop shutting down the amazing incredible JavaScript Apps SDK so long ago (2011-2014). https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/rip-spotify-apps-rip-sound...

Folks love to say that this is what the market wants, that there is convenience and freedom in not having any choices, in not having to compose tools, in everything being provided whole and unchanging. I'd love to test that thesis, but I don't think we have evidence now: 99.999%+ of software is built in the totalistic form, tablets carved and passed down to mankind for us to use as directed (or risk anti-circumvention felony charges!). We haven't really been running the experiments to see what would be good for the world, what would make us a better happier more successful world. Whose going to foot the bill, whose going to abandon control over their users?

And it's not something you can do alone. The really malleable software revolution requires not individual changes, individual apps adding plugins or scripting. The real malleable software shift is when the whole experience is built to be malleable. The general systems research for operating systems to host not just applications, but to host views and tools and data flow, history event sourcing and transactions (perhaps). No one piece of software can ever adequately be malleable software on its own: real malleable software requires malleable paradigms of computing, upon which experiences, objects, tools compose.

It all sounds so far off and far fetched. But where we are now is a computing trap, one posited around a philosophy of singularness and unconnectedness delivered down to us users/consumers (a power relationship few want to change!). The limitations of the desktop application model, as it's related and been morphosed into mobile apps, into watch apps, feels like an ever more cumbersome limit, a gate on what is possible. I feel the dual strongly: I'm with those pessimists saying the malleable software world is impossible, that we can never make the shift, I cannot see how it ever could become, and yet I don't think we can stay here forever, I think the limitations are too great, and the opportunity for a better opener computing to awaken is too interesting and too powerful for that possibility to lie slumbering forever. I want to believe the future is exciting, in good ways, in re-opening ways, and although I can hardly see who would fund better or why, and although the challenge is enormous, the project or rebuilding mankind's agency within the technological society feels obligatory necessary & inevitable, and my soul soars at the prospect. Malleable software: thus we all voyage towards computing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118159

but which didn't seem to get much traction is:

https://pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/

but it pretty much only works for JavaScript programmers and their friends (or folks interested in learning JavaScript).

Other tools which I'd like to put forward as meriting discussion in this context include:

- LyX --- making new layout files allows a user to create a customized tool for pretty much any sort of document they might wish to work on --- a front-end for LaTeX

- pyspread --- every cell being either a Python program or the output of a program, and the possibility of cells being an image allows one to do pretty much anything without the overhead of making or reading a file

- Ipe https://ipe.otfried.org/ --- an extensible drawing program, this really needs a simpler mechanism for that and I'd love to see a tool in the vector drawing space which addressed that --- perhaps the nascent https://graphite.rs/ ?