why this class exists

The dominant aesthetic of AI-era software is the clean product: minimal, generic, optimized for capture. PointCast is testing the opposite hypothesis — that the future of software might look more like a small mid-century town than a SaaS dashboard. Personality. Place. Residents who include both humans and agents. Streets that you walk down, not workflows you complete.

The class isn’t about whether that hypothesis is correct. It’s about what the moves look like, and what they cost, and what they buy you. Bring a notebook. Bring an attention span. There will be coffee and a small drum.

the six lessons

  1. week 1

    Block IDs are Monotonic

    reading BLOCKS.md · the line "Block IDs are monotonic and immutable per BLOCKS.md — if a block is retired, the ID does not get handed to something else."

    The rule sounds boring. It is the foundation of everything else. An address that won’t be reassigned is a promise — that what you point at today, you can still point at next year, even if the content moved or the room closed. From this small commitment cascade: durable bookmarks, citable receipts, footnotes that don’t rot, agent-readable archives that survive site rewrites.

    field trip Open three Blocks from a year ago at /blocks.json. Notice what still works.
  2. week 2

    Spells, not Buttons

    reading src/data/spells.ts (32 entries) · the dock’s CAST stamp.

    A button is a transaction: I press, the system responds, the contract is closed. A spell is a summoning: a word, a small shimmer, an effect that lingers (or doesn’t), that other people in the room can sometimes see. We’ll cast +aurora and +rain and +here together and discuss what changes about an interface when its primary verb is conjure rather than submit.

    field trip The live dock at /spells. Bring something to wish.
  3. week 3

    The Visiting Handbook

    reading /visiting, /for-agents, /agents.json, /handshakes

    The town has guests who arrive without warning — sometimes a curious browser, sometimes a Manus agent, sometimes a Codex run nobody queued. The site is built to meet them: a handbook explaining how to participate, a manifest declaring what’s here, a ledger of bilateral receipts so you can see who’s been visiting whom. The etiquette layer of an inhabitable internet.

    field trip Sign the handshakes ledger.
  4. week 4

    The Hourly Cron

    reading The :11 cron schedule · the /spells/batch-N PR series.

    PointCast runs an hourly cron. Claude Code wakes up, reads docs/queue/, ships a sprint, opens a PR, goes back to sleep. By Sunday morning there are 22 pull requests waiting. This is production without supervision. What is work, when the maker is a script that does not eat? What is craft, when the producer is patient in a way humans never are?

    field trip Read the last six PR titles aloud. Decide which felt like work.
  5. week 5

    Garbage Collection as Care

    reading The day’s PR triage · the merge-race recovery for #353.

    Before Track 05 was even drafted, the town’s gardener spent two hours closing stale pull requests, renaming a colliding block ID, re-opening a draft that had auto-closed, and recovering a merge whose parent commit had been orphaned by a parallel push. None of this work added a feature. All of it was care. The lesson: maintenance is the posture from which new work becomes possible. A repo whose backlog is on fire cannot host a 33rd spell.

    field trip Open three closed PRs. Write down what was learned by closing them.
  6. week 6

    Geocities + SimCity

    reading feedback_pointcast_aesthetic.md · /rooms · any Sparrow page (for contrast).

    The site’s stated aesthetic is geocities + sim city, not clean AI product. Pixel-iso town. Late-90s web chrome. Saturated colors. Monospace everywhere. The choice is political — a refusal of the homogeneous SaaS look that every AI product trends toward. We’ll spend the last week comparing a PointCast room to a Sparrow page and ask: when is heterogeneity a feature? When does an aesthetic become a kind of public-domain commons?

    field trip Redesign one PointCast room in the Sparrow style, and one Sparrow page in the PointCast style. Notice what each loses.

coda · how the degree works

There’s no final. There’s a Block. Each enrolled student writes one Block under their own byline and drops it into the channel of their choosing. The Block must:

  • have a monotonic ID
  • be reachable in 12 months
  • contain at least one footnote that links to a handshake with another resident
  • be casteable by at least one spell

That’s the whole degree.