Are we goat medicine yet?
But we're closer than we've ever been. The day you'd cheerfully spin up a custom app just to track your goat herd's vet visits is the day software finally got good.
We're building a software development platform so fast and so easy to use that it changes the economics of who gets software written for them.
Right now there's a whole universe of problems too small to ever earn a program of their own. No company will build it. No open-source maintainer will volunteer for it. And it's not worth a weekend of your own life to hack together.
So those problems just stay annoying forever — handled by a notebook, a group text, or a spreadsheet you're a little ashamed of.
Take a small herd of goats. You want to track each animal's veterinary visits, vaccinations, and medical challenges. There has never been a great app for that. There probably never will be — unless building it stops being a project and starts being an afternoon.
When that's true, "are we goat medicine yet?" flips to yes. Goats are just the canary. Or the canary's veterinarian.
Take the goat tracker apart and you get a shopping list of platform capabilities. The engine underneath is finished. What's left is everything that turns an engine into something you'd hand a farmer.
Tapping through the herd should feel instant — never a spinner. That's the engine, and it's done: a real language, compiled, with concurrency handled for you.
Language Design · Runtime · Compiler · Automatic Concurrency
Every goat a card, every visit a tap. Building that view should mean dragging it together — not hand-coding pixels and layout math.
GUI Toolkit · GUI Designer
Ask for a goat's full history right inline — the query lives in your code, and the platform guarantees it's safe and well-formed. No injection holes, no string-stitching, no ORM to appease.
DSL Support · Tagged Template Literals
Three years of vaccinations and vet notes — safe, queryable, and there tomorrow. Persistence you never have to think about wiring up.
PostgreSQL Database Access
Drop a field on a screen and it already saves to the right column. Logging a vet visit shouldn't need a single line of glue code.
GUI Designer Database Widgets
The screen in the barn and the server holding the records are written on the same platform — and getting the two halves talking is setup you finish in minutes, not a week of plumbing.
Networking · Web APIs
Cold hands, no signal, standing in the mud. The app has to live on the phone in your pocket — not a laptop back in the house.
Android Platform Support
Most of the tracker comes together visually — the common tasks especially. The code that's left is easy to write and even easier to read. And when you hit something gnarly, AI coding help is built deep into the platform and right there — not bolted on after the fact.
AI Integration
One part ready, seven to go. When the last pill turns green, the word at the top of this page turns yes.
The platform sub-goals between here and goat medicine. 4 done, 1 in progress, 9 to go.
A glimpse of Herd Health — the goat medicine tracker nobody would build today. When the platform is ready, this is an afternoon's work.
Next: deworming · Jun 24
Next: vaccination · Jul 09
Fictional herd. Real itch. This is the kind of thing the platform exists to make trivial.
The future we're chasing isn't new — pieces of it have been demonstrated for decades. A running list of the work that lit the way.
Most new programming languages are accidentally designed to be backwards compatible with punchcards. This talk argues that it would be better to focus on building new live programming environments that can help us solve the problems of the future.
Among other things, Jobs walks through the NeXT Database Toolkit — visually wiring an interface straight onto a database, no glue code in sight. It's the "forms that bind themselves" idea from the section above, demonstrated back in the early 1990s. We're still finishing the job.
Bret Victor shows some impressive demonstrations illustrating his value of immediacy — that creators need an immediate connection to what they're making, with no delay between a change and seeing its effect.
Alan Kay argues that users should be able to "open up the hood" of their software and see something — much like looking under the hood of a Model T. He points to HyperCard, where users so often end up customizing the software themselves over time.
Before the web, there was HyperCard. It gave ordinary people the power to create, to explore — and even led to the best-selling computer game of all time. So, what happened to it?
Long before Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative systems that bore little resemblance to the Web we know today. Alex Wright digs through the heritage of these almost-forgotten designs in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside.
Ted Nelson casts doubt on the "basics" we take for granted in computing. A compilation of all the episodes of Nelson's series Computers for Cynics.
In 1968, Doug Engelbart's team ushered in the Information Age with the "Mother of All Demos," inventing the mouse, windows, hypermedia, and real-time collaboration all at once. Fifty years on we use much of his vision daily — while some of its most profound parts remain unrealized.
Alan Kay traces the windows-and-mouse interface from Sketchpad and Engelbart's NLS to the Smalltalk work with children at Xerox PARC. Along the way he grounds it in human psychology — the enactive, iconic, and symbolic ways we think.
Moldable Development means building custom tools for each problem — thousands per system, many used only once — to transform how we read and reason about our code. Live demos of Glamorous Toolkit show why this lifts both developer productivity and happiness.
Not yet. But the goats are patient, and we're not slowing down.
Check back. This page updates as the answer gets closer to yes.