Geoffrey Litt is a design engineer at Notion. He is one of the authors at Ink & Switch of “Malleable software,” which I linked to back in July. I think it’s pretty fitting that he popped up at Notion, with the CEO Ivan Zhao likening the app to LEGO bricks.

In a recent interview with Rid on Dive Club, Litt explains the concept further:

So, when I say malleable software, I do not mean only disposable software. The main thing I think about with malleable software is actually much closer to … designing my interior space in my house. Let’s say when I come home I don’t want everything to be rearranged, right? I want it to be the way it was. And if I want to move the furniture or put things on the wall, I want to have the right to do that. And so I think of it much more as kind of crafting an environment over time that’s actually more stable and predictable, not only for myself, but also for my team. Having shared environments that we all work in together that are predictable is also really important, right? Ironically, actually, in some ways, I think sometimes malleable software results in more stable software because I have more control.

For building with AI, Litt advocates “coding like a surgeon”: stay in the loop and use agents for prep and grunt work.

How do we think of AI as a way to leverage our time better? [So we can] stay connected to the work and [do] it ourselves by having prep work done for us. Having tools in the moment helping us do it so that we can really focus on the stuff we love to do, and do less of everything else. And that’s how I’m trying to use coding agents for my core work that I care about today. Which is when I show up, sit down at my desk in the morning and work on a feature, I want to be prepped with a brief on all the code I’m going to be touching today, how it works, what the traps are. Maybe I’ll see a draft that the AI did for me overnight, sketching out how the coding could go. Maybe some ideas for me.

In other words, like an assistant who works overnight. And yeah, this could apply to design as well.