Still Burning Find the North Star
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Apr 22, 2026 Amelia Wattenberger, a frontend developer and designer known for thoughtful takes on tooling and UX. She explores reimagining developer tools beyond the IDE, collaborative environments that prioritize context over simultaneous editing, and playful prototyping versus KPI-driven work. She also discusses agent-driven interfaces, remixable apps, and the need for a clear North Star in creative tooling.
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How A Rejected Lab Website Launched A Developer Career
- Amelia Wattenberger accidentally became a developer after building her lab's website and iterating personal sites repeatedly for learning.
- She joined a startup as the sole front-end dev without knowing frameworks and learned on the job while enjoying the mix of creativity and technical challenge.
Collaboration Is Context Not Multicursor Editing
- Collaboration in coding lives more in docs, issues, and shared context than in simultaneous edits to source files.
- Amelia built a desktop app 'membrane' primitive to hold context, tasks, and conversations so people and agents can work together on the same project.
Protect Play To Discover New Primitives
- Preserve play and low-stakes sandboxes to explore novel interfaces instead of optimizing solely for KPIs.
- Amelia argues experiments without immediate production consequences reveal new primitives; without play we only refine existing interfaces.