On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions

Vibe code is legacy code by Steve Krouse

In a wonderfully dramatic change to my life, I became a mother two months ago. My son was born at the end of March via an unplanned but otherwise uncomplicated c-section. Parenthood has been predictably overwhelming, exhausting, and existentially glorious. My days are now spent holding a sleeping newborn on my chest, timing wake windows, picking up the dropped pacifier for the 19th time, trying to eat with 0.5 hands free, and watching an eternal stream of Gilmore Girls episodes on a precariously balanced iPhone while feeding/burping/soothing/rocking/patting this tiny human. It swings between hard physical labour with high cortisol levels, and extremely chill, serene, and joyful a dozen times throughout the day and night. I had doubts about becoming a mother when I was younger. Mostly related to systemic gender inequality, believing I would need to sacrifice my whole career for it, and thinking myself incapable of bearing the responsibility (which, to be fair, I was before age ~28). I spent a solid year in angst and turmoil trying to figure it out. All the parents around me only shared details of how stressful, sleep-deprived, expensive, and burdensome their new lives were. Perhaps because it felt too trite or vulnerable to put into words the love, joy, and purpose that comes with it. Being on the other side, I now realise there was no calculation or algorithm or pro/con list or financial spreadsheet that could have helped me understand what it would feel like. Nothing that would do justice to the emotional weight of holding your sleeping baby that you made with your own body. Of watching them grin back at you with uncomplicated joy. Of realising you'll get to watch them grow into a full person; one that is – at least genetically – half you and half the person you love most in the world. Of watching them trip out as they realise they have hands. I can now say with certainty I am evolutionarily wired for this. Perhaps not everyone is. But everything in me is designed to feel existential delight at each little fart, squeak, grunt, and sneeze that comes out of this child. Delight that is unrivalled by any successful day at work, fully shipped feature, long cathartic run, or Sunday morning buttery croissant – the banal highlights of my past life. When I think back to my pre-baby self, trying to calculate herself into a clear decision, I wish I could let her feel for one minute what it's like to hold him. And tell her I can't believe I ever considered depriving myself of this. In other news, I've read no books (other than Your Baby Week by Week and Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer), had few higher-order thoughts, and binge watched all of Motherland. As this child learns to sleep in more predictable ways, I'm looking forward to being less of a zombie and engaging with the world again.

A tiny tool to calculate when your baby might arrive

Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice by Chris Stokel-Walker for the New Scientist

Well, I've had a dramatic start to the year. Normally, the design agency I joined a short eight months ago, unexpectedly closed down in January. Despite running for a decade and working with almost every major tech company, client work slowed down and the founders decided to close up shop. It's been a sad time. Everyone I worked with there was exceptionally talented and kind. I'm thankful I got to build with them for a short while. I was already due to start maternity leave in March, so Normally closing just moved that date up a bit sooner. But I managed to fit in a couple of months of work with Deep Mirror before taking my baby break. They're a London-based startup using machine learning to speed up the drug discovery process, specifically by helping medicinal chemists generate ideas for new molecules. While I was completely new to the field of drug discovery, many of the design challenges echoed the ones I'd worked on with Elicit – complex research workflows, information-dense interfaces, and making the inner workings of models and their reasoning process visible to users. I've learned I like this shape of work; AI/ML tools designed to help scientific researchers who have high standards and need to thoroughly understand how models “reason” and how answers are generated. It's fertile ground for responsible AI interface design. My baby break has now started. Only _two_ weeks remain until the new human arrives. A terrifyingly short timeline. Luckily, the excitement of meeting our child and the physical discomfort of late pregnancy outweigh any fears about birth or the impending marathon of sleep deprivation. I'd happily start labour tomorrow if I had any say in the matter. Given that I won't be in a 9-5 job for the next six months, I've stocked up on new books. Though it's naïve to think I'll have the mental capacity to read any of them in between baby feedings and waking up a dozen times a night. But one can hope. I've added the full pile to my Antilibrary, but these are the ones I'm most excited about: <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Soldiers_and_Kings/EzPBEAAAQBAJ"><strong>Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling</strong></a> by Jason De Leon This got my attention when it started popping up on all the “best of” ethnography lists in 2024, and then went on to win the national book award for non-fiction. I expect it to be a slightly intense read, but well-researched ethnographies are my favourite genre. <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Cue_the_Sun/GObnEAAAQBAJ"><strong>Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV</strong></a> by Emily Nussbaum Like most of us, I have a love/hate/fascination/repulsion relationship with reality TV. I've watched my fair share of trash series, but will happily defend (most of) them as time well spent. They're always insightful windows into our collective value systems and cultural narratives, and I'm keen to read Nussbaum's critical take on the medium. <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Invention_of_Nature/w1WNBQAAQBAJ"><strong>The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt</strong></a> by Andrea Wulf Given my long standing preoccupation with how we try to define and divide “nature” from “culture”, it's about time I did a bit more historical reading into the origins of this cultural dichotomy. I've been using a bit of my pre-baby time to build as well. I added a new section to this garden called Smidgeons. These are teeny tiny posts: links with a bit of commentary, research papers I enjoyed, or one-liners that would otherwise go on Bluesky. I'm also quite deep into a new research project and set of prototypes I'm calling **Lodestone**. It's an exploration of how language models might be able to get us to think more, not less. Specifically, I'm interested in whether models can enable me to be a better critical thinker and rigorous writer. Not by writing for me, but by guiding me through a well-defined process of understanding what claims I'm making, what evidence I have to support it, and how my argument structure fits together. I'm tackling it from a few angles, but here's some previews from the latest prototype: The code is all open source on Github, though it'll evolve a lot from here. I'll publish more about it soon, but the ideas still feel early and my thesis is unproven. I'll wait until it all gels together a bit more. I should mention that starting this summer I'll be looking for a new role as a Design Engineer or technically-inclined Product Designer. I'm planning to be on maternity leave until early September, but I'm happy to start talking to companies, teams, and founders now if you think we could be a good fit. Just email hello at maggieappleton.com or DM me on Bluesky.

If you're not distressingly embedded in the torrent of AI news on Twixxer like I reluctantly am, you might not know what DeepSeek is yet. Bless you.

Common Misconceptions About the Complexity in Robotics vs AI by Dan Ogawa

A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study by Peter Scarfe, Kelly Watcham, Alasdair Clarke, Etienne Roesch

Unbaited by Daniel Petho

Welcome to the smidgeon stream. This is a new kind of content on the Garden. One that was

How to use Zotero's translator and Tana Paste formatting to easily import papers into Tana

Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it

My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup

Reflections on two years of working at Elicit and why it's time to leave

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse

How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars

Gaining a strange disease and losing my ability to see straight

Collecting people I know who work at the intersection of design and engineering, in an attempt to figure out what a design engineer is

How to gather people and create communities in ways that are low-stress and high-payoff

Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web