Scott 🕰️ 2026-01-05 18:16:31 It's been really interesting to me that we still haven't seen multi-agent systems take off, even with how powerful a single agent system like Claude Code is, and it's got me thinking that we might be dealing with something different and need a new programming/computing environment to explore it...
So...I've been playing around with this idea of taking some of the core original ideas of OO/Smalltalk (Objects as self contained computers that pass messages with binding at late as possible) and seeing what we could do if we added an LLM in there...and have landed on this concept of "Prompt-Objects" that are self-contained computers (essentially what people call agents) that have plaintext instructions, have access to tools as primitives, and run in a loop with an LLM, can pass messages to each other (or to humans) in natural language, and basically no binding (or essentially semantic late binding(?)).
So far I've got a simple environment set up where you can interact with these prompt objects, create new ones, and trace their communication with each other...but I'm curious if anyone else has gone down this line or thinking or gives you any ideas? I recently rewatched Kay's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" and have been toying around with other biological inspired ideas like environmental/pheromone-style signaling...but that's down the line
I played around with it a bit this weekend and it might just be me, but it's actually been kind of easier to think of different "agentic" flows by not really thinking of them as "agents" and thinking of them as "prompt objects" that you build a program with...
Scott 2026-01-16 16:32:31 I've kept on pulling on this thread, and am going to give a talk+demo for the Latent Space discord today at 4pm eastern for anyone curious to see it in action... here's the latest screenshot of one of the prompt objects realizing it needs a new capability, checking what's available in the stdlib, giving itself that functionality, and then using it to accomplish a task:
Orion Reed 2026-01-13 09:30:00 I am 5 minutes into Verbs vs Nouns: The Word Order That Shaped User Interfaces and enjoying it quite a bit, especially excited that the channel has a dozen videos which seem super high quality with only a few hundred views so I'm excited to have a new source of FoC-adjacent video essays which are sadly very rare.
EDIT: huh the author follows me on Twitter maybe he is in this Slack?
Jasmine Otto 2026-01-13 20:32:08
why AI is reviving the command line in probabilistic form
I love this hot take! I can highly recommend Shneiderman & Maes 1997, "Direct manipulation vs. interface agents" as an introduction to the mixed-initiative creativity support literature.
dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/267505.267514
Jack Rusher 2026-01-13 21:31:28 Personal note: Pattie Maes was one of the first two people (along with co-author Rod Brooks) to send me a paper via email request in the 80s. Very different times… 😊
Mariano Guerra 2026-01-16 13:33:15 corca.app
People still do math on paper.
We believe there is a better way.
We are building a
> fast, intuitive
>
> math editor
Konrad Hinsen 2026-01-18 13:00:29 From a first look (reading the description - I didn't sign up for an account because I am not yet motivated enough to go through the terms of service and privacy policy), this looks promising. The overall approach to typing math looks good. The current state looks good enough for standard math usage, as e.g. in engineering. The announced future extensions should make it good enough for most of the natural sciences as well. But I am not sure that professional mathematicians will ever be happy with this tool. They often make up notation on the spot, so they really need a drawing tool, not a text tool on steroids.
Ivan Reese 2026-01-16 19:53:06 Eli Mellen 2026-01-16 19:54:31 Slightly different theories behind them, but interesting to see folks doing different kinda console snapped things.
Ivan Reese 2026-01-16 20:20:20 Yeah — that Lego thing seems really interesting. (Shout out to Scott Anderson for posting a bunch of interesting links about it on Bluesky)
Scott Anderson 2026-01-16 20:28:22 Yes, looking at the sets they released they're underwhelming compared to what some of the demos showed
Scott Anderson 2026-01-16 20:31:34 I think that was the complaint about the initial release. In the demos they showed what looked like composable tags, but the star wars sets come with limited tags in terms of number of tags (I think the x-wing has one) and functionality, hardcoded to "act like an xwing" or "act like a tie fighter", which adds a lot of baked in assumptions and limits creativity
Marek Rogalski 2026-01-16 21:03:58 When the original Microsoft Surface (the table - not the tablet) came out it cost $10k. Now you can have one for $500. Pretty incredible.
Marek Rogalski 2026-01-16 21:05:17 (I mean that the Board is like the old Microsoft Surface - the original units are probably still quite expensive 😛)
Ivan Reese 2026-01-16 21:38:40 Yeah… 1024 × 768 — I remember that detail more than anything else. I had an original iPad, which was also 1024 × 768, when I first got to use one of these things, and it was striking to compare them. "This thing is the size of a table, and the pixels are the size of gravel. That thing is the size of a book, but I can also lay it flat on a table and have many of the same experiences."
Kartik Agaram 2026-01-18 18:50:37 Ivan Reese 2026-01-18 18:56:33 Ooooh! I read / skimmed the first half and then went "cool, i'm good" but this is the kick I need to go back and get through it all!
