Claude code notes, day 2

Thinking of AI and how it relates to software development, I'm working in the old mode and the new mode. The old mode is I build a project over a few years. I try to bury bits of functionality behind interfaces, either APIs or UIs, and hope I can forget how they work and just access them via the interfaces. Repeat the process. In the new mode, I rely on the machine to remember all that. Claude Code is the key to doing that, using a GitHub repo. And then two or more people can work at the higher level. Obviously the next thing is to see if there aren't some interfaces we can build that are even higher level. The evolution of AI and languages go hand in hand. On the other hand, human beings being what we are, it's just as likely as there will be a wild proliferation of new even more complex interfaces, because now we can rely on the machines to remember the complexities, and their limit is, compared to humans, practically infinite.

WordPress feeds and guids

Try entering this into Claude or ChatGPT: "debugging an app that uses wordpress rss feeds and noticed that guids are http but other addresses in the feed are https. this causes trouble." A while back Matt was giving me grief, in a friendly way, about how scripting.com still uses http addresses, the reason apparently is the same one that keeps them from using https in the guids in their feeds. It would break a lot of things that I don't want to break. I'm not suggesting they change it, but somewhere in my codebase somehow the http addresses are getting converted to https, and I haven't (yet) been able to track it down.

Here's a screen shot of the Claude response.

Claude Code notes

Yesterday, I put another couple of hours in my from-scratch right-sized Claude project. I decided we should switch from a browser-based app with no server component to a Node.js app with a browser-based UI. I felt it would be substantially easier to develop as a server app, and would more easily be enhanced with a SQL database running behind it. So I learned how to do that with Claude Code. had to slap its wrist when it tried, twice, to look at and change code outside of the freaking sandbox. I was promised it never would do that. I have the server running in PagePark, which has a built-in Heroku-like system I wrote a few years ago so I could manage all my apps from a CLI app, on Unix at Digital Ocean. Then we created a nice UI running in the browser. Two hours. And how did it make me feel? Mind bomb!

An important best practice is to always start fresh threads by asking the old thread to prepare a handoff.md file that I can give to the next one, so we don't have to always start over. It takes some getting used to because coding doesn't work that way. Everything about your app is in three classes, CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There's also package.json for server apps. And I always have a worknotes.md file for every project. And that's it, the runtime isn't like Claude or ChatGPT. You have to get practiced at starting fresh threads because there's only so much data the app can store for your project. Somehow having the handoff.md doc it effectively does garbage collection? And there are limits to what the "make me a handoff" can do for you, it does forget things between threads. I don't understand how people with large projects don't go completely crazy.

It is incredibly stubborn at insisting on giving you orders or deciding for itself what it will do. According to these AI's the human will isn't important, I couldn't possibly have arrived in the chat with a goal. I am blown away by what I can do, but I absolutely hate how these bots try to dominate, always, and never remembers. There should be a macro for: "I will tell you what to do."

Toni Schneider, Bluesky's new CEO

Bluesky has a new CEO, Toni Schneider former CEO of Automattic. I have known Toni for many years, dating back to his startup, Oddpost, that I praised on my blog, and his partner was then quoted in Wired saying Scripting News is media. That meant a lot to me at the time, and it was true. I was very proud that I had played a small part in their success.

I had a virtual meeting with Toni a couple of years ago about their identity product, then in development, urging them to include storage in it, but as far as I know that didn't happen.

Toni believes that Bluesky is a distributed social media app, but I've been all around this, wrote some software for their protocol to see if I was missing something, and concluded that it's typical tech industry hype, there's no reality to the claim. They're selling something they don't have, and I don't think they can do it and preserve the feature set of their product.

Here's a search for Bluesky on my blog. You can see that I have taken a great interest in the product.

Scripting News unfortunately is not as influential as it once was when I praised Oddpost, but I think this advice is equally valuable as it was in 2002. I think the shortest path for Bluesky to achieve its vision is to hook up with WordPress, that would give us a path into it that is decentralized. If we ever talk about this, ironically, I will be selling Toni on his own product.

Manton's Inkwell

My friend Manton Reece has a new feed reader called Inkwell. The thing that's great about Manton is he tries out new ideas. This is a feed reader of experimentation. Let's see if this works, Manton asks. We'll find out. I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways. I think before long they won't laugh at the idea that RSS is at least as good as AT Proto. (That's a joke, RSS is so much better in so many ways.)

BTW, I'm not sure how Inkwell will fit into my life. I want to try the features of his product, but I am already in FeedLand, all my feed subscriptions emanate from there. I could import my feeds into Inkwell, it supports OPML import, but the subs would not stay in sync. Something for Manton to worry about in a few months or years. No doubt a lot of people are going to love Inkwell, I love it because it's new and creative and represents a substantial investment in RSS. We all got an upgrade today thanks to Manton.

If you want to get an idea of how it works, he did a video demo for his beta testers.

AIs can reason

I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app.

Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently.

I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be.

And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood.

He was a trust buster

If he were alive today he'd be busting silos.

Cory, RSS has never been dormant

I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom.

• Development around RSS has never "lain dormant." That's a perception not reality. Let's stop handicapping what we agree is a very useful and freedom-building system like RSS. You're telling the story that makes people believe it's gone. It is not gone.
• Without the NYT the rest of the news publishing world would probably have never adopted RSS. The NYT drove the liftoff of RSS. Google's product did come to dominate, but there were excellent feed readers long before that.

Happened to the Mac too

• In the early days of the web, it was conventional wisdom that there was no new software for the Mac, all the developers were flocking to Windows. Maybe all the devs were, but the best web server and development software, writing software, was on the Mac.

A blogroll for 2026

• BTW, since you mention Kottke's blogroll, I'd love for you to have a look at mine. You can see it on my blog at scripting.com, or on the WordPress version of my blog at daveverse.org. A screen shot.
• It's a realtime blogroll, the blogs appear in the order in which they last updated. You can expand each item to see the titles of the last five pieces, with a 300-char excerpt, and a link to read the whole thing. It's the blogroll I wanted in the early 00s, a clear indication that there's nothing dormant going on here, Cory.
• You can install it on your own system, it works as a WordPress plugin, so it's especially easy to use it on a WordPress site.

My old ass

• I'm working my old ass off developing for the web and RSS every freaking day Cory.
• I won't stop until we have a social web running with all replaceable parts, no lock-in, as decentralized as the web itself and of course RSS is part of the web.

Really Simple pizza

"It really tastes like a pizza!!"

I tuned into the Fediforum

I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)

They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.

Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.

It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference.

Some of my takeaways from the meetup.

• Getting more people to use Bluesky and AT Proto was the topic. I don't know how to do that, and I don't think there's anything developers can do to make it happen. I think both products are what they will continue to be.
• What's needed is to get all the various systems to interop. There must be a definition of what a text message is. Since we're trying to make the social web, I recommend looking to the web for the definition of what a text object is. I would go with a subset of the web. I outlined the features in the textcasting doc I wrote a few years ago. I am using Markdown in my software, and it seems like a lot of other people feel this is a good subset to use.
• Bluesky will never be a distributed system because it has features that depend on being centralized. That's okay, perfection isn't needed.
• Even better would be to have all systems support both inbound and outbound RSS, then they can do whatever they want internally, and users can participate using any blog and any feed reader. And independent developers can go crazy trying out all kinds of variants. That's how it works in WordLand 2 coming real soon now. 😄
• More people will use a system when it's fun and/or interesting and they can't wait to see what else happened there. Like watching Alysa Liu videos now. People don't think about what they want, they just want it. That's what Twitter was like when it started. Unfortunately you can't start it again, if you want people to want it, you have do something new.
• I talk too much. That's the downside of having an interesting conference. At a boring one where people give PowerPoint type talks, I can listen, form my opinions, write a blog post that no one reads and get back to work on my projects.
• One day I'd love to go to one of these meetings and find people I can work with. You can be sure I'll let you know when that happens. Last conference I went to where that happened was at WordCamp Canada last October, but that wasn't about the social web, it was about WordPress.
• I got to talk with Mike Masnick. I don't understand why he has a board seat at Bluesky and promotes it as a decentralized system. He's a highly credible reporter at TechDirt, but you can't be part of a company you cover and report on it with credibility. And it is not now and imho never will be a distributed system. I talked with him about this, at one of the virtual groups-of-six tables, but he didn't respond. I don't like it when Bluesky misleads users and they buy it, but as bad as that is, it is predictable. A credible journalist doing it, I can't comprehend that. I am open to being convinced, but I'm kind of an expert on this stuff, so it's really going to blow my mind if I'm wrong.

opmlProjectEditor format

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff.

It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it.

I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that).

Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this.

Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub.

I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops.

Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format.