I learned the word from Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, I'm ashamed to say. But it's what's going on inside the head. How much software is left that has anything to do with that?

Not business software, surely; that's all performance. Not image software or page layout; those are canvases, the things you have to fight to make them look the way they do inside you. Maybe music software, but only in the most technical way, arguably a more technical way than code editors.

Research tools ought to do it. They ought to have at least some tools in the toolbar that are for thinking with. But they don't seem to. It's just search, navigate somewhere, hardcode a link, painstakingly weave a web that you're never going to put to a use besides distraction. Where is the page in Notion - and I'm sure it exists, but still, where is it really? - that hands you two ideas at random and asks you to synthesize them, or else separate them for good?

Or: to really think with software, you need a lot of undo: so much undo that it almost becomes something else. Let me walk down a path, rewind it, then pluck it out like a green branch from a tree and save it somewhere. Efforts at doing something like this are generally a mess, maybe because they have to go on a screen with everything else. Or maybe I'm asking the impossible again.

Maybe this would end up being a half-decent way to use LLM-based generative AI: turn up the temperature just a bit, go off the beaten path, but have my collection of notes and topics in mind. Find the themes that are hiding from me. But the kind of training you'd need, and all the GPU time and energy and heat already making a galaxy of customer-service chatbots.

We haven't made real tools for thought, just tools for nailing down thoughts we're already finished having. What I'm after is an aesthetic, software that doesn't feel like I'm interacting with anyone else but that I don't have to write for myself. Software that wasn't there to help me make anything for anyone, and didn't make me feel even like I'd taken something meant for productivity and subverted it to useless ends. How could software say to you, with its being, this isn't about ends?