it is 2:46am in vieques, on my birthday, i was born exactly 2 hours and 34 years ago, and i can’t sleep because i have a vision for the future. i have a multitude of visions. i am sitting on the roof of a beautifully minimal concrete home designed by john hix, surrounded by the sound of frogs nearby, roosters crowing in the distance, horses neighing. the island is full of wild horses and the roads have no streetlamps or traffic lights, only the occasional red lamp to light the way.
i’ve decided to live on this island someday soon, in a concrete home like this one, rectangular slabs blending into the environment, no windows, no air conditioning, ventilated by the trade winds on a hillside, solar-powered, off-grid. without the panes of glass, the usual embellishments of civilization, the conceptual noise, there is a different kind of intelligence that appears in the mind, a new kind of energy in the body at rest, too much excitement about all of this to sleep.
it is hard to describe all of it at once (the meditative, single-threaded process of writing is not ideal for inspiration that sparks like this in small parallel threads), but noting one thing, i have a new appreciation for the natural substrate beneath human concepts like the window and the doorway. and i want to express this architectural sensibility in software.
i believe the true bicycle for the mind is a home like the one i imagine here.
remember, a shell is a kind of home that you make for yourself.
minimal, bare, embellished by the contents you choose.
a design that changes your understanding of what software can be.
built to last for a lifetime, through interruptions in external infrastructure and the supply chain.
a fountain of inspiration, whenever the mood strikes.
a continuous snapshot of some multilayered deep expression of you.
fleeting images of
- ⌁ desktop malleable software
- ⌁ a new way to capture anything (notes, screens)
- ⌁ a particular vibe of generative media tuned to spark inspiration
- ⌁ something intelligent enough to understand complex software artifacts beyond a codebase
imagine
- ⌁ something that can understand and manipulate an ableton project from the filesystem alone without additional instruction
- ⌁ something that can iterate and search for days, at no cost to you except time
- ⌁ a project worth living in for a lifetime
- ⌁ a shell for everyone