What are Programmable Systems?
The status quo is no system we have interacts easily with the others. Our minds are not in contact with digital systems, the digital systems are closed to reduce user movement for business reasons and analog systems like paper and conversations are hard to work with at scale.
What systems?
- Information Systems
- Financial Systems
- Communication Systems
These three kinds of systems encompass most of daily human life especially in business.
What does one occupy most of their time with?
- Information Systems - processing information from different sources
- sales
- marketing
- accounting
- hr
- news / social media
- Communication Systems - communicating
- Messages (chat, direct messages)
- In Person conversations
- Calls / Meetings
- Financial Systems - transacting
- Finance
- Payments
- Investments
We keep record of information in ERPs, CRMs, databases, spreadsheets, calendars, notebooks, text messages, papers and many more. We communicate across many digital channels like direct messages, teamchats, mail and more while adding meetings and in person interactions. We transact across banks, cash, multiple digital channels and maybe even technololgies like blockchains. Additinally one may concern themselves with investments and wealth like assets, interest and the likes at exchanges, banks and markets a like.
All of these activities are coordinated by our brain which has to keep up with all these activities across seperate distinct channels.
Usually these channels are unable to directly work with each other leading to intermediaries facilitating the interaction or humans reentering data multiple times to keep systems up to date that should take work off us, not burden us with their incompatibilities. That is where programmability provides a genius advantage in that if some system is programmable, we can automatically have systems do the syncing if necessary at all. Full programmability would not need duplicates since we would be able to go to the source of truth and use data there to process it and do what we intend directly.
One sample could be the could be the process of invoice paymetns and invoicing in general. You sent an invoice out, now payment comes and the accountant reconciles from bank to accounting to invoicing and CRM. Why couldn’t an incoming payment trigger a system to book it and set all states in the accounting to paid automatically once that is done via the financial system? Paying an invoice can be triggered on incoming invoices according to the systematic rules configured. It’s reviewed, validated and paid. Today this happens fully manually by huymans across the mail, document (PDF), bookkeeping and payment infrastructure. Why wouldn’t one system prepare all that and just have a human say “correct, authorize payment” and be done? The systems can do all the work.
Programmability is a super power! Even outside of business.
Take your calendar for example. Imagine an assistant you can ask all about it. Move meetings, tell you what’s important, make sure you are always on top of everything. Add context from business data or your socials, communication systems, financial systems making the assistant perfectly able to assist you.
That can’t happen without the assistant having data access (read access at minimum) with the ability to manage your calendar. Resulting in programmability being a necessity.
Why do programmable systems matter?
If we look at current programmable, interconnected systems we get to custom built backend software systems, automation tooling (Zapier, n8n, …) and AI Systems interacting with each other. The typical question asked is “does this have an API?”.
In a programmable world when owning the system you have full access, the system is the API, it is the database connection needed, it is the programmable interface.
In this world everything opens up. You do not need to build bridges between islands, you just connect the systems. Or with AI and more autonomous systems you let the systems connect with each other, because they can.
The challenge becomes not a limiation of possibilities, but a limit of imagination. One needs to imagine the systems all working in tandem automagically.
It is magic.
Dream big, dream interconnected, dream programmable.
What’s the future of programmable systems?
The first one that comes ti mind is connecting messaging and the calendar. How many times do we communicate just to exchange times to set up meetings/calls? Our AI agents should programmatically do that. Tools like cal.com and calendly that provide self-service meeting booking/scheduling to whoever we send a link are a good start, but full programmability extends far beyond that.
I can see myself pinging my programmable calendar assistant to move meetings or TODOs (timeblockers - see timeboxing) in my calendar based on priorities it learns from my behaviour, pulls from my business data (e.g. ERP/CRM) and the chat history.
It may read all my incoming messages and schedule time blockers for incoming meeting requests and approve them by replying. Or it shows me proposals so I can approve/deny them. Going further it may schedule TODOs and reshuffle TODOs based on priorities like a client having an urgend request vs a TODO that is not as urgent.
Programmability means the assistant system has all this data access and can perform these actions.
Now we could add a User Interface on top of message and calendar access, with it’s context we get from the ERP, history and more we connected, that shows who we should respond to first based on priority the assistant assigned.
That makes skimming all messages unnecassary and allows us to focus on the high value added tasks. Though without enough data access the context available is lacking. The results will not be optimal outside of programmable systems, where the data access is available.
Integrating information systems beyond the business data (ERP, CRM, etc) will allow sthis sample system to go much further as it could search the internet to help you or connect all other kinds of information to be used as context.
Imagine a system that gets your codebase, support tickets and enough context to not only assing iussues to the relevant team member but already provide a solution in code? Your developers may not need to code simple support ticket fixes and merely review the fixes from the programmable system like an AI agent. This frees up lots of communication and development time.
Information systems could also be integrated to pull up relevant social media posts based on your marketing/sales data so your content improves. The suggestions could be made continously by sending the thoughts and link to content into a shared communication channel between your team and the programmable system (AI agent or other).
The same continous monitoring could be employed to track projects and ping if improvements can be made or a deadline approaches. Combined with communication systems one is able to build internal reporting and improvement systems that have a full overview of the project. Live Post Mortems made easy? It could also help in communication across the project like clearing confusion or scheduling a call when it sees the need. Imagine not running into communication issues and having a mentor system that makes sure all parties keep aligned and communicate instantly once confusion is detected.
On a personal level news aggregates based on your personal context can surface the most relevant information across sources for you. Such a system enables keeping tabs on way more sources than any human can. This system does not get tired extending beyond the information processing capacity of us humans. On the business side this could surface all relevant changes in dependencies, market sentiment, competitors and legal realms.
The possibilities enabled by programmabililty are endless as sketeched brieflu, though we did not add financial systems to the given examples.
Using financial systems we can automate all kinds of payments like reordering materials including paying or invoicing. The news sources aggregator outlined previously could use programmable financial systems to source information behind paywalls by deciding if it is worth paying for, doing so and then leveraging the information.
Payroll accounting and processing could also be fully automated between programmable busines, accounting and financial systems.
Shopping holidays or christmas presents could be automated by an assistant having the relevant context and doing the transactions for you. Potentially one may want to first see a list of suggestions then authorize with the assistant doing the finalisation of booking, calendar entries and more after manual authorization. Holiday trip assistants combine information systems like booking websites for available options, financial systems to pay and communication systems for personal context about preferences or people involved from group chats and more.
There are many more great uses for programmability.
I invite you to open your mind to it.
Please share your ideas and send them over to me on Farcaster.
Summary
- programmable systems open Pandoras Box -> the only limit in a programmable world truely becomes imagination and creativity
- Betting on AI getting better means choosing programmable solutions today, so you can benefit tomorrow.
- Ask yourself what you can do if chores are automated away? What will people do? What will people want?
- Architect your business to be accelerated by programmability, not be killed by it.
- Programmable privacy will happen. Don’t worry about privacy. Solutions are already in the works. Reasearch Zero Knowledge and Confidential Compute.
- Open your mind. Think modular, think composable, think programmable. Remove the chains.
Cheers to a programmable future.
- Samuel