What Maggie Appleton thinks about ideas vs execution

@maggie-appleton · 20 positions · On ppll ↗

Designer, anthropologist and illustrator who writes about the web, tools for thought and generative AI on her digital garden at maggieappleton.com. Her 2022 essay "The Dark Forest and Generative AI" put the reverse Turing test -- proving you are not a language model -- into the vocabulary of the independent web.

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1 dated position, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Maggie Appleton has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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13 Apr 2026

Our readingWith implementation cheap, deciding what to build is the hard question in software, not how to build it.

Their wordsThe hard question is no longer how to build it. It's should we build it. Agreeing on what to build is the new bottleneck.

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