Exoskeleton for the Mind

One of the core things that gave us humans a leg up over other creatures is our ability to form tools that help us further our cause. These tools were not just physical things, like spears, axes, hammers and such, but also mechanisms for expression and communication. Language, symbols, ideas are examples of this. Combining human intuition with these tools are the basis of everything we see in our planet.

When general purpose personal computers started becoming a thing, we unlocked a new range of human expression that was difficult before. We unlocked the capability of building tools that exist entirely in the realm of expressions: software. An amazing unlock with this expression called software is that we are able to build out these ‘castles of abstractions’ that help the user wield it well. A ‘file’ is not a thing that actually exists and it also doesn’t express how it is laid out in the physical realm, it is just an idea, existing purely as a relatable crutch that the user can hang on to an wield.

All these abstractions in the software world solely exist for one purpose: to be wielded by the user so they can accomplish their goals but these tools aren’t written by the users themselves, at least not the majority of the users that consume it. It is instead written by people who intimately understand the art of building these realms. We call them developers, software engineers, programmers and so on. They build upon existing software and build out new ones, making new software that hopefully delights the users and furthers their goals.

These class of people had a pretty unique superpower. These ‘developers’ by having the ability to understand and mould their realms were able to develop further tools (software) that helped them do their work more productively. They didn’t need to rely on others, you don’t need to pay for anything. You just write code and run it in the computer and they get to massively grow their productivity. For example, these folks wanted a place to ask solutions for problems with their craft and they build something like Stack Overflow. They want to collaborate with other people on building their software and they build version control systems. All of these are ideas in a developer’s head that with their superpower was able to be built to solve their own problems. It’s like an exoskeleton, that allows them to further their goals faster, better and smoother.

I am a person belonging to the same class as those people. I have a very (personally) high bar of things I expect from the software I use. I write my own tools and utilities and even mould the desktop environment and user interface I interact with to exactly work for me. The software I build these abstractions on are similarly written by people similar to me and many of these software that I end up using is designed to be moulded by me explicitly. For example, I use Vim as my text editor, it is a remarkable piece of software with the ability to be scripted: through which I can make it work exactly like how I want. I don’t like the default theming, so I use a theme that I like, I have a specific way I like to flow when I review and deal with pull requests and I just implement it in or bring in a ‘plugin’ made by someone like me who have implemented something similar. Vim is just one example. There are many other ‘malleable’ software out there. I authored this post in Obsidian, which is also one such piece of software for example. So are other apps like Notion and maybe even your spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets!

The ability to mould them is still locked behind the acquiring this understanding of how to ‘program’ them. How can we empower everyone to be able to mould their digital worlds to fit them perfectly ? How can we make an exoskeleton specifically tailored by them to fit their minds. I believe, with the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the capabilities they bring into the table will unlock the same superpowers I enjoyed to everyone with access to them. I am seeing it live right now with a lot of people building things they couldn’t before just by the virtue of this technology.

This is the core idea behind Chibi: a journey to figure out the what and the how of the things we have to build to make this dream come true. An exoskeleton fitted for not just us, but for everyone in the world. Our intention is to catalogue these findings and experiment with different strategies that will lead us into this reality.