Monday Links

Robin Sloan in 2020’s An app can be a home-cooked meal:

When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen. I can report to you: not only is this different activity rewarding in almost exactly the same way that cooking for someone you love is rewarding, there’s another feeling, too, specific to this realm. I have struggled to find words for this, but/and I think it might be the crux of the whole thing:

This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?

Is it simply … the feeling of being home?

Robin Sloan in 2026’s Ask for what you want:

What’s changed between 2020 and today? Oh, just the entire process and practice of computer programming. Here, right up front, I decree: building a personal app with the help of AI agents still totally counts as “home cooking”. You’re no longer grinding the flour by hand; fine. This is a cool development. You do still have to make the meal taste good, and this still requires care and effort. Fine.