Stuart Bowman

Ok since I've accepted that I have to code in English now, is there like a "English framework" that makes this easier? Like if you have a big complex idea/spec in your head that you need to articulate so that an LLM can implement it, what does the workflow look like?
I struggled with this. So far the best thing I've come up is to start by writing an "index.md" that is like a high level summary/abstract containing a bunch of links pointing to other "<feature>.md" or "<concept>.md".
I just write free form exposition until the entire idea is rendered into English, and then I tell the LLM to read it and ask me clarifying questions about anything it does not understand. I don't shy away from "pitching" the idea in these design documents. I want the LLM to grasp the *why* just as well as the *what* because I think that helps it make better implementation decisions in certain cases.
Then, once I've got the whole thing from my brain into English and I feel like it makes sense *to me*, we iterate. I tell it to read the whole thing and ask me questions. I answer its questions and update the markdown files as necessary to include details that I may not have specified or that it thinks are ambiguous.
At some point just based on vibes this matrix of markdown files (the "English source") feels comprehensive-ish and I tell the LLM "ok crawl these interlinked design docs, read them all, and create a todo.md file". This todo.md is like a persistent roadmap or task list (also containing tasks marked as complete and descriptions of the task) that gets committed to git along with all the other markdown files.
Then we go into the implementation phase. At this point you can pretty much just say "ok do it" and walk away, have some coffee. I tell the LLM (in the index.md file) that whenever it does something it needs to update todo.md (Claude leaving messages for future amnesiac Claude). And also I have to create or update tests because why not.
One way I've been thinking about this is that /src is no longer the first step in the pipeline. There is now a /design folder containing English that gets (effectively) transpiled by the LLM into the source code. But it's not a pure transpilation. There is path-dependence because of the notes that the LLM leaves itself in the todo.md file about what it did and why. (sometimes I've head to clean these up manually when it goes off the rails to avoid contaminating subsequent context)
I've realized a couple things:
The *good part* of coding in English is that you get to maintain your high-level designer headspace the whole time without getting bogged down by implementation details. Honestly this is the best part.
The *bad part* of coding in English (and this is why I'm like the last dev in nostr to let Claude take the wheel) is that, at least for me, trying and failing to implement something has very often been *how I discovered* certain information about the problem domain.
Without trying to implement something myself I often don't feel confident enough that my designer guy persona is not full of shit (this I feel is parallel to the writing process - there's that line about how "writing is thinking", the point of writing being to reveal to *yourself* inconsistencies in your own thought. Anyway).
I feel like in last few months I've finally started to make this work for me. The learning forgone by not encountering low level reality is being counterbalanced by spending more time iterating in English.
Still, I have the feeling that I'm leaving something on the table. For example I have no idea how to really take advantage of sub-agent orchestration. I also have no clue what happens if/when my markdown files become too big to always have in context.
Maybe my whole concept of a markdown-based pipeline is retarded and I should just use <foo> (yes I know about Obsidian)
As an engineer, I don't think I've ever felt more *and* less capable as at the same time.
I am curious what you guys are doing. Anyone have a similar process?

2026-01-12 03:35:44 UTC

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npm run test --trump

2026-01-10 20:09:30 UTC

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There's no way it stays the same. I'm not even sure that "going" to a "website" for information is going to be a thing much longer, because yeah I agree if most of the results are AI generated, at the point the web is just like AI answers with extra steps

2026-01-09 22:26:06 UTC

It's kind of crazy how "searching" something on the internet is basically not a thing now

2025-12-30 22:06:24 UTC

https://findaspring.org/map

2025-12-29 02:59:53 UTC

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New Satellite supports NIP-17 too

2025-12-29 02:55:40 UTC

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Appreciate it man. It's good to be back

2025-12-29 01:37:34 UTC

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Yep that was a bug sorry! I pushed a fix already but make sure you're on the latest version of the app (hold down Shift and refresh or clear your cache) Should work after that.

2025-12-26 14:41:02 UTC

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Damn yeah that was a bug introduced by the recent localization update!
I just pushed a fix.
If you refresh the app (holding down the Shift key when you click refresh to make sure you get the newest version) and then try to upload something it should be working now.

2025-12-26 13:37:52 UTC

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I deployed an update to the cdn backend recently but it should work the same. What do you mean "the hashing thing" is not working?

2025-12-23 19:45:23 UTC

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That's slick!

2025-12-23 18:35:42 UTC

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Check out https://satellite.earth

2025-12-23 02:41:57 UTC

日本のnostrユーザーの皆さん、こんにちは！
https://satellite.earth を日本語にローカライズしました。おそらく間違いがあると思いますので、もし見つけたらお知らせください、修正します。ありがとう 🙏

2025-12-21 22:41:08 UTC

Today's the Winter Solstice
https://cdn.satellite.earth/3cc40b1d2e3af7aa837440b322e60106a910207dc2f75e1fe5e7b51db0d3caf4.jpg

2025-12-20 18:13:18 UTC

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That he had to plead guilty because he knew that the law as written would not be respected is perhaps the darkest aspect

2025-12-20 16:51:38 UTC

The thing about prediction markets is that they don't just reflect direct bets on an outcome.
They also reflect bets on how others will place bets on an outcome.
Once this is understood, they will start to reflect that too.

2025-12-20 14:15:49 UTC

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2025-12-19 19:08:58 UTC

Deployed Satellite v2.2
- Added support for reading and replying to long form articles
- Added proper link previews
- Bug fixes and performance optimizations
First class support for composing long form is not in this release, but is in the pipeline.
Also I set up a CORS proxy `https://cors.satellite.earth` for link previews. It's really simple, you just `GET /link/:url` and it will proxy the request with the proper headers so your client can parse the response however you want. If anybody wants to use this for your project lmk and I will whitelist your origin.

2025-12-16 00:57:57 UTC

Got an email saying that Satellite's @npub1get…0nfm Hub missed a lightning payment because of lack of receiving capacity, yet I have currently have 1.3 million sats of receiving capacity. Smaller payments earlier today went through fine - so either something strange is going on, or someone tried to buy a LOT of Satellite CDN storage...

2025-12-15 13:41:23 UTC

How though? There are fundamentally only 3 ways right?
1) PoW L1, i.e. a distributed db with public read access and write access mediated by energy with a network effect strong enough that it will never be displaced (so Bitcoin)
2) Make all the data that's being hosted encrypted in equal size indistinguishable chunks so that infra providers can't discriminate even if they want to. (so something like Garland aka the thing @npub1klk…x3vt proposed recently)
3) Pay infra providers enough money that ideology becomes marginalized as a motivating factor as to why the operator would or would not host your data (this is kind of the defacto solution but it fails in cases where the gov mandates censorship)
Out of all these options it seems like #2 is the only one that is actually maybe workable at scale (obv bitcoin works but cannot hold all the state in the world). And *storage* is the relatively easy case. If you want ideology-neutral compute you need homomorphic encryption. (and I guess that's possible but not really fully solved... I don't know enough about that to be sure)
Every time this neutral infra thing comes up in a mainstream forum like hacker news or something, it's clear that the only solution people can agree on is like "the government should force them to be neutral" (lol) I feel like saying yeah maybe that worked in 1996 when the gov was the "containing superstructure" of the world and the internet/media was a like a subsidiary realm, but now that the roles are reversed, well, math to the rescue I guess (why does that sound familiar?)
Not saying a political solution is bad, I'm just saying it's impossible.
Technical solutions are hard, but possible.
#nevent1q…6jgc

2025-12-15 12:53:39 UTC

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this is deep

2025-12-15 12:52:33 UTC

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lmao

2025-12-14 18:46:07 UTC

When you read a note from someone you've met in real life, do you read it to yourself in their voice?
Sometimes even when I'm not reading nostr I will suddenly think "swim bladder" in @npub1myg…sn5p's voice in my internal monologue

2025-12-14 18:15:10 UTC

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Hello and welcome!

2025-12-14 18:10:24 UTC

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I think the idea that the PDS servers "should" be neutral is unrealistic. If community servers are acting as de-facto infrastructure and you suppose that they "should" do something, well then, there's always an implicit enforcement mechanism standing behind the word "should". If you still need to invoke a centralized authority to make the players in a supposedly decentralized system work together, well, back to square one then. I will admit I myself have fallen into this kind of wishful "should" thinking before. And I think the reason why it's so easy to fall into is because the early internet had a lot of self-selected people that naturally aligned idea on certain values like curiosity, not assuming things about people, etc. But it's a different game now. I do think nostr is closer to a workable solution than bluesky, because nostr is fundamentally oriented toward redundancy/exit, not consistency/consensus. Notice that biological systems mirror this architecture.

2025-12-12 19:36:03 UTC

meditation is dewormer
#nevent1q…qsct

2025-12-12 18:31:09 UTC

Is @npub1lt6…p8hj still a thing?

2025-12-12 14:46:18 UTC

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And at some point the government will be a proxy for social media corps

2025-12-12 14:19:20 UTC

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Terrence McKenna has entered the chat

2025-12-11 18:59:57 UTC

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Ah ok, yeah I don't have a physical tablet to test on so thanks for mentioning that, I will try to reproduce. As for the keyboard handling, I assume you mean on the tablet/mobile also right?

2025-12-11 17:25:37 UTC

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> bot is muted but still shows up in notifications...
Will fix thanks.
To input emojis, just type `:` (colon) and it will open up an emoji search box!

2025-12-11 16:20:08 UTC

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Yes

2025-12-11 15:47:09 UTC

I have a theory that nothing actually ever gets fixed. Things just die, and then, ex nilhio, new things come into being, and it's all good.

2025-12-11 15:43:48 UTC

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Looks great man

2025-12-11 15:28:38 UTC

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That's surprising

2025-12-11 15:25:26 UTC

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That's actually a great point. I will fix this

2025-12-10 21:58:43 UTC

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Anarchy is not necessarily Mad Max but to your point it probably was for some Arabs

2025-12-10 21:51:28 UTC

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That's kind of a depressing proverb ngl

2025-12-10 21:47:40 UTC

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I mean that agency is the thing that all the various kinds of freedom have in common. Of course that is reductive. But sometime's the reductive case reveals something. It reminds me of the line from that song, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose". That's not the complete picture but it's a useful lens imo

2025-12-10 20:47:27 UTC

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What's the least obvious axis?

2025-12-10 20:40:54 UTC

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> boss hogs with billy clubs and company scrip
Amazing 😂

2025-12-10 20:33:19 UTC

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Maybe you can compose the vectors into like an overall "agency" vector though

2025-12-10 20:27:58 UTC

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https://cdn.satellite.earth/ee37dbc82cd2582a7110fff11a7f9389e1c48eed87baf67e70d154927755ca7b.png

2025-12-10 20:18:43 UTC

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September 10th, 2001?

2025-12-10 20:18:23 UTC

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True but there's a subtle difference in the mechanism maybe, that addicted people give up their freedom willingly because they see no use for it

2025-12-10 20:12:45 UTC

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Yeah in the 1930s it was illegal to own gold or have glass of wine

2025-12-10 20:08:48 UTC

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That's a good point and aligns with my experience even today in developing countries where people have a decent amount of day to day freedom because the administrative state is too broke to fuck with them.
Maybe someday we'll attain high life expectancy Medievalism

2025-12-10 17:54:12 UTC

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I was a kid

2025-12-10 17:42:21 UTC

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Man I miss the old Australia, like crocodile hunter stuff

2025-12-10 17:30:26 UTC

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Although to clarify I feel like the "peak freedom" local maximum may have been around 2010

2025-12-10 17:22:55 UTC

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I myself have thought many times that we are much less free than our ancestors, and in some ways that's true. But in other ways we have so much freedom now that we take for granted. Admitting that you have freedom is hard, because then you have to do something haha

2025-12-10 17:19:11 UTC

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Indeed. It's a thought experiment about what is meant by "freedom". Like I can fly across the world for 400 bucks, but it's harder than ever to have a conversation with the person sitting next to me on the plane

2025-12-10 17:09:25 UTC

I doubt that the average person who lived 100 years ago had more freedom than we do today

2025-12-10 16:43:56 UTC

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Yep, it's like we need a new term, like "Post Developed" or something. Entropy is expensive.

2025-12-10 16:39:55 UTC

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Can confirm

2025-12-10 16:18:05 UTC

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The NIP-72 communities are removed in version 2.0 but version 2.1 which I'm currently working on will add relay based communities - it's going to be really cool

2025-12-06 17:10:08 UTC

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Re-education

2025-12-03 19:15:03 UTC

Atomicity is underrated

2025-12-03 18:55:33 UTC

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not for long

2025-12-03 17:01:50 UTC

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I AM BECOME VERTEX

2025-12-03 17:00:22 UTC

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None currently, but I'm almost ready to ship the update that adds relay-based communities. It's not going to follow any NIP, it will a Satellite specific thing. Although, as I've said before, I think what @npub1jlr…ynqn is doing with Flotilla is directionally the right approach, and I'm trying to make it as interoperable as possible.
Actually basic relay feeds are actually working already (though it's sort of a hidden easter egg right now since I haven't wired up the UI) e.g. https://satellite.earth/relay/pyramid.fiatjaf.com

2025-12-03 16:47:01 UTC

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Lmao I was literally typing a note out just now trying to tag both you and Vertex and I was so confused! I thought it was a bug in Satellite until it randomly changed back 😂

2025-12-03 16:44:48 UTC

Just shipped a new Satellite version with hybrid @npub1kpt…nhmz integration for user search.
Now when you search as a signed in user you'll see memory-cached results instantly (computed locally from your follow list) and then a second later the Vertex results appear as well.
So now you can find pretty much anyone in nostr from the top nav, even obscure profiles.
Solid product @npub176p…vgup @npub1wf4…dgh9

2025-12-02 17:43:33 UTC

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The unfortunate reality is that they would be a lot better if useful mobile browser apis weren't a direct threat to Apple's revenue model.

2025-12-01 22:38:48 UTC

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Regressive Web App (RWA)

2025-12-01 22:25:29 UTC

Nostr may be the last social network to ever exist

2025-12-01 22:23:01 UTC

Shhhhhhhh!!!!
#nevent1q…wn8s

2025-12-01 21:19:53 UTC

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Yes, since the recent update Satellite CDN does support both /mirror and /list

2025-11-30 14:16:16 UTC

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real

2025-11-29 15:05:05 UTC

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It's my fault. In my recent Satellite CDN update I changed the upload endpoint to actually be blossom compliant and broke the v1 api

2025-11-28 14:23:09 UTC

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Send you a DM

2025-11-27 14:56:51 UTC

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I see. Thank you

2025-11-27 13:14:51 UTC

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Damn it youre right. Ok back to the drawing board. Thank you!

2025-11-27 04:06:45 UTC

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Can you explain this more? So the backend service generates an nsec for the email, and then what is the other nsec?

2025-11-27 03:55:35 UTC

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https://nostrhub.io/naddr1qvzqqqrcvypzp978pfzrv6n9xhq5tvenl9e74pklmskh4xw6vxxyp3j8qkke3cezqyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2aqqzpg9zvj0tyeyxktg894x25m8x4tsz7q8t0

2025-11-27 01:49:18 UTC

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I looked into and the CDN did detect the transaction and credit your account. Are you seeing the recent transaction? According to my database the issue is just the amount of data that is stored has consumed more than has been received.

2025-11-27 01:38:48 UTC

It occurred to me that the new key rotation thing makes it possible to implement a credible low friction "Sign up with email, then migrate a self custody nostr id later" sort of flow.
So basically the way it would work is that the client allows the person to sign up with email, and you have a backend service that generates an nsec for them, and the backend signs stuff for them.
Then if the user wants to move to self custody at any point, they go in their account settings and click like "Enable self custody" or something.
This causes the client to generate a local nsec in the usual way, and the backend creates a key rotation event pointing at the self custodied nsec, and as soon as it's timestamped, immediately rotates to that new nsec.
So far so good.
However, there is still a problem -- there's no way for the backend to prove that it did not also publish an earlier timestamped rotation event with the new pubkey (which would allow the backend to rug the user in the future)
But we can solve this by having the user rotate *again* (using their new nsec) to a second locally generated nsec. (which the backend service could not have known, and thus could not have created any prior key rotation events for)
So bottom line is, yeah it involves two rotations (ie a 20 minute process on average given block time) but it massively reduces sign up friction while providing a way to migrate to self custody while keeping the social graph you may have accumulated prior to rotating into self custody.
@npub1jlr…ynqn @npub1klk…x3vt

2025-11-24 12:23:20 UTC

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Glad you like it 🙏

2025-11-24 12:18:25 UTC

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It's not Jumble haha, it's built from scratch

2025-11-23 17:09:49 UTC

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This is awesome!

2025-11-22 05:51:56 UTC

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Ok thanks. Yeah you should, code here https://github.com/lovvtide/satellite-web
And I can't remember if I already mentioned this but v1 is still available at https://v1.satellite.earth

2025-11-22 05:45:48 UTC

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Is the scrolling issue on mobile or desktop? I'll try to replicate it

2025-11-21 13:21:35 UTC

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I'll take a look thanks

2025-11-21 03:42:33 UTC

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If you click on the small 3 dots at the top right of the notifications, there is an option "Mark all as read"

2025-11-21 03:38:26 UTC

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Done

2025-11-21 01:55:14 UTC

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Got it, I'll add a button to mark all as read like the DMs