Listened to this podcast interview with Andy Hertzfeld one of the lead devs on the Macintosh, he talks about his time at General Magic and Google too.#
His interviewers were surprised that he likes developing with AI tools. People think that developing is just coding, but that's only part of it, and when you put that aside and become the director, script writer, choreographer, the whole thing, all of a sudden:#
you have time to try out every idea because it's free and fast.#
you have time to work on interop, building bridges between your software and other people's.#
a very long list of other things you can do that one person could never do before. #
Programmers have a better chance of being social in a world like this, but so far unless you want all your software from bots, you still will like the work of a craftsperson and visionary more than Claude (who I have deep respect for, not sarcastic, it seriously has superpowers). #
I'm doing some of my best work now because I can dream, I can ask Claude to try something out overnight and most of the time it is able to do it. and then what if we did this -- for the next night.#
In between we write docs, help users, add features to the product that's shipped that people are developing around. And most important it checks all the code for breakage before anyone sees it. never had anything like this.#
This means a lot of things -- one of them -- a single developer can create products at bigco scale. If we think a big company did something wrong, we can compete. We still need a few things to make this really work -- user-owned and controlled storage is the big one. #
The bot can handle infinite complexity. If you ask it to do something where the result is clear, it does it. It doesn't matter what it is. It will need help and encouragement, a pointer in the right direction, and along the way we all seem to be sharing what we learn with everyone else.#
There's never been a leap in tech anything like this in my life. #
How could Andy Hertzfeld knowing all that which I'm sure he does, not use it?#
Also -- I didn't know JLG wanted to kill Hypercard, but if he did I'm pretty sure I know why. There are all these unnecessary divisions in tech. The first impulse should be to work together. I know that Andy sees it from the other side, he talks about it in the podcast, he felt that way about Newton re their Magic Cap system at General Magic. Yes, you all should have at least made your products work together, and for sure you should have bet on SMTP. #
Last update: Wednesday July 29, 2026; 1:15 PM EDT.
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