Bits and Bobs 2/2/2026

As institutional authority weakens and certainty feels suspect, this aesthetic legitimizes unfinished thinking, signaling seriousness without the false comfort of polish.

John Wilson's documentaries are a good reference point. Meandering, observational, odd. He directed a bunch of Bon Iver's recent music videos.

BRAT was this aesthetic in flyer form: fluorescent, underdesigned, intellectually overstimulated, like theory notes spilled across a club floor and stapled together five minutes before the deadline. So was Lorde's recent work: fish eye, chaos, her in a white shirt & jeans strutting the streets of NYC.

As agent interfaces like ChatGPT or Claude become prompt-driven distribution surfaces, we're going to see a new crop of apps come to life.

You don't win by being downloaded. You win by being invoked.

In this world, apps are discovered by capability. Ranking is based on whether the tool works, how fast it is, how reliably it succeeds, and whether it can be trusted with context. Distribution happens at the moment of intent, not ahead of time.

We're moving from tools that return outputs to tools that ship experiences. Once a tool can bring its own UI, the host is no longer just a chat window. It becomes an operating system for little applications.

You can think of @modelcontextprotocol/ext-apps as a way to turn "a tool result" into "a tool result plus an interactive micro-app UI" that renders inline inside a host. In MCP Apps, the UI is not generated by the model. It is a versioned HTML/JS artifact that the server advertises and the host renders in a sandboxed iframe.

If you control the host, you control distribution, policy, identity, and economics. You get an app store, a runtime, and a default surface area.

ChatGPT is trying to incentivize developers to "build on ChatGPT" – they want to be the Apple here.

Anthropic's MCP UI and MCP apps are a counter-move. They separate the app from the host. Same tool, same UI, many clients. The bet is that developers should not have to choose a single company's interface layer to reach users.

Picasso's Bulls describe the creative journey perfectly.

Picasso draws the bull over and over until it becomes almost nothing, and somehow more true.

The graph I drew under it explains the journey in complexity across time: complexity rises first, then declines. You do not get to "perfectly simple" by starting simple. You get there by exhausting the subject.

This is the operating loop:

It's the same move in product. Let the first version be a full-bodied bull. Then iterate toward the icon. Simplicity is not restraint, it's refinement.