Designer, developer, teacher. Co-founder @Pathwright. Probably working on something new ꩜
Greenville, SC
Joined March 2007
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Mark Johnson retweeted
This might be the most beautiful thing I've read in my life. What a privilege to be alive in 2026.
ordinaryabundance.com
Mark Johnson retweeted
Because agents are automations, and creating automations is a business problem, not a consumer problem.
Hot take… isn’t it kinda crazy that nobody is really using AI Agents? I don’t mean software engineers or AI early adopters. I mean “college friends talking about it in group chat,” the feeling you got when everyone started using Instagram or TikTok.
These frontier AI models are *insane* (as are the harnesses & tool calls & the like). And every large tech co has an AI agents platform, not to mention all the YC startups doing vertical agents. Yet all of your friends and family outside of tech — who spend all day staring at their iPhones and get paid to work in browser tabs — don’t really care or find themselves using any AI agents yet.
Yes ChatGPT, Claude, etc. are extremely popular… but if you look at the engagement data the vast majority of people are still using these aI chat tools like a glorified Google + Grammarly. That’s why the AGI labs are all pushing desktop apps for Codex, Cowork, etc. so hard to non-technical ppl. And yes exceptions for lawyers and customer service but even those have some asterisks and exceptions to rule.
Look I’m not saying the ChatGPT moment for AI Agents is not coming… it most definitely is! Remember we pivoted from Arc to Dia precisely because we believe computing is going to be radically reimagined around these AI primitives. No doubt. But that’s my point: it’s just so surprising it hasn’t happened yet because all of the tech you’d need is there.
Again if you stop for a second and think about it… for all the press and money and hype and models and crazy ARR numbers… this “AI Agent” moment does not *feel* like the other breakthrough tech moments we’ve lived through (e.g. think the shift to Stories via Snapchat & Instagram, or shift to on-demand via Uber/Airbnb/Doordash).
Which is a long way of saying: if you can figure out the answer to “why” most people don’t care about AI agents yet (and have no enduring interest in using them) — especially since the models and harnesses are here and ready — the answer to that question will allow you to capture a lot of marketshare and make a lot of money in 2027.
Theoretically, the tech is ready for AI Agents to totally transform how we work and live our lives… but alas the general public dgaf… that’s the generational puzzle to solve for the next 12 months for anyone not working on the models themselves.
Mark Johnson retweeted
wrote a few thoughts about what we lose now that we don't write the code ourselves, and do we get our flow back
Mark Johnson retweeted
Levie’s Law of AI Psychosis:
The farther away you are from the actual work the more confident you are that humans are no longer needed
I like it
CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.
So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.
“Look I made this awesome product prototype”. Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues.
“Look I generated a contract”. Yes but you didn’t verify all the terms before it goes out to the counterparty and didn’t have to wire up all the past contracts to work with.
The best thing you can do as a CEO is to use AI a *ton* to figure out the real implications of agents in the enterprise, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work that goes into them.
Mark Johnson retweeted
Weird isn't just visual. Weird is whatever strays from the norm. Weird is relative to the current state of the world.
You can have weird principles. They should be things people can legitimately disagree with.
You have to remember Obsidian was very weird when it launched six years ago. Local files, malleability, backlinks, graph, even Markdown syntax... these were not as widely understood and accepted as they are today.
That's why I spent so much time writing essays like "File over app" to try and explain our choices. The goal was to describe why our weird ideas should be normal, and it worked!
Now the world has somewhat caught up and accepted those choices, so it's time to find the next frontier of weirdness.
Mark Johnson retweeted
You're not imagining things—the Greeks and Trojans really are at war.
• The rage you're sensing? It's real. It belongs to Achilles, and honestly, it's going to be a problem for *everyone*.
• Achilles's anger is not a metaphor—it's a body count.
So yeah—sing, Muse. 👀
Mark Johnson retweeted
A few things I've noticed as all devs write code with AI.
When you write foundational / architectural code of a new project by hand, you "feel" the code pushing back if your abstraction isn't right. You feel when something is harder than it should be. The code is telling you it's not in the right shape. Good engineers are sensitive to this.
When you're using an LLM, you keep pushing right through this in a way that feels like you're making progress, and it may even be directionally correct in a sense, but the underlying foundation of it all is actually bad in a way that either kills progress of the LLM later as it buckles under the complexity it has created or destroys your ability to maintain the code long term.
Related to this, I see a general restlessness with just sitting and thinking about a problem for a while.
As I've been working on a new library here at Laravel, there have been days where it feels like I mainly just stare at my screen thinking about something. When Claude Code is at your fingertips, it's tempting to just start yapping into the terminal and watching code come out the other end. Again, directionally correct in some ways, but often doesn't land on the elegant solution that is waiting to be discovered.
Mark Johnson retweeted
Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.
Mark Johnson retweeted
I really miss .swf (shockwave flash) as a format.
Literally a chain of bezier paths. Scale to any resolution. Oh, and it loads progressively with its own virtual machine (ActionScript Bytecode).
No modern filetype comes close. Vector video was a special era.
Mark Johnson retweeted
Products with extensive/rich UIs lots of sliders, switches, menus, with no scripting support, and built on opaque, custom, binary formats are ngmi in the era of heavy human+AI collaboration.
If an LLM can't read the underlying representations and manipulate them and all of the related settings via scripting, then it also can't co-pilot your product with existing professionals and it doesn't allow vibe coding for the 100X more aspiring prosumers.
Example high risk (binary objects/artifacts, no text DSL): every Adobe product, DAWs, CAD/3D
Example medium-high risk (already partially text scriptable): Blender, Unity
Example medium-low risk (mostly but not entirely text already, some automation/plugins ecosystem): Excel
Example low risk (already just all text, lucky!): IDEs like VS Code, Figma, Jupyter, Obsidian, ...
AIs will get better and better at human UIUX (Operator and friends), but I suspect the products that attempt to exclusively wait for this future without trying to meet the technology halfway where it is today are not going to have a good time.
Mark Johnson retweeted
in RTS games like age of empires
at the beginning you are focused on the micro - acquiring basic resources takes up 100% of your brain
over time you build up enough systems so that a lot of this can happen without needing much from you
by the end of the game you're hardly thinking about the basics and entirely focused on larger scale decisions
this is what compounding feels like and it's only really worth starting a business if you're tapping into that
year 2 should look materially different than year 1 - otherwise you just have a job without any of the benefits and a lot more stress
Mark Johnson retweeted
Sometimes I wonder if there are really only two frontend architectures:
1. No frontend rendering, no JavaScript. Just HTML the and browser (not even htmx sorry)
2. 100% frontend rendering + background sync
Everything else feels fraught with compounding complexity
Mark Johnson retweeted
Very happy to have made an strong bet on sync engines over RSC to address most of the motivating problems.
Apps like Linear have proven it’s the way to go.
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