# Tinkering ## Motivation I started tinkering on a ZX-Spectrum at 16 and enjoyed learning to program, typing in games from magazines, saving to cassette; laborious, frustrating yet somehow fun and inspiring. The experience at university with Pascal, punch-cards and teletypes was negative, you had to plan in advance and wait for printed output with hundreds of syntax errors; the tinkering and the joy were gone. Life improved with Emacs and Smalltalk, interactive, fluid, self contained environments at each end of the ease of use continuum - the commonalities; a single language, a well defined framework - one place where you can get 80/20 of what you need without reaching outside. Deft aims to be a practical take on that experience, an environment that grows with you from script to systems. ## Deft Embraces AI AI enables tinkering on a different abstraction layer; in ideas rather than mechanics - so an environment that enables tinkering at both scales is pretty useful; ideas -> mechanics -> repeat. AI is the tinkerers "philosopher's stone", transmuting ideas to reality. The notion of user generated custom apps on demand is now real and Deft enables this. ### /rant on - appeal to authority Constructs should be judged by the quality of artifacts they produce Rich Hickey asserted in 'Simple Made Easy' - in that vein, is the 'AI slop' construct any worse than using an unknown library if the artifact passes tests and benchmarks? Was abstracting from assembler to C not "Language Slop"? New abstractions enable hitherto impossible realities. ## Conclusions I've tinkered Deft into existence with AI, a wild idea a year ago and now real. I was able to do the impossible (for me) and I now have an environment that grows with me, with my crazy ideas - I've recovered the joy i lost as a kid, and as a programmer, I'm not disenfranchised by AI but empowered. # Goals - A one stop shop for all my daily activity. - Comfortable, configurable ergonomics that supports different workflows. - Plugin functionality as much as possible. - Be faster than Python in all benchmarks.