Get Maggie Appleton on Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Get Maggie Appleton on Syntax

The Case for This Conversation

Maggie Appleton works at GitHub Next, building experiments around how developers use AI. Before that, she was the founding product designer at Elicit and spent years making programming concepts easier to understand through her illustrations at egghead. She brings both a developer’s experience of using these tools and a designer’s instinct to question how they should work. (maggieappleton.com)

There’s already a connection with Syntax. In episode #249, Scott praised Maggie’s illustrations and her writing about digital gardens while discussing his own personal website. Bringing her on would be a chance to pick up that conversation and explore how her thinking has developed since. (Syntax)

Her talk, One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment, gives them plenty to discuss. Maggie argues that coding agents are built around making one person faster, while software still requires a team to agree on what they’re building and why. More generated code can mean more duplicated work, more review, and decisions that teammates only discover after something has been built. (maggieappleton.com)

She’s also helping build Ace, a research prototype where teammates and coding agents work together in a shared workspace. That gives Scott and Wes something concrete to dig into: what works, what doesn’t, and which parts of the development process need rethinking. (maggieappleton.com)

The conversation could go beyond coding speed. How do you keep your team involved when an agent can finish a feature before anyone has discussed it? What should developers still learn to do themselves? And how do we use the time AI saves to make software we’re actually proud of?