Article URL: https://norbertkozsir.com/posts/work-in-the-second-dimension/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187084 Points: 34 # Comments: 29

I built a prototype of a 2D canvas you can put all of your work on: real terminals, running apps and browsers side by side instead of a row of tabs. We, at FlutterFlow, got so obsessed with using it that we built a full product out of it, Campus. It's free and available for macOS now. Next comes the story of how we got here … Just a few years ago, development was organized in a pretty straightforward way. Plan the work in more or less detail, then work on those features for the next week or two, rinse and repeat. With the advent of agentic coding, that has completely changed. Planning or discussing certain types of work has itself become slower than just letting the agent do the work. This is causing a massive shift in how I and tons of people I know work. Instead of focusing on a single task for a prolonged period of time, parallel work is the new norm. None of us would want to go back, but it came at a steep cost: context switching. One consensus among me and my group of friends is that software engineering has become more tiring. Quite ironic, as we’re essentially doing less of the actual work. I think context switching plays a big part in that. For the past year or so I’ve been obsessed with exploring different ways of putting “work” into better context. I strongly believe the future of work is moving towards a more holistic way of working. I hope the future is better than switching between Jira, Slack, VSC and GitHub. One of my earlier experiments was putting agents into Minecraft. Why Minecraft, you might ask? And you might be forgiven for doubting the holy grail of IDEs that is Minecraft. But I actually think Minecraft is a pretty interesting way of prototyping ideas in 3D. It’s well known, has a very good modding community and, most importantly, has all the basics already implemented for you. No need to re-invent any 3D, networking or general interactions. I didn’t take this too far, but the idea of having your work in a “physical” space while also maintaining some kind of human connection in this increasingly isolated world was intriguing to me.