We Still Need a HyperCard for the AI Era (rogerwong.me)

The author argues that the AI era is missing a modern equivalent of HyperCard: an accessible, malleable authoring environment that lets ordinary users build, own, and distribute interactive apps without deep programming skills. Drawing on HyperCard’s five simple primitives—cards, stacks (apps), objects (buttons/fields), HyperTalk (plain‑English event scripting), and hyperlinks—the piece shows how that “programming for the rest of us” model powered hobbyist culture (even Myst was a HyperCard stack) and influenced the Web itself (HyperCard inspired early browsers and hypertext conventions). That history matters because today’s AI tooling reproduces some of HyperCard’s promise (vibecoding and natural‑language code generation) but leaves users stuck in brittle chatbox interfaces, closed SaaS ecosystems, or niche low/no‑code tools that don’t combine generality, ownership, and easy distribution. The technical implication: we need an authoring platform that pairs AI-assisted natural‑language programming with event‑based primitives, composable UI and logic modules, hyperlinkable state/navigation, and export/share capabilities—so users get HyperCard’s creative freedom without requiring professional developers or sacrificing control. Such a tool could revive the tinkerers’ ecosystem while making powerful, shareable personal software accessible to everyone.