Ink & Switch's 2025 'Malleable Software' essay resurfaces on Hacker News
A year-old essay arguing users should be able to freely reshape their software gains fresh traction online.
What to know
- A 2025 Ink & Switch essay argues that software should be as editable and reshapeable by users as physical spaces are, rather than locked-down 'appliances.'
- The essay identifies barriers across programming languages, operating systems, and app stores that treat users as passive recipients rather than co-creators.
- The piece has resurfaced on Hacker News (40 points, 9 comments) and been reposted across Mastodon a year after original publication, without new commentary content provided in the evidence.
Geoffrey Litt Co-author, Ink & Switch researcherJosh Horowitz Co-author, Ink & Switch researcherPeter van Hardenberg Co-author, Ink & Switch researcherTodd Matthews Co-author, Ink & Switch researcher
How it unfolded 3 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Second Mastodon bot repost of the essay
A separate Mastodon aggregator account (newsycombinator@framapiaf.org) reposts the same essay and HN comments link, indicating continued cross-platform pickup of the resurfaced piece.
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I believe it is critical for regulators to force mega-corporations (and software vendors in general) to permit third party clients.I use services like YouTube every day, why can I get sued if I write my own YouTube client that's better than the one provided by Google? Why can I get sued if I create a chat client that aggregates the myriad of chat…
2 more of the top 3 · 12 posts in this stretch
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I agree that the current state of software is quite rigid. There is no room for imperfection and often one opinion is seen as fixed the best.I think the essence of the GPL is trying to solve this issue, the freedoms of that license is focused on keeping software as editable as possible. The idea of malleable software is not new but most…
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Looks like Microsoft were listening to Ink & Switch and borrowed their multiple-values-in-a-cell idea.Feb 2025: https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/September 2026:
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Essay link reposted on Mastodon
An automated Mastodon account (hkrn@mstdn.social) reposts the essay link along with the Hacker News comments URL, extending the essay's circulation beyond HN.
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Essay resurfaces on Hacker News front page
The essay reappears on Hacker News under user evakhoury, reaching a score of 40 with 9 comments, alongside a lower-traction duplicate posting via an HN Frontpage RSS aggregator.
“The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable.”
— Geoffrey Litt, Josh Horowitz, Peter van Hardenberg, and Todd Matthews, Ink & Switch researchers · source -
Discussed at the time:Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237881 - June 2025 (114 comments)
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background
Ink & Switch publishes 'Malleable Software' essay — Researchers Geoffrey Litt, Josh Horowitz, Peter van Hardenberg, and Todd Matthews publish an essay at Ink & Switch arguing that software should be as reshapeable as physical environments, contrasting today's 'sealed, unchangeable' apps with a vision of user-editable tools.
What people are saying 9 voices from 1 site · best of 13 · verbatim
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What's really restoring my agency right now is Claude's APK reverse engineering skills.I've been tearing through the apps on my phone and just adding the features I want.My biggest problem is I'm going to need actual good home CI and some compute: having these check in on new releases and maybe once a month give me a summary of what we need and…
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I have been trying to promote open source sw for as long as I can remember but peoplel like my wife who is a social worker says it is too clunky and gets in the way, recently I have been vide coding with apps on Raspberry Pi's and just maybe that gap is slowly starting to close.I for one am watching this space with a lot of interest.
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Intelligence and the mental load it requires has a budget - in both real and artificial forms. In real - people are bombarded with tools and requirements and when the teams behind those don’t consider mental load required, that spends down the budget. Thus people give up fighting all battles and are forced to prioritize their resources. Denial of…
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The realization that "normal" people don't care and will never care was the saddest for me. There are so few people who care. We're essentially irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. We have no leverage.
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Miss the days of hacking binaries or deeply customizing apps. Modern SaaS feels like renting a sealed box.
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I think one of the best ways of stopping lock-in is to be file-based. Obsidian is a good example of this. Users can just keep their data as is and move on with their lives.
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This whole article is true and to the point but... reality is: most people still don't build their own setups: work, home - most of them follow a sh*tty software or decorate with Ikea. I think this applies only to a small group of users how will be willing to go extra mile and prompt their ideal interface for whatever they need to do.
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Miss the days you could script or tweak everything. Modern apps feel like sealed black boxes with no escape hatches.
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This makes me miss the era when computers felt more like environments than products