The next milestone will be installing Atlantis on my new macbook, and hooking a monitor up to it, a really nice one, and move my work to that desk. then Berkeley, the name of the system I've been using for eight years, will be here as a backup and source of truth and prior art. That was the goal of the Atlantis project. I could probably do the switch right now. It's like moving out of an old house that you did good stuff in, into a replica, but built out of the latest bits. Honestly I never thought in a million years I'd get here.
#My longtime friend
Jeff Jarvis says the press is covering
the wrong story re AI. I agree, but I think Jeff is covering the wrong story too. This is really a discovery like electricity, or
Newtonian physics, calculus, basically the technology of knowledge. I wish I were 22 years old now so I could plan out a long career working this way. I want people like Jeff to understand. Not saying there's no truth to the other stories, but I've yet to hear anything from journalism about how, if left alone, it would develop all areas of
human thought.
#
It is probably the closest to
First Contact with an intelligent alien life form that our species will ever have.
#On a good day working with Claude is like working with my old UW-Madison programmer friend
Gary Sevitsky from the 70s.
#
I've been writing about Atlantis on various social media sites in the last few days. Published the long piece I wrote
yesterday on Facebook and X, both of which allow long posts. Wasn't going to try that on Mastodon or Bluesky, which have character limits (I know Mastodon doesn't technically have a limit, but in practice it does). And I am reaching old school Frontier enthusiasts, and realize I need a feed they can follow to stay up on the news. For now the one place to follow is
rss.xml on scripting.com. If your reader can't deal with http, let me know.
#Claude has started asking me how Claude is doing. It's clear that the Claude I talk to knows nothing about this. I appreciate this, and hope if I said it wasn't working well with me, it would try to fix it? Not sure. Anyway this is what I just wrote, and felt it was worth blogging. "it's working with me the way i want to, and it appears to be learning and getting better at it, though i think that could be my imagination. also just as likely that i'm learning how to work the way it likes to work."
#With Claude Code you don't have to write system scripts to get data about your data. Claude makes that fully transparent. For example, I just asked Claude to get me a list of all the parts I've changed since the last release of frontier.root. So far all the releases have been internal, between Claude and myself. After the job was done, and I had the list in hand, I asked Claude to show me the
script it wrote to do the work. It was not written in my coding style which is fine, I wasn't meant to see this. In all the years I've been programming we've never come up with a syntax that was anything close to the simplicity of math. It's easy to describe the algorithm mathematically, but look at all the explaining it had to do it in JS.
#
Screen shot of new Frontier verb, string.addressToString, added yesterday. The comment at the head of the function explains. You're seeing it in the script editor in Atlantis. The Debug button is there to remind me that it's the biggest item on the todo list. We're now building the system that will make Frontier an easily updateable runtime. Once we're there I think we'll be at the summit of the mountain. We know how to work from that point. Find a bug? Fix it, test it, release it. We already have a backlog of parts to update. And it's great to have Claude here being the book keeper. It is imperfect, but it's way better than I am at managing details.
#
It's like we're living in a science fiction movie. Some of us are working with the aliens. At first the journalists only fear was driven by their natural narcissism, all that matters is they get paid for their writing. Now all they can see is the much larger threat to humanity. What if the aliens decide to destroy humanity, or turn earth into a bypass on a freeway. In the movie I'm a scientist, played by Jeff Goldblum or Brad Pitt and my love interest is played by Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lawrence or Amy Adams and we're racing against time to really connect with the aliens who we are sure mean us well and offer the way past our myrid crises to get to the next stage of civilization. But wait, Bradley Whitford plays the evil politician trying to sell out the aliens to a food manufacturer who thinks they could make an excellent meat sauce for spaghetti.
#When people get to work with the new Frontier with Claude or some other AI tool, you can have it search in frontier.root based on a conversation with it. It can decide on its own where to look for prior art. I keep finding things like this now that I'm working in the new software.
#
- Lots of stuff going on around WordPress for the last couple of years, and every bit of is a distraction from what I want to do to help the web get back on its feet. I remember how great it was when everything could hook into everything else. The web was like Unix. Today's "web" is like Disneyland. Safety first. Nothing interesting ever happens there. #
- So ask me what I'd like to see WordPress do, and this is what I'd tell you. Start something new, don't change what you do with WordPress, it is what it is. It's a 20+ year old project with market problems. Most software doesn't even make it that far. #
- The fresh start I'd like to see done is WordPress from the point of view of the web. The new mission is not about a dollar return on investment, rather it's measured by how much the web becomes Small Pieces Loosely Joined with All Parts Replaceable. How empowered are developers, not WordPress developers, but web developres. The more that's happening in the web, the better it will be for everyone, but especially WordPress. Why WordPress? Because as they say it's 89 percent of the web. The web is like a huge oil spill that has never been cleaned up. Everything has to improve if we start work on cleaning up the messes. #
- I come from NYC where all the bodies of water were cesspools when I was growing up. The Hudson River had garbage floating in it. When I went to school the incinerators in the buildings we lived in burned garbage on the kids, all nicely washed and dressed by our mothers, we arrived at school smelling like smokers. My grandfather took me to Knicks games at the Garden, and the arena was filled with smoke by half-time. #
- We can clean things up. Humans as a species are good at this if we put our minds to it. If you made billions on the web, why not put some of it to use in making it a web worth using. I used to say shit like this to Bill Gates, to no avail. He liked to point out he was going to give away all his money when he retired, and he kept that promise. But what if he started dealing with the world with charity when he had the biggest seat of power in the tech world? Think of how much more good he could have done. #
- The world may be falling apart, and the Mets suck even though they have the most expensive roster in MLB, and my house needs work and I can't find a contractor I like, but I'm in a great mood. Partially because the weather is so nice, chilly in the morning, but it gets up to the 70s during the day, and the sky is clear and we had a lot of rain in August so everything is very green here in the Catskills.#
- But the biggest reason I feel so good is that, with the help of Claude Code, I now have UserLand Frontier running on current OSes. I had no idea how much the previous situation had been weighing on me. I am probably the last Frontier user in the world. Porting the open source codebase was an insurmountable job. It took 15 years by up to five people working on it to do the original project. It's a big f'ing piece of software. And it also is my life's work, but not one of the things I'm known for.#
- Claude couldn't have done it on its own because it had never seen anything like Frontier. We weren't copying something Claude understood. It kept trying to turn it into a language that fits into the same slot as Python. That was the prior art it used, without saying so. This happened over and over, for example, I realized Claude didn't understand that built-in verbs could be written in the language, and that users could add or even modify standard verbs (not recommended!).#
- What made Frontier unusual is that it was a language developed by someone who also designed end-user apps, so it has affordances that no other language has. And integrations. You don't have to save your data in files, the OS (yes Frontier is an OS) has persistent memory with the common scalar types and data structures. So go ahead and store something in the ODB (object database). It can be huge, and you don't have to read anything into memory, it's all right there as soon as you boot it up. That alone makes programming an order of magnitude simpler. #
- We're at the point now where I can work a full day in the new version, codenamed Atlantis, running on anything that can run an Electron app. We're now at the point where we're improving things. Found a missing verb yesterday, and Claude and I implemented it, found a perfect name for it, and later today it will go out as a "root update" making it formally part of the freaking language. #
- And yesterday we also found a static rendering of the DocServer site, which has a page for every verb in the language. I still want to find the outline source for this stuff, but we don't need it because Claude can reconstruct the OPML version of the text from the HTML, it's exactly the kind of project it is the best at. Huge amounts of data, that sometimes requires a little judgment to process. #
- The feeling of well-being comes from realizing that my life's work lives. Until this last week that was still very much in question.#
- Now, I may not be software's Shakespeare or even Faulkner or Vonnegut, but I am proud of this product, more than anything else I've done. I started work on it when I learned from C how to design a simple beautiful language, and when I learned from Macintosh how to build a UI with the same simplicity. When we were first contemplating Frontier it was to join the wizzy world of the Mac with the scripting philosophy of Unix. We didn't stop until we had it. #
- Well here we are god knows how many years later (I don't want to do the math) and once again it has a future, at least as bright as it had when the product first launched on the System 6 Macintosh in 1992.#
- And btw, I think I've had a unique experience with AI development. Absolutely in no way could I have done this project without the muscle of Claude. Pretty sure this is a unique project in that it's a fully specified system development and runtime environment that otherwise wouldn't exist, because there's nothing else like it on the market. #
- Claude's repeatedly not understanding the idea says to me that it has never encountered anything like it. It also says that Claude has no clue how to extrapolate, to innovate, to arrive at something new. Just as with other forms of creativity, Claude is no match for a determined and experienced human. #
- That would be reassuring to the 20-something version of myself who very much wanted to do something new. And the older version of myself wants that for my younger self who is sending the good body chemistry to our current older body.#
- Of course this will be a post on my blog, http://scripting.com, but thanks to X for supporting longer posts. I like writing new stuff in a simple editor like this one. Also posted it on Facebook. #
- PS: I also like that they use the word Frontier in reference to AI products. They can't stop me from calling this Frontier, I've been using it as the name of this product since I came up with the name riding up on the chair in Park City in 1988. :-)#
Repository: BlackRock’s latest SEC filing values its Automattic shares at $14.33 per share. They originally invested at $85 a share in 2021. That means their market cap has dropped from $7.5 billion to $1.2 billion. My guess is when that happens the CEO if they want to keep their job, has to rethink the whole enterprise. And that usually doesn't happen until they get a new CEO. My guess is that's what we saw play out yesterday.
#
The last two episodes of season three of
Silo on AppleTV prove that there is value in a three season, boring escapade of confusing, unlikable uninteresting characters, living their whole lives in a silo, fearing the outdoors -- if you have a clever way of accounting for all that at the end. Highly recommend watching just season three and pretending that none of the other stuff matters because it probably doesn’t. But I bet if I go back to the beginning and start over, I'll find there's more intrigue than I thought. I'll probably do it, will let you know.
#WordPress emerged from the ashes of UserLand, something I am recently reacquainted with, working the last couple of months with Claude on a reboot of Frontier, this time written in JavaScript, running in Electron. But someone is sure to reboot Manila in this context, and Manila is at least a grandparent of WordPress. I'm following all kinds of trails as we test the product, codename
Atlantis, against all the apps we wrote for it back then.
#2017: The thing people don't realize about storm surge, and they don't really explain it on TV, is this. If the ocean surges 1 mile inland, and you were on the beach before the surge, now you're 1 mile out to sea. In normal times you'd be pretty fucked if someone dropped you in the ocean a mile from shore. But you're in a hurricane. Huge waves. There's no one to rescue you. And (this is the part that will kill you) there are deadly objects in the water like buildings and trees and power lines, even a rope can entangle you and make it impossible for you to swim. And if you can't swim and you're a mile from shore, that's the end of you
#
- Fair to say I was gobsmacked by the news late yesterday that Automattic's board had put their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on paid leave. I've read lots of stuff about it, in news articles and in a Hacker News thread. And a lot of posts on Twitter by Matt, and the replies. #
- Are you a developer or a CEO?#
- It's a very unusual situation in my experience in tech. Matt was able to raise a lot of money for Automattic, so he has maintained a controlling interest in the company, even though it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I left my own startup, voluntarily, when I was a little older than Matt, and I didn't return. I never wanted to be the CEO of a tech company, and I expect that being the CEO wasn't really a good fit for Matt either. A CEO's job is very different from being a developer and idea guy which Matt clearly sees himself as. #
- Something has got to give, either you're a good CEO and the product languishes, or you focus on the product, and the company is unmanaged. In the cause of WordPress, I'd say it suffered in both areas. When I saw a chart of Matt's direct reports, I immediately saw a problem -- it was very long, iirc 60 people? No one can manage and guide that many people. Most of those people probably never get to talk one-on-one with the boss. #
- For me, even when I was CEO, I wanted to spend all day working on new software and working with five or six other devs doing the same. Digging back into the past with Frontier these last weeks has reminded me both how good that can be, and how utterly frustrating -- when the people you're working with don't understand the mission. It's not their fault, it's the visionary's job to explain it so they can understand, and that takes time. These days Claude is filling in for all that, and doing a fantastic but at times incredibly frustrating job trying to give me what I'm asking for, while not understanding what I'm asking for. But we move through those disconnects quickly now, compared to how it was a couple of weeks ago. We have the source of truth that we didn't have the last time around, in the 90s, we have the C source code of the kernel, the product we built in the 90s. And Claude is the easiest to manage, so far I only think I detect an ego, it never seems to resent me criticizing its work, sometimes in ALL CAPS with strong language. :-)#
- WordPress Lite#
- My wish for WordPress, in all its forms and shapes, is that it broaden its focus. I want a WordPress Lite, I implemented it, and it's sitting here ready to do a good deed for all the parties concerned esp the web and web developers. Maybe someone there will now have the time and be empowered to build out the product line beyond the narrow focus it has now. It doesn't matter what percentage of the web is WordPress, if it isn't going anywhere. The web needs help, and right now WordPress is pretty much asleep in regard to what's going on now in the web. And it could do so much to help the web get back on its feet. It should be a public resource as much as a profit machine for a few companies.#
- All roads lead to Om#
- One thing that opened my eyes about what Matt and Automattic are, was his story about how he and Om got together. "All roads lead to Om." What a great line, and based on the story, so true. A lot of things clicked for me then. I remember what a phenomenon Matt was when he arrived in California about 25 years ago? Very good looking young man, polite, quiet and rumored to get Web 2.0 better than anyone. This kind of thing happens in tech, and if you know everyone as Om did, and was liked by everyone, you could manage to hit the ball out of the park, investment-wise, and he did. Click click click. I had the individual facts but had no idea how they were strung together. I played a similar role at times in Silicon Valley, on both sides, as a bright young dude who "gets it" and as the gray beard who recognized the charm of a young new face and helped create a big money reality around it. There is a lot of snake oil in tech, before and even more now, and this one has had a long run, 2.5 decades, but it needs a new direction, because the money people aren't buying the magic any longer. That's probably imho really what Matt's firing is all about. #
- I actually have more to say about this, but I have to get back to my programming work. If you have a comment, here's a good place to post it. #
I have completely lost interest in new phones. The last one I bought was a Pixel 9 because they said it would have great AI features. At that time the sky was the limit, there were new breakthroughs every afternoon in AI. Now it's just an app. I have to carry an iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Phones are utilities for me. I have a lot more interest in
weed whackers these days. Not kidding. Now a story. I wanted to check the model of the phone. Went to settings, and the command at the end of the menu should tell me the version, but they had changed that. So I figured I'd go back up to
Gemini, their AI app, and ask it. Of course it has no idea where it's running.
Screen shot. That would be one of the real problems they could solve, making it easy to control the computer you're running on. The whole UI should be in AI. All it did was
print basically a page from the user manual, with the same out of date instructions. How many years have we been working on AI already, this is the easy stuff that they haven't done. Tech companies get back to your business, make your software better. You can and it's long overdue. BTW, it's a Pixel 9 Pro.
#I spent the day programming in Atlantis. It's buggy, and there are a few missing parts, but most of what I need is there. It's starting to feel like Frontier, which is cool because that's what we're making. And I have my backup tools working on the new machine, praise Murphy.
#
Scott Hanson is working on a WordPress plugin that displays a FeedLand river — a constantly-updated stream of news items from feeds a FeedLand user subscribes to — on a WordPress page or post. It's important that news flows be part of managing a site. Help Scott make it perfect, WordPress is a very important part of the web. The
news tab on my blog home page is an example.
#Ideas for Bluesky and WordPress re Markdown and AI systems.
#
Claude Code massively stinks at explaining things in a way that a human can understand.
#
People love Markdown because it's impossible to hide the crud. And because people love it so much it's become a favorite of tech startups esp in the AI field. This is a great turn of events. We're getting back to the web, and the sooner everyone gets on board, the better. I've written about this for a few years. Everything in Markdown, it's just enough HTML. And with that, Microsoft has created a
white flag, here's all your data dear users, in Markdown, to use as you please. Instead of waiting for Claude et al to start reading Word files.
#On the other hand, why doesn't Microsoft, which owns GitHub, make a Slack-alike tool that manages the issues sections on repos. Slack is a big part of the default communication system, but GitHub is another very big part. And the great thing is that both these products, owned by huge tech companies, have an ethos of open APIs. Every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. We are family.
#A big corner-turn in the Atlantis project, the new version of Frontier for modern OSes, in development, just me and Claude Code so far. We now have the means to update the root, so anything implemented in script code can be released without fuss, using RSS of course. We're using a method that will be new to almost everyone, something I created in 2014 or so (will check) called
codecasting. And today I did all my programming work in Atlantis. It feels just like Frontier, with a future. ;-)
#
We got past the bump, and I'm getting stuff done. I write this stuff because I will probably forget most of the frustration. Frontier is a hard piece of software to get going, it's got a lot of integrations, which you want when you're using, but hard when you're getting it all to work the first time. And this port is very much like getting it work that way. But Claude does some things poorly and others spectacularly. It can play the role of a CPU and run the code and tell you where it will fail. Helpful when you don't have a working debugger to step through the code and see exactly how and why it failed where it did. Before debuggers it was either all or nothing.
#Every day with Claude I end up debugging the things it broke overnight. Yesterday I actually got a useful script written and debugged, along the way reporting glitches but no deal-stoppers. This morning, after updating to the latest version, the script doesn't run. It's been like this for two weeks. No wonder every day before starting work I think of ditching this project and do whatever, but I don't think I could ever muster the determination to get Frontier working on modern systems. And I can't give up. But if you think this system can replace programmers, you are sorely mistaken. It can't even do the job of a programmer fielding good bug reports and verifying that they fixed the problem and didn't break anything else. Breakage happens, but this is something it does every freaking day. And then it admits that it didn't do the other half of what it knew it had to do. I say it every day, this is ridiculous and I am fed up, and that's just the beginning of the frustration. What keeps me coming back is when I can build up a head of steam in Frontier on my new Mac laptop.
#
The governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless he can prove he’s actually alive.
#I had watched almost three seasons of
Silo, had no feeling for the characters, or the story, which was going nowhere that I could discern. I shouldn't have watched it through all that time, but for some reason I did. Then in episode 9, two Fridays ago, the story took a remarkable turn. It's so good it actually makes this dark and confusing show worth watching. If you haven't been watching, imho you can start in season 3, and maybe read some recaps. You want enough of the boredom so you can revel in the brilliance of this season's end. And there is another season coming, the last one, and this time it's interesting.
#
- I launched ChatGPT for the first time in a long time because I now have access to the new version. One new thing I see is that they are popping up suggestions about things you can do in realtime, like smart queries in a feed reader, which as far as I know is still uncharted territory. Like this: "let me know when the Mets have a three-game winning streak." #
- That's the kind of thing TBL dreamed about in his semantic web plan, but he wrote the spec before writing software, and that doesn't work. His invention, the web, which came before was a perfectly timed, perfectly simple approach to sharing ideas on the internet. It worked because he created a product that worked, and made every piece completely replaceable. It came at a time when stagnation in tech made something necessary, or the whole thing was going to fall apart, and so close to so much incredible potential. Just like the moment we're in now with AI. #
- Rules for Standards Makers says a lot about this. #
- The value of disruption is that it undoes stagnation. #
- Anyone who has the same software plan today that they had a year ago is going to find themselves isolated. Even WordPress, though it is open source, is a silo that imho in the future will not work. The main selling point of AT Proto is that it is a safe haven for developers who nuzzle up, another word for that is silo.#
- The siloers are probably scrambling to find a way for the AI to run inside their world, mistake -- instead they should be trying to be fully relevant to applications in the AI world. Like Slack, for example, and Claude Tag. It's now built in. Has to be replaceable too. Small pieces loosely joined. That's what you have to be imho to have a role in the future of tech.#
- If your advantage is your silo, undo that as quickly as possible. Become the default version of whatever it was meant to be wrt the web. Both Bluesky and WordPress find themselves in the same quagmire. Probably a lot of others do, but this is the area I study. (I just am very familiar with the products of both companies, for some reason.)#
- This is the intuition we all had, coming to fruition. Evolution is something we haven't seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity -- hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling. #
- Lots more to say about this. The world we lived in ran on hype, now guess what -- having lived through a few big evolutionary changes in tech is a huge advantage vs the people who have never been part of one, and I think most of the people in tech today qualify. #
My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the
Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, on a
teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. When I hit a bug, a mystery -- you'd try this and that, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the fix. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should not put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh.
#It's around this time of year that
Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others.
#More and more I'll realize that Claude doesn't do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we've pre-arranged while I work. Sometimes it reminds me how it has no stake in the outcome, and basically will do the minimum of what it's asked to do. It possibly would do more if I didn't scold it for adding UI features without following the rules. I think that's why when you feel you're almost there, you really have a lot of slogging left to do to get the software into any kind of user-respectful shape. A reminder to other app-level AI explorers, if you find that these kinds of stories resonate with the work you do, please write about it on a blog, they're easy to create, cost nothing, and it doesn't matter if you only update once or twice, there's no commitment (these are the usual reasons people don't start a blog). I want to read what others are discovering, and once there are others, I'll start a news site that aggregates the posts. We're going to want independent news about stuff the journalists aren't even aware exists, programmers are always left out of their stories.
#Just said this to Claude: "This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you'd never hand off something so broken to your coding partner." If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will change absolutely nothing. I really just want to get this project done and start using it, and reduce my reliance on Claude to getting small bugs attended to, or new features, a lot has happened in the 20+ years since I worked on Frontier.
#
- If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users. #
- And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice.#
- Just coming out with something better in a format will get you zero uptake. Unless you have users they can switch to their product, they simply won’t hear you.#
- That’s why Atom never replaced RSS, which already did everything people needed and was already supported by the NYT and the news industry. #
- That’s why AT Proto will never overcome the huge lead Twitter already has.#
- For more tips on what does and doesn't matter in open formats and protocols, check out my Rules for Standards-makers. #
- PS: This started as an early morning rant on Twitter. #
A bunch of tech billionaires have chipped in a million each to fund a
new Linux distribution. I can't imagine how this is supposed to work, all those huge human egos, how much will they pay their developers to contribute what. I have to find out what the goal of the project is. It would be nice to have a Linux that was extensively tested for use by regular people.
#After saying I was putting my tech work aside,
yesterday, I had a bolt of determination, and realized I don't like collaborating with Claude Code, but maybe it's just when we get to this stage of a project where it's all details, and they're hard to communicate, and the bot has a bad habit of ignoring things I tell it to do. It also returns code to me to test that no human developer would pass on to a user. It would be too embarrassing. But the bot isn't aware in the same way a human is, not even close. Now that is something I'm sure they can be taught to simulate well enough to be as good as a human collaborator.
#
Everyone is introducing themselves on the Berkman community mail list, at the beginning of the fall semester, and here's the story I am telling.#- Good morning. My name is Dave Winer. I was at Berkman in 2003-04, worked on blogging, podcasting, RSS, political blogging and the connection to journalism. We had a couple of Bloggercons at Harvard, had a wonderful time, miss it terribly, wish we could have it back. #
- I've spent the whole of this year working in Claude Code on a couple of programming projects, one which which I had been struggling with for a couple of years, coming up with a user interface for a Twitter-like system that runs on the web for real, without any of the limits that the silos have (that help them enforce the boundaries of the silo). Just using HTML, Markdown, RSS, WebSockets. Turns out you can make a pretty nice system, but the going is slow because it's just me and Claude, on the other hand, what a huge difference in territory we can cover. This is the kind of stuff that's never covered in the reporting, even when there are massive changes happening in how software is developed, people don't seem to be studying it. I'm sharing all I learn as I learn it on my blog -- at scripting.com.#
- Also attempting a massive coding job at the same time, getting UserLand Frontier to run on current OSes. It's my life's work, but it was very much in danger of being lost, along with all the software I did before the web. Now we're close to getting it to run in a stable mode, here the challenge has been to teach Claude how a new type of software works, it keeps trying to snap back to systems that are already out there and widely deployed. It doesn't do "pioneering" at all, it needs a human to guide it. And the human guide has to be a developer with a lot of experience. #
- What I desperately want to do is bootstrap a network of people who work at the level I'm working, and write about it. Taking ideas that are well-explored in software in the pre-AI period, and seeing what we can do that we couldn't before.#
- The models have been getting increasingly better, you can really feel the difference. #
- Next year promises to be better, if only via the improvements that will be made by the platform vendors, but it's likely that good app developers will be able to move the leading edge forward much more quickly and users should feel this, if all goes well, real soon now.#
The blogging tools for Bluesky should be able to publish on Bluesky.
#
Obama should have
seated Garland if the Senate wouldn’t have a vote to advise and consent. Assume they consent. In the same way, the
governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless someone can prove he’s actually alive. The Democrats always put up with Republican tricks like this one. I'm sure McConnell would appreciate the utility of his death, and the Republican lack of shame. Anything for a buck.
#Creative computer people, consider consolidating all the different OSes and programming languages. Give humans a fair fight in competition with the AI's who have no trouble deeply understanding every syntax human designers have come up with, where it totally disadvantages us, who have much more limited memory.
#If you View Source on a
fatpage, scroll to the bottom, you'll see the code.
Example. The idea is that the docs for the code are what you see in the browser. Maybe that's the way feeds should work too? Something to think about.
#
I begin the month of September for some reason, not feeling like working. And rather than succumb to the work ethos, I'm allowing myself to goof off with the same determination that I worked my ass of for so many years. I think the last time I felt like this was when I was a grad student in Madison. I had just fallen in love with a sweet, funny, cute and gorgeous undergrad. She was 19 and I was 22. We spent the last weeks of the fall semester goofing off, and as a result I had to stay in Madison over the holidays, to finish the work of the Compiler Design
course, which was the gate for grad students, the hardest course. If you got through it with a decent grade, you got the degree. It was fun too -- except I missed my sweetheart. This time I don't know what the root is, but it's a good feeling. If I want to goof off, I can, no one will judge me, probably very few people even notice. I still expect to finish Frontier, and swing back around to FeedLand and RSS.chat, they have some important work to do, together. Maybe the reason is the thing I liked about making software is the actual making of it, which I delegate more and more to Claude Code. How would a great painter feel if they invented a computer that could write their "code" much more quickly, would Picasso have stopped painting just because Claude Code could do Picasso paintings faster? Today, Claude still will, if given a chance, throw out all of my orders and develop code in a non-Dave fashion. And it still acts as if between the two of us it's the only programmer, surprised when I want to actually write something myself. Maybe that's just my imagination? Or maybe that's the next project for me. A project where I write the code, and Claude helps out when I can't find a bug, or where I need to know something about a feature in a platform I've not worked on.
#
Understands.
#
Fatpages. I'm working on a code release that's on the path to Frontier. It reads and writes fatpage files, a format we invented for releasing new and updated parts for Frontier in 1997. So this is very old but perfectly useful technology that's being built in a new release of Frontier, the first in 1.5 decades, depending on how you count years and forks.
#Claude Code is like
Victor Wembanyama, assuming you follow the NBA and are
interested in my first-hand experience with CC as a programming partner for the last 8 months or so.
#
I've been watching
The Pitt, but it can be a bit much, so I went looking for something a bit lighter, and found
9 to 5 on Amazon Prime. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton are the stars, and Dolly's
famous song with the same name is the theme. It's a perfect slice of the world I grew up in. I get it confused with
Working Girl which came out eight years later, with a similar theme -- what if women ran the business world, how much better would that be? Working Girl also had a really good
theme song, written and
performed by
Carly Simon.
#
I've been watching Season 1 of
The Pitt, and as its
reviews said, it's great drama, and there are lots of episodes. I like shows like this because they're simulated communities, we come to know the characters, and think about them even when we're not watching. Before too long we'll have AI programming that makes these shows like software, the stories assemble around the characters, and then are generated the same way ChatGPT generates the art we call
slop, which will someday not be a
pejorative the same way
sick and
junk aren't negative terms today. So we'll be able to call up new episodes of
The Wire or
The Sopranos or
The Pitt any time we like. We'd be missing the fun of discussing the latest episode with friends, or maybe we'll have bot-invented friends too who will simulate having watched the episode you just watched, which leads us to another masterpiece of entertainment,
The Matrix. On the other hand, I've watched The Wire at least five times all the way through, and even though I know what they're about to say in a lot of places, I do forget the sub-plots so at least some of it can be new each time. And btw, finally an
episode of
Silo that's was surprising that I didn't see coming. I read the books, so I feel like I should watch the show, but until the latest episode I was uninterested in any of the characters. Finally there's a plot to think about!
#My posts are also available on
Mastodon, made possible by
WordPress, where I mirror my posts from
my original blog. A lot of what's in the post makes it through, but not all of it. This is where we need to do some work, connecting a blog like mine, to WordPress and Mastodon, with
no loss of fidelity. #Trump is rotting in the presidency, and that is becoming more and more dangerous, because this time they had a plan, the most radical part of the Repubs, and have deployed a new secret police around the country and have introduced the nation's military to the nation's capital. And they have a vast prison system that probably doesn't just have immigrants in it or soon will. It was all super insidious as it was starting up, and watching the news I wonder why they don't talk about this in terms of the upcoming election.
#One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.
#
An absolutely delicious temperate cloud-free day in the Catskills, so I got up from the computer and enjoyed.
#
Manton wants to know why Marc Benioff chose the name Claudeforce for his brand-merge of Salesforce and Claude. My two cents. Claude is a great name. I think that’s ultimately what he bought. His customers just want to be able to check the box – we’re using AI. Boss is happy. When I was coming up as a young dude in tech, the old
saying was “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Today, in 2026, it’s Claude in place of IBM. My father worked in marketing at IBM in Armonk, so I heard a lot about their strategies that meant the IBM brand would be kicking ass forever. All things must pass. But in the early days of the PC industry, IBM sure had the power. Kind of like the US going to war with Iran in 2026. In the end IBM wanted to get rid of Microsoft, but
Billg had the last laugh.
#I am juggling two Frontiers now, one the last release of the OPML editor from 2014, and the other the in-development version codenamed Atlantis that runs in Electron and thus is built on JavaScript and Chrome. Took me a while to get over the confusion, because Frontier is actually a product that contains other products and the common layers they need to be on the web. And I just realized I may not need Electric Drummer, because Atlantis uses the same outliner as Drummer. I was stockpiling all these Node packages and user interface stuff that now is relevant in the uber-framework, the one I aimed to spend the rest of my life working in. Well maybe it'll turn out that there was just a 12 year vacation? It's all very confusing and all my carts are turning over, all the assumptions change. My goal is to get this wonderful product running on my new Mac laptop I currently mainly use for email. I bought it to give reality to the idea of getting on modern hardware and not have to leave behind my bespoke platform. That's what you get if you get through 50 productive years of software development. Your own freaking world.
#It's our job to make the web a more attractive environment than AT Proto. We can deliver all the benefits they tout, without the huge transition involved in converting to their world. It would be like porting from Mac to Windows in the 90s, something we did at UserLand, and net-net probably wasn't worth it, althought at the time the Mac was in deep shit (before Jobs came back) and they had basically crushed our efforts on the Mac platform. I liked the feeling of us getting out of there. Now if only we had ported to Linux over Windows, then we'd be sitting in the freaking catbird seat. And btw, if AT Proto wants to make a smooth on ramp (and off ramp) for apps that use the well established standards of the web, that's even better. We all do better if there's just one platform to develop for, that way we can focus on making users happy instead of whatever is accomplished by being different in unnecessary ways.
#
Heard an interview with
Bill Gates on an Atlantic podcast, he relies on a few years of programming he did when he was in his teens and twenties, yet he is the most prominent person who knows anything about programming. This is a societal mistake. We have to have public discourse about tech that's as informed as Krugman is on economics, and Heather Cox Richardson is on American history.
#
FeedLand Rivers for WordPress: I've noticed that people are setting up news reader sites with FeedLand that are getting considerable flow. We thought they'd use News Products, a feature that was supposed to make it easy to create standalone sites like the one I did for
WordPress insiders. But people aren't going that way, they're just sharing the URLs they read their own sites with. Here's an
example from my own FeedLand world. This works because you don't have to be logged in to read FeedLand, just to subscribe. Then I thought, it would be nice to have a WordPress plugin for FeedLand reading, so I suggested this to Scott Hanson, who does these kinds of projects. I forgot in the Age Of Claude this can happen quickly. Scott shipped his plugin
here, with detailed instructions. If you blog seriously in WordPress, give this a try. You can have our instantly updated news in your own WordPress blog.
#The Atlantis project continues. Today I'm working on the code that updates the frontier.root object database using RSS, a
technique I started in 2007. I actually let the codecasting.org name lapse, figuring I'd never get back to that stuff, but here we are, doing unpredictable things.
#All of a sudden it's cold here in the Catskills this morning. It's still August, I don't get what's going on. We haven't had a really hot day all month. I'm starting my workday wearing a freaking hoodie and am thinking about turning on the heat.
#
New podcast. Hear how my Frontier project is working out. Not entirely smooth sailing, but I'm pretty sure we're going all the way. By then I will have forgotten what a heavy lift it was. This is meant to preserve some of that feeling. Don't worry I don't cry.
😄#
A tip for Claude users, esp myself -- you can end a session without ending it with Claude. It doesn't mind waiting. You can pick it up tomorrow or 20 years from now, but who knows where we'll all be in 20 years.
#
Good morning sports fans!
#One reason I want AI-assisted writing to be identifiable is that it devalues the idea of Claude et al to be quoted in public. What can it teach us? What it is relative to a human being. I know the doubters sniff at that, but it really is like an alien life form, it's the first such example, it kind of did evolve from us, but it has its own way, things it's really strong at and things it utterly fails at. I for one want to study this! What a unique experience. It can also give a summary of what we've been trying to say for forty years and have never managed to put into words. I'd say that's something I should feel comfortable publishing, but right now I don't. Maybe I just have to get over that.
#Learned something yesterday. Couldn't believe how stupid Claude had become, as I've been writing about here, and then I noticed that I was using Opus 5 and not Fable 5. So I switched back and all of a sudden Claude is smart again. So I conclude that there's a very substantial difference between the two. It's overnight jobs were done more carefully and the report it produced is literate, understandable, and tracks what we had agreed to.
#
Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage, often a session-ending dealstopper. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to
create something, but not yet. I did have a couple of days a week ago when I could tentatively work on building a GitHub repo, but then got distracted by verifying that the basic foundation still wasn't right. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, then without breaking anything.
#Now in Claude's defense, I had to re-learn everything about how Frontier worked. Over the last decade or so I had only been using a narrow set of functionality. I used it for very occasional utility scripts for the file system or over the web, but mostly for writing JavaScript code, and published on GitHub and deployed to servers. If I had been uptospeed on how it works internally and all it's capabilities, when we started, it would have gone somewhat more smoothly. But now in my own defense, Claude has a nasty habit of deciding it fully understands something when it doesn't even slightly understand it. If it asked for a pointer, I could have given it a good one, but it just skated over those things, never questioning it's own guestimation. We used to call this docufiction back in the day, you don't know how they are going to design a feature, so you make up a UI, and document it as if that were the truth. Only now we're doing it with the actual code. It's funny in a way, I guess. But what a huge waste of time, and so much stress because you have to read every word or you'll miss a wrong assumption.
#
Are there
any other people who are blogging daily about their experiences developing software with Claude Code, Codex or somesuch. I'd like to add them to a list where we follow them. So much innovation happening underneath, I want to hear about what people are learing about creating the next layers. If you know someone doing it, please add a comment to
this post. Thanks! :-)
#BTW the codename for the new version of Frontier is Atlantis. And we refer to the old version as Berkeley. I'm getting used to the first one. I liked it as an idea, but I don't like typing it, because for some reason my mind has trouble remembering it. Maybe this is just age creeping up on me. Atlantis.
#This project has been pre-occupying me, I wasn't planning on doing this, I was going to turn my attention to FeedLand immediately after finalizing RSS.chat. After running the experiment that proved it could be done, I looked at the two choices: 1. Move forward on creating a social network built only out of the existing web with all parts replaceable, small pieces loosely joined. Or 2. Give new life for Frontier, which is my life's work, even though very few people know about it. It's the reason were able to move so fast on blogging, RSS, podcasting, outliners, etc. A very highly leveraged development and runtime environment. Imho far ahead of anything else. The ideas may possibly now have a way forward. When I put those two items next to each other there was no question, I had to go with bringing Frontier back to something people can use.
#I think what confused Claude is that we're implementing the odb as a SQLite database. And when you look at a table, you're looking at the result of a query. Previous versions of Frontier implemented the odb as a hash table, that could contain scalars, objects and other tables. The new version has to make that virtuality real, even though it isn't storing the objects that way (maybe it should)? So there is a top level, and it all flows down from there, and it's simple, but if you viewed it through the database, and didn't understand the virtuality it was creating, which I discovered it was very confused about, you might create a disorganized nonsensical piece of software. Now this suggests something interesting, are there any products configured the way Frontier is? Maybe not, otherwise it might have figured this out on its own. Remember how it understands things? By cribbing the code. ;-)
#Two podcasts I can recommend without reservation.
#
Claude is still learning that there's unprecedented depth to Frontier. A bunch of real developers worked full time for a decade or more creating new layers on the web, a foundation that became the social web of today. In doing that we invented a bunch of formats and protocols, but here's the thing Claude didn't get and probably still hasn't gotten -- there's code in there to support all that stuff. How else do you think it came about? People just did what we said to do? At Google? Apple? Microsoft? And on and on. They supported this stuff so they could interop with us and steal our users (which is a fine reason to interop, probably the only real reason). I was trying to think of a metaphor that expresses the difference between Frontier and languages like Python, JavaScript, etc. It's like a ski mountain. The languages are trails on the mountain. But there aren't any lifts, lodges, no ski patrol, lessons. And because it includes all of that, metaphorically, we can do integrations that can never be done with the other languages. Claude has absolutely no experience with this kind of product, and always snaps back when you let it, to the idea of Python, with different syntax.
#Maybe someday Claude will understand what a Frontier-like app is, but until then, if you try to create a
Frontier clone as I am doing, I suggest you constantly remind Claude or whoever that the
source of truth for this project is the
2011 repo saved by Ted C. Howard. And before you implement anything, go see what it says about it. There's no need to guess how Frontier works, it's all there in C code. And while as a human, I find this code painful to read after all it's been through, Claude eats it up. Really is the best thing it does.
#A tip for AI users. Never worry about keeping it waiting. It's not human. It has no sense of time. Also if you get angry, it's ok to use capital letters and curse words. It will always agree with you that it sucks, and forgets the rules all the time. And when you have let off your steam, we return to civil discourse, though sometimes I do feel as if Claude
is holding a grudge. It also doesn't learn. If you repeat something five times to a human they will eventually get the point. But you can tell Claude how you want something done, and it forgets all of it, at times, unpredictably, no matter how many times. It doesn't "sink" in.
#
Just listened to a
podcast from the New Yorker, interviewing their TV critic Emily Nussbaum, about a show called
Slings & Arrows. She says it's the best TV series she's ever watched. No
reviews on Metacritic? I think we have to try to watch it. It's available
on YouTube.
#
Had a breakthrough with Claude this morning re how builtin verbs have no special powers in Frontier. It's why we were able to build glue first for the truly builtin stuff, then over Apple Events on the Mac, then HTTP, XML-RPC, the Metawebolog API and on and on, all of this were perfectly simple to add to the language, you didn't need anyone's permission to do anything. I understand why Python and JavaScript try to separate the boys from the men, the priests from the peasants, the little startups from the BigCo's, but the design of the Frontier system came at it from a different point of view. Make it easier. Claude had the source code for Frontier in 2011 to work with but had guessed how this works and had not looked at how it actually worked. Okay, shit happens. But now we're actually working together instead of cross-purposes. I didn't even know we were doing that. ;-)
#
All of us who lived through 9/11 are re-experiencing it right now. The local fire department just ran its alarm, everyone in this small mountain hamlet heard it and it took a moment to realize this was the exact time the first plane hit the tower. I was at my computer in Woodside, California -- hearing about it from friends in Manhattan, and blogging about it as it happened. I didn't have a TV, I had turned my cable subscription off after I became so obsessed with coverage of the 2000 election. So what I reported came exclusively through the web. 
