It's even worse than it appears..
If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype. Don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps leading me into different corners that have nothing to do with it. When it clicks, it can go faster than a thousand programmers and it's a miracle, and when we can harness it to the job we want to do it's incredibly economical. $100 for $1 million of work. That's why you see me full of gusto for that mode. What I haven't written about how when you slow to nothing, back and forth, and you get no closer. I hate this kind of work, esp the role I have to play in it. #
I just went through hell trying to respond to an email that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link to the message, so I clicked it, took me to a Mastodon post, where there was a bit of (valid) snark, from a longtime friend. So I clicked Reply, and then the dialog from hell. I understand why it is this way. They did the best they could for a protocol that was designed that wasn't appropriate for a distributed system like Twitter which was what Masto was/is. At some point you have to be dispassionate about this. We wanted a self-driving car, but it can't drive itself. The spec isn't the important thing. You do that after you have the software running and usable. #

© copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer.

Last update: Wednesday August 12, 2026; 10:31 AM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)