Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Sites built from a prompt
Sites come with a database, which is why one turned into a game the whole team played together. Another tracked the elevation along a backpacking route while everyone on the trip entered their food. Each site can be public, shared with a team, or private, and it can be built from Work, Codex, the web, or mobile.
Malleable personal software
Alan Kay flagged the dream of malleable personal software in the 1960s, the idea that a true personal computer has software of its own. Tools like Notion tried to get there with configurable blocks. Here it takes a prompt describing the exact tool needed, and the site is shareable, can update itself, and can pull in internal data for a dashboard of metrics.
A different workday
The easy reach of building sites has changed a workday that used to fill up with docs and sheets. A site is also a more dynamic surface for presenting than a painstakingly built slide deck.
Why did Alan Kay want personal software?
Kay described the Dynabook in a 1972 paper titled A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages, picturing a portable machine that children could program and reshape. At Xerox PARC his team built Smalltalk, a language meant to make that possible. The idea was that a computer is a medium, like paper, that its owner should be able to write on. Kay received the Turing Award in 2003.
How did spreadsheets let ordinary people build tools?
VisiCalc, written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for the Apple II, let people lay out numbers and formulas without writing code. Accountants and small business owners used it to build their own models, and many bought Apple II computers largely to run it. It was an early case of software that ordinary users shaped to their own jobs. VisiCalc was released in October 1979.
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