I watched OpenAI's Astra announcement video, and immediately thought about the projector above my bed!

Which, sure, probably requires some explanation.

A few months ago, I projected Codex above my bed and posted that I needed to optimize every waking moment, including waking up in the middle of the night (That part was a joke. Please sleep.).

But the projector itself, and the idea of interacting with a computer that way, was something I was sincerely interested in (that's why I bought it). I wanted to see what it felt like to take a tool I used constantly and put it somewhere different. Which, I guess is kind of my specialty.

So seeing the projected interface in the Astra video was pretty exciting! It looked pretty similar to something I’d already tried and importantly, something I'd imagined as part of what comes next. It's pretty cool to see people who are literally helping design the future envision it in a way that feels familiar to you.

It also brought up something I want to figure out about myself. Basically, it boils down to this:

I love how I interact with technology now. I also want to leave room to love interacting with technology in ways I haven't tried yet!

Funnily, those feelings can be surprisingly difficult to hold at the same time.

I think part of figuring out this "conundrum" is understanding what I’m actually attached to.

Which parts of an interface do I love because they’re familiar, and which parts do I love because I actually enjoy the interaction? I guess I'd like to know what I’m hoping to carry forward.

I Want to Be Involved

When I first started thinking about these feelings, on a surface level I thought "Maybe it's simple. Maybe I just prefer physical interfaces." But, no, I don’t think that quite captures it.

I want something I can look at, sure. And something I can watch being manipulated, even if I’m not the one manipulating it all the time. But I absolutely want the option to step in and do something myself.

Watching Astra interact with a computer gives me this incredible feeling of wonder. But it’s still using my computer, so I'm in charge. And I can stop it, I can start it, and I recognize the environment it’s working in. There’s something familiar there, even while the full process is really entirely new.

Maybe part of that is just the illusion of control? I guess that might be a deeper issue, haha. But I think a lot of it comes down to how much I really just enjoy the process.

I’m someone who reads every bit of reasoning a model exposes. I'm curious! I want to understand why it went in one direction, what made it change approaches, etc. Sometimes I'm just inferring conclusions from the limited context I have, but sometimes the pieces click together and I learn a way of doing something I hadn’t considered.

That’s an experience I get a lot out of :)

So if I were to imagine a future interface that makes me uneasy, I can immediately say that it's one that cuts me out of that experience. Something happens, the result appears, and I haven’t had a way (however theoretical) to be involved.

Honestly, that gives me a little feeling of dread.

I like being part of figuring things out! I like having somewhere to "put" my curiosity. And I don’t know yet what happens to that feeling as the tools become capable of doing more on their own, without me.

That might explain why I keep making new ways to interact with them. Every interface is, to me, another place to get involved. Another thing to learn, another possibility to try, another “wait, could I do this?” And spoiler alert, the answer is usually "Yes!"

I Keep Putting Codex in Things

I guess, really, that I just love interfaces. I’ve been experimenting with interfaces for a while, although I don’t think I fully understood the connection between all these projects until I started writing this.

So, I'll give you a glimpse into what I keep building. It might be the easiest way to figure out what I’m trying to hold onto.

I put Codex on a Game Boy Color. I built a custom interface, made an on-screen keyboard, and sent prompts through the Game Boy’s infrared port to a bridge on my Mac. Then the answers came back to the Game Boy.

I also put it in Paintbrush. You draw your prompt by hand, mark a submit box, and get a response drawn back into the canvas.

I made a version for my 1998 iMac G3, and another for a Palm Tungsten E2 PDA I found at a thrift store. I bought the Palm, went to a cafe, and spent the next few hours getting it to work.

There have also been other interfaces, like using Joy-Cons on my Nintendo Switch, an e-ink reader, a pager for Twitter notifications, Claude Code through a Furby, and a rotary phone for my OpenClaw.

These projects involve tradeoffs, ones that are very apparent nowadays, but definitely weren't when the interfaces were new. A lot of the hardware I work with is, well, old. And old hardware can be slow, clunky, loud, or difficult to get working. I become very aware of that while working with them.

But getting an unusual interface to work brings me joy. So does the fact that it exists afterward. I had a strange idea, figured out how to make it happen, and now I can interact with something in a way I couldn’t before.

That experience is valuable to me even if the thing never becomes my daily setup.

The tool can be doing similar work underneath, but changing how I interact with it gives me a different experience. Sometimes that experience is drawing, sometimes it’s figuring out how to fit a conversation onto a tiny screen. That seems like a pretty important part of what an interface makes possible.

I think the reason I keep doing all of this with and for Codex is that Codex feels like the future to me. I’m so interested in that future that it "calls to me" creatively. I want to experiment with it. It's still so new; there's so much that's unexplored, and I'm honestly just fascinated.

Old Can Feel New

The terminal is one of my favorite interfaces right now.

Part of the fascination is because working in a terminal is so new to me, but another part is because it feels almost endless. Every time I discover another thing I can do in it, I start wondering what else is possible.

And, yeah, I find it funny that an interface with so much history can feel that expansive and new to me.

The iMac G3 gives me a different version of that feeling. Sorry if I make anyone feel old, but it was before my time, so I’m discovering it from the other direction. It somehow feels simpler and more complicated at once. I enjoy it, and I also encounter all these reasons computing moved forward at the same time. It's a weird mix of nostalgia and understanding of a time I literally never experienced, and also understanding and hope for a future that, again, I've never experienced.

Maybe I'm drawn to the personality of these interfaces? I want to see what happens when you give them access to something new.

I absolutely want future devices to make me feel that curious, too.

There’s something reassuring about discovering that feeling in interfaces from such different times. It makes me think there are probably a lot more ways to find it. But I have to actually give those ways a chance, which brings me to a slightly embarrassing part of this.

I Was an Apple Holdout

For someone who spends this much time experimenting with technology, I can be surprisingly stubborn about changing what I use.

I used Internet Explorer as my daily driver for way too long.

I also only switched to Apple products about two years ago, which I think would surprise some people.

I’d gotten curious enough to want to try it. But I really hadn’t understood how the other side lived when it came to ease of use in the Apple ecosystem, and with Apple interfaces.

I mean, AirDrop still blows my mind!

Before switching, I was sending myself every file and photo through Slack to get it onto another device. I’d accepted that as part of the process. It took time, but it was familiar, and I knew how to do it.

Then I experienced something easier and realized how much effort I’d been spending. And, look, I obviously wasn’t learning much from sending myself another file. So I guess I include this to say that figuring out what I’d happily give up in a process I actually enjoy is hard.

I willingly spend hours getting Codex onto a Game Boy, and I’m thrilled to stop spending time sending myself files. Both make sense to me! The challenge of the Game Boy gives me something I enjoy. Sending myself another photo through Slack had become a routine I barely questioned. I think I need to keep asking which kind of experience I’m holding onto.

I think about that when I catch myself getting attached to a particular vision of how I’ll use technology in the future. I have evidence that I can be very confident in a preference before discovering something I like more.

What Haven’t I Tried Yet?

I don’t think I’ll ever fully stop trying new technology. I’m too curious. But I do think comfort can make a transition harder, and I want to notice when that’s happening.

I get too attached to the ways I use interfaces, and I don't want future Maddie to dismiss a different kind of interface before experiencing it. Even if current Maddie is excited now.

That’s the possibility I want to leave room for!

Learning is my favorite thing to do. And for me, learning entails digging into how tools work, figuring out where they don’t work, and especially discovering the weird edge cases where they perform surprisingly well (that's my specialty).

A new interface could give me more ways to do that. It could help me understand something I couldn’t previously understand. It could let me experiment with something that’s currently out of reach, like how the tech world felt out of reach until pretty recently.

Maybe I'll find a way of being involved that I can't picture yet?

Even now, being involved sometimes means reading, sometimes drawing, sometimes pressing a button, and sometimes building the interface itself. My own projects have already expanded what participation can look like for me. I want to allow for the possibility that something new could expand it again.

I still feel uneasy about being cut out of the process, I think. I don’t have a "neat" resolution to that. But I want to keep trying things long enough to find out which parts of that worry hold up, and which parts change through experience.

I Want the Future to Be Fun

I want people to feel like they can still have fun with technology!

For me, that means learning more (especially things I couldn’t understand before). It means experimenting, it means building, and occasionally spending an afternoon making a very impractical object do something that I personally think is very exciting.

For someone else, it might mean making more art. Or enjoying more of what other people make. Or working on spreadsheets because they love working on spreadsheets (you do you).

I want people to have more room for whatever fulfills them. Even if that thing doesn’t involve technology at all (which is completely possible)!

People will want different amounts of involvement, too. I might want to watch every step of a process that someone else would happily hand off. I really hope there’s room for both of us.

And I’ll probably want different things at different times! I can imagine wanting a task completely handled so I have more time to dig into something else. That choice feels like the part of the future I’m excited about: getting to decide where I put my attention, and having more possibilities when I do.

And that's definitely what I want to carry into whatever comes next: the curiosity to try it, and the hope that it makes life more fulfilling in ways we each get to discover.

I don’t know what my favorite interface will be in a few years. Given my track record, it could be something very very strange.

But, yeah, I think I’m getting a better idea of what I hope to find in the interface of the future. Something that makes me want to explore, that I can learn through, that gives me that little “what if?” feeling, for sure.

I’d like the future to surprise me, but I want to be part of it.