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Jem Sophia

Personal Computation

Exploring the philosophical and technological implications of WebSim, a simulator that generates hypothetical interfaces based on user prompts, showcasing a potential future where software is instantiated through user intention rather than pre-designed by teams.

I’m convinced that WebSim is one of the most profound projects in the history of personal computers. At first glance, it’s a simulator that hallucinates websites: a technological performance art imagining an internet that doesn’t yet exist. In doing so, it reveals a possible future for how technology and software could be created and distributed: a glimpse at a truly New Paradigm.

In WebSim ↗(opens in new tab), users prompt with URLs instead of the familiar chat box from ChatGPT et al. For any given URL—e.g. http://quotes.com/alan-watts or blog://jem.ai—an imagined website is returned. It’s a fascinating and playful concept. I’ve had fun this week hallucinating news articles from the future and tutorials for the music theory & spiritual systems of alien civilizations. The community’s growing shared mastery of complex prompts with custom protocols and query string parameters has resulted in everything from esoteric texts and academic papers ↗(opens in new tab) to functional in-browser operating systems ↗(opens in new tab) design tools and IDEs .

Even WebSim’s own documentation ↗(opens in new tab) pages are hallucinated.

The Inversion of Software Creation

This is much bigger than psychedelic websites. Through playful GeoCities-core incantations, WebSim demonstrates a world where user intention creates software at runtime instead of users interacting with pre-mediated software created by teams of designers, product managers, engineers, content strategists, and so forth. In this New Paradigm, we no longer consume pre-published content or interacted with one-size-fits-all applications; we manifest it.

One of the tools that has served me the best through my technology career is looking at the inversions ↗(opens in new tab). The most promising breakthroughs often come from simply exploring the most opposite thing to what everyone else is doing.

Rather than making everything look the same, what if AI created things that looked radically different?

What if personal computers were truly personal?

The Isomorphism of Novelty

With large language models (LLMs), we’re training them to retain and reproduce their training data. But the magic happens in the negative space of the model’s weights - the isomorphism representing everything we don’t know yet. In this realm of LLMs, we can tap into novelty by exploring the boundaries of what the model can generate beyond its training set.

The Future of User-Defined Software

In WebSim, the entire web becomes user-created and user-hallucinated. But this concept extends beyond websites - all software could be user-hallucinated. As I talked about in Escaping the Labyrinth you could simply say, "give me my calendar" and it would generate an interface tailored to your needs, containing your data injected into a user-defined system.

This is the direction software could be heading - an evolution from the chatbots and assistants we see integrated into apps today. Instead of building pre-defined software, it would exist only for the user’s eyes, in that moment, as a guidable reaction to their intention.

While WebSim may currently be seen as a fun performance art tool for hallucinating hypothetical websites, it represents something far more profound - the potential for an entirely new architecture for how we conceptualize and interact with technology. It’s an invitation to "shitpost our way" towards a future where software is no longer a pre-packaged product, but a dynamic, user-defined experience.

Personalization

In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS.

When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen. I can report to you: not only is this different activity rewarding in almost exactly the same way that cooking for someone you love is rewarding, there’s another feeling, too, specific to this realm. I have struggled to find words for this, but/and I think it might be the crux of the whole thing:

This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?