https://lord.io/spreadsheets/ is one of my favorite technical blog posts of all time. Highly recommend everyone check it out!

Yes, I cite Brooks (and Harlan Mills, seemingly the original source of the idea) in the post!

Author here. I thought about including TCAS in the article but it felt too tangential…

You’re right that there’s a voice alert. But TCAS also has a map of nearby planes which is much more “HUD”! So it’s a combo of both approaches.

(Interestingly it seems that TCAS may predate Weiser’s 1992 talk)

Author here. Yes, I think the original GitHub Copilot autocomplete UI is (ironically) a good example of a HUD! Tab autocomplete just becomes part of your mental flow.

Recent coding interfaces are all trending towards chat agents though.

It’s interesting to consider what a “tab autocomplete” UI for coding might look like at a higher level of abstraction, letting you mold code in a direct-feeling way without being bogged down in details.

Neat —- Scrappy looks like a lovely prototype! As the creators say in their writeup, it fits nicely into the lineage of HyperCard-style “media with optional scripting” editors, which provide a gentle slope into programming.

In the section on dynamic documents towards the end of our essay, we show several of our lab’s own takes on this category of tool, including an example of integrating AI as an optional layer over a live programmable document.