June is about to be a very exciting month for the Glitch community! But before we get to that, you know we have to celebrate all of the cool things that were created in May. From mythical monsters to time travel to playing with custom domains, the Glitch community was very busy building, experimenting, and making the web a blast. 

Speaking of custom domains, special shout out to all of the folks who participated in the community testing last month. You all helped us to make Glitch and Fastly even better for building with and we can’t wait to show you how. If you missed out on that fun, don’t worry! There will be another round of community testing coming soon to try out Fastly features on Glitch apps from within the Glitch editor. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, share your interest by commenting on this sneak peek thread in our community forum! 

~biking-in-chicago by @etsinger gives you the lowdown on the issues facing bikers in the Chicago area. 

~creating-with-data.glitch.me/shirt-designer by @digitalWestie and @petra89962 uses generative art to create some shirts people would truly love to buy!

~archive-stumbler created by @ckolderup lets you explore the Internet Archive in a “Stumble Upon” style. 

~gh-pages by @domfarolino is a useful tool for remembering how many static pages you’ve deployed to GitHub. 

~succession-generator created by @derekahmedzai lets you hold onto your emotional support billionaires’ toxic family drama just a tad longer. 

~minigamesbyjess created by @jessameliasilver is the perfect way to kick off your Friday, with a variety of fun mini games. 

~notsoterriblestory by @sjsbutterfly is a fun “choose your own adventure” style game.

~poetechnics-transfluxions created by @ryanhgreene1 is a fascinating collection of poems, diagrams, and figures from Yaxkin Melchy’s "constellation book" called EL NUEVO MUNDO or THE NEW WORLD. 

~pale-reliable-fog by @aagunasekaran will keep you on your toes. 

~word-mastermind created by @clupasq a fun word guessing ga—….it’s wordle, it’s a wordle clone and I just now realized. 

~mythical-creatures by @mapsmania lets you wander the world of cryptids at your own peril!!

~wswjp by @Flench04 and @sutherland.creations details racism facing the Douglas County School District.

~timetravel-streetview by @mapsmania is not a new app, but allows you to now travel to Los Angeles in 2100. 

~birds-eye-quebec created by @mapsmania takes you over Sherbrooke, Quebec circa 1881. 

~cubshomegametoday created by ​​@jbouvier is like a Magic 8 Ball for Chicago Cubs fans. 

~tbb-links by @triangleblogblog is a cool Glitch in Bio app for Triangle Blog Blog fans. 

~galaxykate-arvr-aframe by @galaxykate gives you a chance to play around with WebXR, remix it and give it a try!

~paint-it-timelapse created by @new.in.twon is a soothing timelapse painting of whatever you choose!

~incantationbowl by @olee0114 lets you unearth a 3D incantation bowl from ancient Mesopotamia. 

~strange-attraction created by @rowan-m is another satisfying project that creates beautiful art generated by math that you can shuffle to your heart’s content.

And that’s a wrap on another amazing month for the Glitch community! Follow us across the open social web 🌐 

You can still send your projects and playlists to us via the community forum, or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~bikebus created by @daniel73473 for the Chicago metro area, not the Milwaukee area—but if there is a Milwaukee bike bus we would love to know about it!

June is about to be a very exciting month for the Glitch community! But before we get to that, you know we have to celebrate all of the cool things that were created in May.

Last month on Glitch, the May 2023 edition

If Stefan’s name sounds familiar, we profiled him 6 years ago (essentially, a million in web years) about creating Twitter Bots. Obviously a lot has changed since then (we got TikTok, a global pandemic happened, we lost Twitter) aside from Stefan's passion for creating bots. We caught up with him to chat about the recent AI hype and the future of bots on the web. 

Glitch: Do you remember the first bot you ever interacted with?

Stefan: The first two bots I remember learning about would be @congressedits, which is a bot that posts anonymous Wikipedia edits made from IP addresses associated with the US Congress, and @YesYoureRacist, which originally retweeted tweets that contain “I'm not a racist.” Now it seems to be more of a manually managed account.

Either way, both of these showed me how a simple, yet clever idea can be very impactful.

I imagine that there are many folks these days who hear "bots" and (similar to the word "hacking") assume the worst: misinformation, threats to democracy, spam, etc. Does this happen when you talk about your work and if so how do you reconcile that in a way that shows how great bots can be without dismissing the threat that actual bad bots are?

I don’t actually recall having this conversation personally, but I am very much aware of this perception.

I have this video, from a few years ago, of a UX review of Botwiki done by someone who’s not too familiar with creative bots. And I really enjoy the part where the person speaking goes from visiting a website on which they have no idea what to expect, to saying: that’s kind of cool.

I hope Botwiki has the same impact on people who come across it, perhaps by accident, or trying to learn more about other kinds of bots, and realizing that there’s a lot more to this topic.

There’s been so much change and uncertainty in a lot of the bot-building world lately, what keeps you motivated to help people build bots even when it’s challenging?

I’ve been working on Botwiki for a few years now, and there were definitely moments when I did feel burnt out. And that’s when you know you need to step back from what you’re working on, take a break, focus on something else.

But this site, even if it’s a pretty small niche, feels very special to me. There really isn’t a project quite like this one, and I still get occasional emails, less so now, compared to the early days, with people reaching out with questions, asking for help with things not covered by my tutorials. And I really enjoy that, I like being able to help others, and seeing their excitement when they get their idea working. I find that very rewarding.

...you can actually build a bot that doesn’t really run on any of the existing fediverse networks, like Mastodon, but it’s its own server.

What's a platform you wish you could build a bot for but they don't have an API for it?

That’s a great question, and I guess I don’t really have an answer for you. It feels like every big platform has an API nowadays. And if not, there’s usually a way around it.

I would say, the one challenge I see here is platforms starting off being open to developers, but as their venture capital funding starts to dry up, and they need to turn profit, things start to get closed off and limited. See Twitter for example, where they’re now charging ridiculous sums for things that used to be free.

AI hype aside, what do you actually see as being the next big thing for bots, and the like?

After Twitter’s takeover by Elon Musk last year, after a brief period of living in denial about the whole thing, I’ve moved my attention to the fediverse. I’ve had an account on Mastodon for a few years by then, but didn’t really get much out of it, but that has changed significantly, as more and more people flee Twitter.
And it’s a breath of fresh air, on many levels, including it being a great platform for creative automation.

Mastodon’s API is very similar to Twitter’s, with fewer restrictions, and it’s completely free, so it’s really easy to get up and running on it, even to move over your existing Twitter bots.

And that’s what I’ve been seeing, folks have been migrating their bots from Twitter, and making a lot of new ones as well.

And because of how the fediverse works, you can actually build a bot that doesn’t really run on any of the existing fediverse networks, like Mastodon, but it’s its own server, so to speak, and becomes a part of the fediverse. And that’s pretty cool from a technical point of view, and something you can’t do with today’s commercial social networks.

Do you have a favorite project, or maybe bot that you’ve seen on Glitch?

I have quite a few of them saved, the list is pretty long. I really like lists on Glitch, like this one with Data Journalism projects. I’m into music, so I definitely have to mention this nice little drum machine. I’m a big fan of the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, so this title card builder using his style was a neat find. The Online Museum of Multiplayer Art is also great. And I enjoy browsing the various demos, like the ones for A-Frame. And as for bots, I really like this sock-generating one, which is actually a remix of my Twitter bot template.

I host my own Mastodon instance, and you can also follow me on SoundCloud and GitHub. And Glitch, of course! 

Stefan Bohacek is a web developer and engineering manager, and a prolific bot creator. His templates for building bots have been remixed by hundreds of developers, and his work has been featured in Wired, The Verge, and other tech blogs and online publications.

If Stefan’s name sounds familiar, we profiled him 6 years ago (essentially, a million in web years) about creating Twitter Bots.

5 Minutes with Stefan Bohacek, bot builder 

AI assisted coding has really taken off recently. The tech and the conversation around it say some interesting things about our understanding of what developers do.

AI can write some kinds of code, and it’s even helping people who aren’t coders to make software applications. It’s also frequently wrong. We’re still learning the types of coding task it’s suited to — in what specific contexts it’s a help rather than a hindrance. Unrealistic expectations and inaccurate interpretations abound! The conversation reveals our inability to define the real skills in being a software developer.

It’s not writing syntax. Being able to recite the right keywords only takes you so far.

Back when I was training for tech, an instructor told us a story about a research exercise. A mix of people looked at a code sample for a short time and tried to memorize as much of it as possible. Some had never written code, and some were experienced software engineers. The non-coders were able to recount detail about the first couple of lines from the top of the excerpt. The developers remembered almost none of that detail, but recounted a high level overview of the structures they had seen (a loop, a conditional, etc). The developers understood the code differently.

Code comprehension remains a neglected part of developer education, but this exercise reflects how integral it is to making software, and that abstraction level is a key aspect of working with code. The actual syntax is a detail — an important one, the code won’t work if it’s wrong — but focusing on syntax is only helpful at a granular level, it doesn’t come close to conveying what a developer actually does.

When I see a job posting that requires experience in specific frameworks or programming languages, it always seems like such a missed opportunity. Software engineering is fundamentally a learning activity. Developers are always learning new technologies and solving new problems. Once you’ve learned one language you pick up more. What characterizes the more experienced developer is the ability to reapply skills in different contexts.

I’ve had the privilege to work with incredibly highly skilled software engineers, and if I were to try to describe their talents and contributions, writing correct or efficient syntax would not make the list lol. Part of it is going past “how” and delving into “why” — articulating the problem as it stands within an organizational or social context, making sure you’re solving the right problem, and defining it in an actionable way. There’s a ton of communication and collaboration, and being comfortable with ambiguity is hugely valuable. 

Making the web isn’t about writing code, it’s about being able to create and participate through technology. 

Shifting abstraction levels have given us an evolving definition of software engineering since the inception of coding. What seems like essential knowledge to one generation of coders becomes an invisible part of the stack to the next generation. There’s a strong argument that AI is another interface in this cycle. Remember the discussion a few years ago about knowing how to use effective phrasing for a Google search? The algorithms in the tools we use daily have advanced, but describing many of them as natural language processing is still a stretch. 

Everyone who interacts with tech figures out how to give the inputs that get the desired output, whether you’re writing code or adjusting your accent because the voice recognition tool can’t process Glaswegian — we learn how to get the machines to do what we want.

Increasing abstraction levels have been accompanied by the rise of the API — we make software by combining a lot of components towards a particular goal. Connecting all of these different tools means the activity is in part defined by its technological and community ecosystem. Software engineers make something valuable within a complex landscape of interacting systems. 

The modular style of making software is successful because it frees developers to focus their creativity on the parts of a project that make it unique — which are also the parts AI is least able to approach.

Making the web isn’t about writing code, it’s about being able to create and participate through technology. As it becomes harder to say what is and isn’t software development, maybe it becomes more interesting to ask other questions. For example, what does a tool enable people to do, what are the opportunities, and what are the risks of harm?

What do you think the skills in software development are? Share your thoughts in the Glitch community forum!

Software development isn’t writing syntax

Webster’s Dictionary defines “April” as being the month when the dictionary was officially copyrighted by Noah Webster on April 14, 1828. There’s probably some other stuff in there too but instead of reading the dictionary, let’s take a look at what the Glitch community created during THIS April, instead. 

SPOTTED: The first Glitch app we’ve seen using the AT Protocol and Bluesky, created by @gsajith.

~monoclejs, created by @Utopiah, this tool was created to assist with creating a mobile developer experience using the Monocle! 🧐

~permutation-groups, behold, one of the fundamental atoms of symmetry, present in the mathematical fabric of all possible worlds …but in a format you can play with, created by @tesseralis.

~hello-deno-fresh, created by @pb.oliver.mcloughlin - we truly love to see a community-created Deno starter!

~shema-permutationsrandomized and represented all of the possible permutations of the Shema—approximately 68,000,000 unique prayers—and was created by @dluxemburg. ♥️


Hide your secret messages inside of the glitchy noise of this DCT station, created by @ffd8.

~random-garbage, created by @ryan.broderick, for Garbage Day fans, press the trash can button and it opens one of the 135 random links pulled from previous issues of Garbage Day in a new tab. 

~nice-typhoon-kiwi, created by @SummerAnneBurton lets you chat with Summbot for a while to get a custom mixtape made for you! 

~stop-chinatown-jail, sign up for a templated way to demonstrate your objections to a megajail being built in the Manhattan area of Chinatown.

~a-fountain, created by @SerenaShen, is a beautiful and creative take on the “Choose Your Own Adventure“ style of games. 

~the-speaker-zine, Enjoy listening to the very first issue of this new audio zine, created by @fg-j.

~keyboard-bashing, created by @christianp, finally gives us the answer to the question “Who among us would not want to bash a keyboard for fun?“

~american-treasure-map- is another @mapsmania hit….with potentially life-changing consequences for treasure hunters!!!

Creator @benjamin.hills94 used ChatGPT to create “Luna's Big Adventure,” a cute game based on his girlfriend's dog! 

Did Mark fool you? We loved this writeup about how the team at Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange used Glitch and GPT-3 to create a human-curated, AI-published bot for content curation and sharing. 

~unnotable-people.glitch.me, created by @mapsmania was their fun April Fools prank in which ChatGPT shares the most unnotable people in America's biggest towns and cities.

~pretty-impartial-daemonosaurus, created by @EvanMarie is a to-do app built with Glitch and ChatGPT.

And that’s a wrap on another amazing month for the Glitch community! Follow us on the fediverse at @glitch@mastodon.social where you can share Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature! 

You can still send them to us via the community forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~cultured-wooden-krill, created by @herbst which combines fun RPG-esque gameplay with Unity, Needle Engine, and Glitch.

Webster’s Dictionary defines “April” as being the month when the dictionary was officially copyrighted by Noah Webster on April 14, 1828. There’s probably some other stuff in there too but instead of reading the dictionary, let’s take a look at what the Glitch community created during THIS April, instead.

Last month on Glitch, the April 2023 edition

Glitch is the friendly place where everyone builds the web, including writers and folks whose first exposure to coding might have been tweaking the design of their MySpace backgrounds or designing potions in the hopes of having a popular Neopets store. Such is the case for Kim Key, a writer for PC Magazine, who happened upon Glitch and returned to the journey of coding and creation all these years later. We recently had the chance to ask Kim about her experience on Glitch and what she loves about the web. 

Glitch: How did you hear about Glitch and why did you use it instead of other options out there? 

Kim Key: I’m pretty sure I first learned about Glitch from Anil Dash’s Twitter feed. 

I’m an elder millennial hurtling towards middle age, so the nostalgia of using HTML and CSS to create a lo-fi online presence was appealing. I have a lot of sepia-toned memories of my earliest online experiences in the late 90’s and early 00’s. 

I miss those old Geocities websites, web rings, and message boards. I found a cached version of my first website recently, and while I admire the very earnest efforts of my teenaged self, I think I could have used more restraint with sparkly GIFs, under construction signs, and MIDI music. 

Thanks to Glitch, I can create and maintain a lot of different kinds of web presences: a portfolio, a Mastodon-powered social feed, and even a blog. 

I’ve created various portfolio websites over the years while working as a freelance writer, but I had the most fun using Glitch to carve out my little space online.

What site or tool do you wish everybody knew about?

Ha! I’d normally reply “Glitch” to this question. I’m serious! I really did tell a lot of my friends about Glitch when I first tried it.

Otherwise, I don’t use many online apps or tools anymore because so many of them are built on a business model that requires them to collect your data and sell that information to advertisers. 

I’ve always written articles, blog posts, notes, and reviews using a clunky but comforting combo of MS Word and Notepad. 

I recently put a 15 minute timer on the app I use to browse Reddit so that I could slow my consumption of news-related media. As a result, I spend more time clicking on links to articles, and less time getting that dopamine rush from witnessing strangers squabbling in the comment section. I quickly found a lot of cool stuff to listen to and read. I have some links for your perusal!

Newsletters:

Hung Up by Hunter Harris (pop culture/entertainment)

Frank by Ira Madison III (pop culture/entertainment)

The Rewatchables (incredible old movie conversations)

Still Watching (catch up on all the prestige TV you’re missing)

Do you have a favorite project you’ve seen on Glitch?

This is a lovely endless scroll of smiles and I love it!

What is your favorite thing about the internet?

I mean, my career would look a lot different without it, for better or worse. I appreciate the convenience of updated maps, accurate weather reports, and telemedicine. I think all of those things have been pretty good for the world. The rest I could do without.

I write for PC Magazine about online privacy and security.

I have written for CNN, ESPN, Fanbyte, Mashable, TechRadar, and The New York Times about tech, pop culture, sports, and video games.

Encourage me to use Mastodon by following me here.

Kim Key is a security analyst writing for PC Magazine. You should follow her work to get regular reminders to keep your online hygiene minty fresh. 

Glitch is the friendly place where everyone builds the web, including writers and folks whose first exposure to coding might have been tweaking the design of their MySpace backgrounds or designing potions in the hopes of having a popular Neopets store.

5 Minutes with Kim Key, security analyst

Learning is one of the most important and arguably, foundational, values that Glitch was built to amplify. Whether you’re brand new to creating a website, or figuring out how to make ActivityPub fit into your plans to create the best new RSS feed reader – creating requires problem solving, growth and learning. 

Participating in the Glitch community, you can see the encouragement and collaboration around learning almost everyday. For that reason, we were very excited to feature Sonny Li, a Glitch creator and founder of Codédex, a platform that combines nostalgia, gaming, learning, and most importantly—fun! Please enjoy our recent conversation with Sonny. 

Sonny: I’ve been using Glitch for so long that I don’t even remember! Glitch has been my go-to anytime I want to get an MVP live and shareable without going through all the dev setup! I can just plug in my code and boom, it’s live.

I’ve built MLPs (minimal lovable products) for my startup ideas, webVR sandboxes, fun applets, and even learned Node.js on Glitch.

By the way, congratulations on your recent launch of Codédex! What was the inspiration for creating it, and giving it that name? (Is it a play on the name Pokédex?)

Yesss! It’s pronounced Codédex like Pokédex. We’re a bunch of gamers, so this is a hat tip to a franchise that practically raised us. Our north star is to make learning to code as fun and collaborative as playing a Pokémon game with friends.

Why do you think creating a platform to help folks learn how to code is important?

94% of people who learn to code online give up in mere days. That’s not okay. Especially when coding literacy is one of the most important skill sets for the digitally native generation. We want to empower the next generation of builders and dreamers with the learn to code platform and community that they deserve.

How’s it going so far after launch, and what’s next for the platform?

It’s been a wild ride! We launched on Product Hunt in November 2022 and since then, we’ve seen crazy interest and traction from learners all over the world! In just a few short months, we have tens of thousands of registered users, over a million page views, and it’s still going up. We went to HackNYU recently and five different students told us they learned Python on Codédex.

Anyway, super proud of what the team has been able to accomplish in this little time, and beyond grateful to see how well our product is resonating with so many users around the world. I mean, people in 174 countries are using or have used our platform! Mindblow. 

Codédex isn’t your first big project made with Glitch – tell us a little bit about Karaoke Nite, including the inspiration behind it!

Haha yeah, Karaoke Nite is an online karaoke room where you can sing with your friends! It was born during the pandemic when everyone was remote; I wanted to bring people together!

It started off as a WebVR project, meaning that you can do it in a VR headset and interact with others as 3D avatars, but people kept asking to see their friends’ real faces, so it pivoted to a more Zoom-like room instead.

Absolutely! I’ve saved a few in my bookmarks. One being a ML5 web app that detects yoga poses: https://yunai-movenet.glitch.me. Another one being the course that got me interested in A-Frame: https://blog.glitch.com/post/an-intro-to-webvr.

What frameworks or new additions to HTML/CSS/JS have you had your eye on, but not gotten around to trying out yet?

I would say Three.js. I’ve always wanted to experiment with ways to make web pages more immersive. 3D feels like the future.

It connects me to my family in China, including my dad who’s back there living part-time now. I grew up in Shanghai, but moved all over Europe (Germany, France) and the United States (Oregon, Ohio, New York) because of my parents’ jobs in academia. I remember crying once back in 2009 when I was riding my bike home because I felt so helpless that I couldn’t see my friends and family, but thankfully the internet has allowed me to do so even being half way across the globe. So even with all the baggage and problems the internet has brought to humanity, I will be forever grateful for this part alone.

What’s next for you (and the Codédex team)?

I think this tweet says it all. We are now shifting gears and taking gamification to a whole new level – we are talking about cutscenes, world maps, skill trees, spider charts, and character customization! It’s about to get wild.

I’m @sonnynomnom on Twitter and the same thing on LinkedIn! My DMs are open so let me know what you think of Codédex! :)

Love learning? Us too, and we’d love to hear more about your learning experiences. Tell us all about your favorite platforms, projects you’ve created, or ideas for learning on Glitch in our community forum or find us on Twitter or the fediverse. 

An interview with Codédex creator, Sonny Li

Making learning to code fun: A Q&A with Sonny Li, Codédex founder

Whether you’re in the northern hemisphere celebrating spring, or the southern hemisphere welcoming the autumn season, there’s one thing we can all agree on when it comes to March — allergies suck. Fortunately, watery eyes and sniffly noses can’t keep the Glitch community down. March was a busy, busy month around these parts so let’s get right into it! 

Introducing 3table: a web experiment based on exploring the idea of a simple 3D editor, created by Joe Gaffey.

Glitch.com, Welcome Home: if you only click on one thing in this roundup, let it be this post by Matthew Danh about Glitch. ✨

Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Coders Just Yet: Clive Thompson explains how he used ChatGPT to build a Glitch app, and how that experience made him think about the future of programming. 

The Journey of a Self-Taught Teen Developer: Meet Khaleel Gibran, a 14-year-old school student from Kottayam who began programming at age 9, and built his first Glitch project at 12. 

~curly-luminous-surfboard created by @bobarke, allows you to ~~virtually~~ attend the Rebel Alliance’s kickoff meeting to take down the Death Star. 

~vrrealism,  ~spillage, and ~galaxyexplorer by @blippypixel allows you to view these gallery art pieces up close. 

~deciduous-plain-flyaway, created by @haue807 really captures the sentiment “Graphic Design Is My Passion” and we are here for it. 

~spiral-galaxy-illusion created by @tesseralis is a galaxy visualizer based on an illusion created in the web series Grand Illusions.

~lowly-dandelion-echidna by @SummerAnneBurton is a fun exercise to help you get unblocked by improvising a Five Minute Poem, with a little help from GPT. 

~lethal-herbs (cw: self harm, abortion) created by @YvetteGranata is a website dedicated to a VR film that is based on a story from a subreddit. Layers upon layers of internet culture!

~kimkeypcmag by @bykimberlykey is Kim Key, a writer for PC Mag’s, author page.   

~at-tumblr-links allows tumblr users to create links to their posts without all that href cruft. Bookmark this post for easy access!

~unlock-nyc-web by @mab253 and @unlocknyc shares tools and resources for New York City metro area residents in the search for fair housing. 

~ai-states, created by @mapsmania, is another new classic that combines AI with a map of the United States for interesting results. 

~sushibeans by @corbancg is a clicker game with the goal of making infinity sushi beans!

~incrementy-planet created by @randomtuba is the latest addition to the incremental games community. 

~rocketer by @Farmer, @lineegg749, @Dadlpguy, and @jarok is a modern and colorful version of the classic game Asteroids. 

~us-state-brainiacs by @mapsmania, combines the US map with AI’s description of individuals from each state. Sincerely, A Wizardo. 

Supporting PDF Embeds in an Eleventy WebC Component by Raymond Camden features a demo build of PDF Embed in WebC that you can remix for your Eleventy blog!

Discover How to Visualize Nuclear Propulsion in Augmented Reality by Micah Tinklepaugh includes a Babylon example on Glitch that they use to rapid prototype this visualization.

I built a ChatGPT plugin to answer questions about data hosted in Datasette by Simon Willison mentions that they built the initial prototype on Glitch because “...that’s the fastest way I know to get a live-on-the-web application which constantly reflects new changes to the code.” 

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~fractious created by @rowan-m explores the fractals in the Mandelbrot set and creates such dreamy images. 

March was a busy, busy month around these parts so let’s get right into it!

Last month on Glitch, the March 2023 edition

For most people building the internet today, the hardest part of coding is all the non-code barriers that stand in the way — from overly-complex technical requirements to exclusionary social and cultural factors that keep people from being able to create. This stands in contrast to the “no code” or low-code vision, which has often been based upon the idea that actual coding is the hard part, and should be hidden away or tucked behind a different UI.

But coding, done right, is a superpower. It’s not just a way of communicating with a computer or a compiler: it’s a way of communicating with a community, and of connecting to other people. The millions of people who’ve shown up to create on Glitch, and the millions more who’ve used the apps those creators have built, are testimony to the potential of that idea. I summarized some of this a few years ago in one of our earlier posts about Yes Code:

[A] Yes Code tool can create something unexpected, can talk to a legacy system that hasn't been updated in years, lets you try out a brand new framework or technology that you're discovering, and lets you reuse the billions of lines of code that already exist in the world.

And this fundamental, empowering idea of “Yes Code” matters more than ever now that AI’s transformation of the discipline of coding is rapidly accelerating. Now more than ever, the hard part of coding is not the code — it’s the connection to community.

As with all new technologies these days, the attention around AI and LLMs (large language models) and machine learning is a combination of genuinely interesting new capabilities and genuinely ridiculous hype. The exact ratio of value vs. hype depends a lot on your own personal perspective, but at Glitch we have a strong bias towards wanting to make choices that age well over time, and to make technical decisions that endure. 

From that standpoint, we do think AI assistance for coders is going to be an increasingly standard and pervasive part of coding workflows (I’m old enough to remember when we first got smart completion in our IDEs!) but we also think that the widespread accessibility of these tools will make more people into coders. Or put another way, it will make more people who are coders realize that they are coders. We’ve long said that anyone who ever made a really complex spreadsheet formula, or who hacked on a Neopets or MySpace website back in the day, or who installed an advanced Minecraft mod — they’re all coders! And a lot of people who have fallen out of the daily coding world, or who struggle to keep up with the relentless pace of advancement in things like JavaScript frameworks, will be more able to find the time to create when they have LLM tools to help them do it.

But what we’re not doing is presuming to choose your tools for you. We think there’s power, and value, in enabling our ecosystem to bring all of these new tools together, to compare and contrast their strengths and weaknesses, and especially to identify the things that AI tools are not good at, so we can help debug those problems collectively. For example, while a lot of commercial offerings in the coding AI space get a lot of attention, it’s just as important that open source or community-led tools be a vibrant part of the ecosystem — especially since we can see how they work, and know how their models have been trained. It’s really important that one or two companies don’t control the whole ecosystem, and communities of coders can be a powerful countermeasure that ensures that the AI markets stays competitive as it matures. Because we’re still in the early days of AI-assisted coding!

Recently, Clive Thompson (who’s long been augmenting his journalism with apps built on Glitch and other platforms), wrote “Why ChatGPT won’t replace coders just yet”, showing off how he built a todo-list app in 15 minutes using Glitch and ChatGPT. It’s exciting! But Clive reaches the conclusion that the splashy new AI tool ultimately serves to “help me quickly blast through boilerplate code so I can more quickly get to the tricky bits”. And that matches the experience we’ve heard from lots of coders — these new tools will accelerate experimentation by taking care of the drudgery, but they’re not nearly as good at the parts that have to do with innovation or the unexpected.

This is why community and connection and trust matter as much in the new world of AI-assisted coding as training models or prompt engineering. Teaching new coders, or teaching experienced coders about new tools, is going to require learning about intellectual property and permissions and how code can be ethically reused just as much as it’s going to be about the latest and greatest frameworks or programming languages. But these things can be a lot easier to figure out if you’re not doing it alone. And that goes back to the story we’ve been saying since the first day of the Glitch community, which just passed its six year anniversary since our launch: we make the internet better by lowering the barriers to creation, and letting everyone code together.

So I’ll close the same way I did a few years ago, when we first started publicly talking about the “yes code” idea:

There are cutting-edge areas like machine learning and bots and augmented reality that will never quite fit into a template, and there are millions of coders around the world who want to work together to put their unique coding superpowers to use for solving meaningful problems at work, at home, or in society.

We’re excited that Glitch is the place where so many are exploring these new tools together, and more than ever, we want to hear our community’s vision for how we all team up to make sure that every who creates with code is empowered by new AI tools to build a better internet.

“Yes Code” is how coding evolves with AI

Just like Danny DeVito, February is always short and sweet so once again we find ourselves with another month of Glitch projects to share with the community. Real quick, in Glitch news the Eleventy starter app was updated to use version 2.0.0 and it continues to be our favorite way to get an Eleventy site going quickly! 

Last thing—did you know that Glitch is on dev.to? Follow us over there to get updates and maybe, just maybe, a sneak peek at our monthly newsletter (maybe). Otherwise, let’s take a look at all of the cool things the Glitch community built in February!

This is SO cool! 😎Someone shared this Three.js audio reactive shader in the community forum using their open source tool Shader Park and they host their core examples on Glitch!

This is the story of how code saved an end of life game controller with a little help from WebHID, the Gamepad API and Glitch. 

~piano-genie, while not new, is making the rounds again! Created by @notwaldorf, it’s an intelligent controller that maps 8-button input to a full 88-key piano in real time!

Join us in learning about alternatives to policing in the United States with this interactive guide, created by the @seattle-abolition-support team.

If you need more Daleks in your day-to-day life, check out this VR experience created by @bobarke.

Thanks to @blippypixel you can confidently attempt to balance your levels in VR with this virtual mixing board ~music10000ar.

Brunch plans or pizza parties will be that much easier to plan with ~middle-point-calc, created by @idobackup1 which helps find the middle point of up to 5 locations to meet up with friends! 

Craving a first person space experience? ~opening-scene by @iamrishav2006 hosts 4 different 3d astronaut journeys for you to embark on! 

This recreation of a sunset in Cinta Costera created by @rosapark0328 in ~cinta is so charming that we really want to go there.

~at-tumblr-links is a tool that converts Tumblr links back to their original permalinks so the original previews load when they’re shared on social media. 

It’s always neat to see Glitch pop up in new places, like this project ~3d-model-embed-html simulating the foundations of asphalt roadways featured in an article touting the benefits of plastic roads over asphalt.

Follow us on the fediverse at @glitch@mastodon.social where you can share Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature! You can still send them to us via the community forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~cloudwatching created by Chia Amisola and is part of a wider series of simulations titled, When We Love. 

Last month on Glitch, the February 2023 edition

He also serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.