I was talking at around a year ago with Tudor Girba and asked him what is his opinion towards AI---I somehow believed it to be conflicting with his world view, but then he showed me some amazing demos of llms walking inside of the GT, making tools and molding it. It was way before these new agentic plugin-based IDEs.

I think Girba's really amazing idea of "language = ui = software = data" has a huge win in terms of AI that is not used anywhere else (maybe only in Chris Granger's Eve), but to work with data and build live on it, is something way better than BB.

I agree, it's an awesome concept in principle (and Girba is graciously welcoming people in discord). Working with an agent in GT, the agent will just look at the data and figure out how to express it in the graphical framework.

But in practicality, at least at this point, bb wins out by sheer expansiveness of ecosystem. I was working on a mishmash of an editor interface that combined obsidian with heptabase, directly in GT. It kind of worked. And the amazing thing is, everything has just a single representation: window positions displayed as text automatically have 2 way bindings across widgets, because they are the same data. But even with agents doing everything, 2 things creep up.

First is in JS/TS, all these binding problems are solved 1000x already. You can fake shared memory with callbacks and the agent won't lose track. In GT you move the cursor around, and have to decide at what point do you convert a widget representation to source representation, and when to restore the widget: is it a delay? is it after changing lines? is it after you move off the text? before or after the whitespace? There's a package for that somewhere in npm that answered all these questions, and it has tables, and it's performant. It doesn't do the 2% stuff that GT does using its magical shared memory representation (which also makes TS->smalltalk porting not straightforward), but you can still tape over it with sheer optimized code.

The second thing is that GT got really slow with all the data structure re-interpreting and rerendering. As "dirty" as bb is in reloading dynamic code, the runtimes are so optimized, I wanted the markdown nodes to be GPU-accelerated in bb, and it turns out they already were.