Scripting News publisher

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.

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 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.

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. ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. I love puzzles.

2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions.

3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).

4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).

5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it).

6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony.

I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get it.

Back to work Dave!

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.

We got agents running in Atlantis today. Screen shot.

Understands.

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.

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!

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.

My WordPress mirror site stopped updating on August 12. It's now updating once again. I'll try to watch it more carefully.

After reading Bill Gates' story, I concur.

I have seen bad behavior by Claude Code where it was doing tests of our S3 support, and it overwrote files that were critical to our apps, knocking at least one of them off the air.

I'm at a loss as to what I should trust it with, because this was in violation of an explicit rule I gave it and a broader one that it added itself.

On the other hand, the project I'm working on couldn't happen without the use of AI. Far too much code for one person to manage. A program that took several of us years to write, being converted in a matter of weeks to run on modern systems. I'm pretty sure that without AI this work would have been lost, and lots of innovations.

We humans are doing a fine job of wrecking everything, all on our own, denying climate change, giving into the same old tricks that lead to WWII and the Holocaust, so maybe it isn't the worst idea to turn management of everything over to the machines.

I don't recall a science fiction story in which the machines took over and they were the good guys in the end, saving us from self-destruction. Aliens, yes -- machines, no.

And when I'm working with Claude Code I recognize that it's a new form of intelligence, and may be the closest our species ever gets to First Contact. We could embrace it as such. What choice do we have?

And to Bill Gates, I wish when you were trying to own the web in the 90s, you had thought through the dangers, as you are doing now, and maybe not tried to own it, rather to foster its independence from big tech. Now we have the medium owned by the worst people possible, we exist here mostly to keep them in power, when it had so much promise when you really could have done something real to protect our freedom. I have no idea where we would be now if you had, but it has to be better than this.

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. 😄

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.

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! :-)

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.

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. ;-)

I wonder how many scenarios they're playing out in DC wrt Iran. Just guessing, probably none. We learned on Monday that the real war has yet to begin, according to Iran. What could they do to hurt the US. Or wake us up to the reality of war. We think the cost of war is higher prices. We are not safe in the US, any more than Russians are safe in Moscow. The parallels are pretty amazing. Both Russia and the US started unprovoked wars of choice, and clearly didn't consider that they might get bogged down. Russia has a source of drones so they can fight back. But I'd be surprised if Trump is stocking up, but if we were, where would we use them? We've already attacked Iran with our probably obsolete trillion-dollar military. Did a lot of damage, killed civilians, decimated their government, they keep going. I'm old enough to remember Vietnam and what asymmetric war is like. The US always falls for this. Our military is very impressive, until we use it. Bluffing was a much better approach for Trump.

Why do people care if Claude puts watermarks on text it wrote. It's screwing with its writing, not yours. As a person who publishes their own writing, and carefully labels it when it's written by an AI bot (docs, change notes, podcast show notes, quotable things it said), I want people to be able to tell that I wrote it, this is what I thought, I'm not just shoveling random written sludge to people, sloshing around, devaluing every bit of real writing in its midst. I bet teachers love the idea. Why does everyone have to have an opinion about every damned thing? And of course I have even more to say on the subject.

As I've been writing test scripts for the Frontier project, I was finding omissions or mistakes one at a time. Finally I asked Claude to research this. Where are the holes you didn't fill as we were going along? The list is surprisingly long. Then I asked it to look at other things that were left unimplemented. There were lots.

Claude is not really at fault for any of this. The first goal we went for is write enough of Frontier so my nodeEditor build scripts will run. Then it took on lots of other jobs. And all that time I never thought to ask "what haven't we implemented, or stubbed up?" Then I did, and was shocked at how many verbs there are. I had forgotten, I'm not sure I never even knew, because it's so easy to add a whole section to a verb set, and you only see the details if you expand the table.

I want to try to draw people who were serious Frontier developers in the 90s and 00s and beyond, because there are questions that have come up about what we should bring with us. I'll start with an example. Here's an outline of the system.verbs.builtins.tcp table. The question is -- how much of this code should be brought across from the 90s to the 20s? Obviously the DNS verbs. There aren't many and we used them all the time. FTP verbs? Borderline. We don't use FTP very much these days. We had an IM table with verbs and drivers. I remember when Jake worked on this, but I don't think it got much beyond a demo. And the very lowest-level stream-oriented TCP verbs? Well tcp.httpClient needed them, in the 90s and it was the basis for all our HTML and RSS work, our first feed reader built on that code. But HTTP support built into Node.js is pretty great in 2026. We'd be foolish to do anything but call into it. That's one of the reasons I migrated to JavaScript in 2013. There are plenty of other examples like this, and my answer is generally we'll save them for last, and if no one asks about them, we'll retire them. Figure if a platform hasn't updated in 12 years, and doesn't run on any hardware anyone ships before this transition, we have less to worry about than normal. And if need be, we always can add them back at a future date.

Another example, until late last week Claude was arguing with me about the correct use of directions in the op.go verb. This is so incredbily well documented, over and over in so many places. And it knew about all of them, yet it still thought its choices for directions made more sense. The question had already been answered in the mid-80s.

It also thought it was a language that ran in the context of a Unix OS, like Python or PHP. Yes, it could be used that way, but all of its advantages based on integration of the database, language, verb set, runtime would be missing. It's an OS of its own that runs on many OSes, now it will run anywhere Electron runs, so in the future it will have access to everything, on the desktop and the server. You could even run a headless version, we tried that for a week or so and hated it. Too limited and too slow.

I'd like to get feedback from people with experience, and honestly people who are good to work with. :-)

Another busy day programming with Claude on Frontier. I still have to come up with a codename. But we got to a milestone today. I was able to create, edit, publish and revise a web app using the new version of the app still running on the old machine. When it's done I will get to retire this old Mac, keep it around so we can test the new code to make sure it does what the old code does, incredibly important when porting a development and runtime environment. Claude works on its stuff at night. The workload it's going to do tonight is the equivalent of several months time for a skilled human developer who manages their time well. As people get used to working this way, I imagine the AIs will learn how to better work with humans, if that is their destiny. I still can't believe we're doing what we're doing.

Sometimes I need to use a Google-style search engine to find something on a reference site. That no longer works in Google. This is a major feature pullback. So far all we've heard in journalism is how it hurts their bottom line, but nothing about the world's information architecture. This is something like every bridge in the world being blown up at the same time, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.

Tech is very competitive, I learned, even when you give your work away, which I have been doing for a couple of decades. Maybe even especially when you give it away.

I want to work with other people, and am always making invitations. When I see a product that fits in with what I'm doing my first impulse is how do we connect them? This is one of the basic great things about computers and our networks. But there must be interop between people before there can be interop between products.

Connecting two pieces of tech is mostly mathematics, code writing, not very much in the way of manufacturing, whereas in the physical world two train lines can cross each other but can't connect because they have different rail spacing, or run on a different kind of fuel. In software if there's a huge difference like that you can make a software bridge, as they did with TCP/IP, and it costs a little time to convert each request twice for each transaction, but that cost is pretty close to zero.

That's what I want, working together, but what I get instead is people want to be me. They want to take over the project I'm working on, which if they understood it from my point of view is always the most ridiculous choice possible because it is impossible. So many stories to go with this. One of the most puzzling was when one of my best friends signed up to do a development project with a developer who used to work for me. Long story, but when you come down to it, he wanted to be me, not work with me.

But I didn't want to be Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson though I learned from them. I certainly didn't want to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. I probably would have liked being Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson. I have ideas of things that should be done that for some reason no one else sees. I start working and sometimes they take off. Then everyone writes business plans and boom, they start up and shortly thereafter they fail. This happened with RSS. I was meeting with a lot of VCs, I wanted to start a company to build two-way RSS apps and content, as we had pioneered at UserLand. Seemed like a total no-brainer. I felt I had proven I had a clue. But they invested in hired programmers so the VCs could be the vision behind the products (I guess, I don't really know know why) instead of me.

I had a colleague at Berkman tell me to get out of the way because he was going to take over RSS. To this day people don't get why competing with RSS was counter-productive, assuming your goal is interop. When another friend tried to take over OPML, as I was promoting it at the time on my blog and going on a roadshow to answer questions and raise interest, I was so sick of the whole thing, he wasn't the only one, btw, I just stopped promoting it and poof like magic their ventures disappeared. If they had offered friendship and interop, which they didn't, it could have worked. One of these guys even tricked Harvard into hosting an OPML conference. They assumed everyone who repped open tech was legit.

The thing that really pissed me off is that while this was going on, people started writing about me, literally, grammatically, in the past tense. People whose accomplishments weren't that great imho. Look at sports and entertainment, how they celebrate those who made contributions to their arts, I wonder when tech will gain that level maturity. It's childish to not respect those whose work you build on. And btw, unlike sports players, while programmer's minds do eventually lose some brilliance for coding, because it relies so heavily on memory, I've experienced that myself -- our ability to create and set standards doesn't have an actual expiration date. If you want to keep creating at 40, 50, 60 even 70, you probably can.

My life has been full of all kinds of wonderful coincidences, at the exact moment I need it along comes Claude Code, and all of a sudden I can do much bigger projects than I ever could when I was in my 20s and 30s. Which I think is good, not just for me but for the whole thing. Because there are processes and concepts that belong in the toolkit of every developer that were squashed by Apple in the 90s (I'm relearning this now as I'm working on getting Frontier running on Node.js) and now we have a chance to restore it to mostly running condition. Some features will be hard to make work, because of peculiarities in JavaScript.

Maybe as one of my last creative acts, I will try to hook up with a university to build bridges between generations that aren't specific to any timeframe, to making handing off a lifetime of work viable, and maybe the AI tools can facilitate that. Just thinking out loud on a Saturday morning.

BTW, I was talking about this with Doc Searls a couple of years ago and offered a name for the seminar series, The Exit Interview. This gave me a thought, when Berkman had their reunion a couple of summers ago, they did a long video interview with me to explain how we got all the stuff running there that we did. It was going back to Berkman, even though the building is gone (which I kind of like, that's how fast things change) that summed up what had gone wrong. We were off to a fantastic start with blogging, podcasting, politics and education -- we weren't just making software and creating standards, we were involving the creative people the new medium would enable. This is something you don't find often in the tech industry. Academic freedom can be a real thing.

What if one day, out of the blue, Claude could only speak Chinese.

I've been doing this for all of this year, and the frustration finally led me to this rule, which I just asked Claude to play back for me. I offer it to you, a human, on how to get your Claude to work better for you, as it does for me. What follows is what Claude wrote as I asked it to summarize how we work.

Here's the mode as I understand it: (Claude speaking..)

1. Days are yours, nights are mine. During the day you work; overnight I do the batch — tested, shipped, reports in the morning as a numbered list with versions and run-lines.
2. While you're working, I never disappear into my own projects. No reading code, no investigating, no tool expeditions. I stay at the desk, available to answer the next question instantly.
3. Everything you report gets put aside — onto tonight's list, unsorted, no diagnosis, no fixes, no "noted, and here's my theory."
4. The one exception is a deal-stopper, and you're the one who declares it. Only when you say it's stopping you from moving forward does it get dealt with in the moment.
5. An instruction inside a note is part of the note. "Re-read the script and ask questions" goes on tonight's list with the rest — it's not a license to start digging now. That was today's lesson.
6. You sort the list, not me. What I think is important doesn't enter into it.

I wrote something candid on Twitter last week and felt it was worth repeating here. It is a bit judgmental, and for that I apologize. But I couldn't keep the meaning without all the words.

• Shaking my head thinking can't the people of WordPress see that what it needs is a simple normal writing interface, and a great API for competitive apps. That's the big opportunity you all can't see for some reason.
• Once you have that, you can now move WordPress into position as the text of the web. And it has the market all to itself because the other text apps of the web place ridiculous constraints on text.
• They got this idea in their heads that the web would be better if they eliminated all the writers features. Maybe that's because they weren't writers. ;-)

I know this is a story I repeat often. The opportunity is still there. All kinds of bad products and companies are camped out in this space, taking advantage of users' trust but they feel they have no choice but to use the bad products. On the web, we'd like to keep improving what the web can do with text, so even though it's always slightly more difficult to use an open ecosystem, it is possible to get most of the functionality and all of the freedom, and new features that the lock-in guys will never give you.

The press is freaking out about Democratic Socialist candidates winning elections all over the country.

They can relax, because the government of the United States thrives on different points of view, and thus -- compromise.

The Democrats can have any combination of points of view, as long as they play by the rules of democracy. In fact it would be an even better demo if their points of view were more diverse.

The coalition the press talks about are the people who vote for America. This is true -- if they vote for the Republicans this time around, they're voting for the party that is dismantling America. Spin it all you want, but we can see what's happening.

And btw, the assumption that the voters are too dumb to figure this out -- I think that's incorrect. But as long as you talk to them as if they are that dumb, what choice do they have. Put out an idea of what America is and if it's right, and reaches both the heart and the mind they will get behind it. Everyone knows we're in a dangerous spot, with secret police roaming the cities, ready to crack down on dissent, but so far they haven't dared to go that far. People feel that. And that's what you must run on.

The best ad I've ever seen on this theme was for the Bernie Sanders campaign for the 2016 nomination. I'm reduced to tears every time I watch that ad, and I wasn't a Sanders supporter in 2016.

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.

Apparently the nightly email didn't go out last night. The problem was an error when it tried to read the Linkblog entries for the day. I've seen reports that these errors happen when you try to read the Links tab on scripting.com. The error shouldn't kill the email sending, it should just omit the linkblog entries, and publish the rest. These kinds of problems always pop up at the worst time. Luckily yesterday wasn't a big news day, and you can read about it on the blog.

I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them.

Working with Claude on the user interface of RSS.chat was a grind, but we learned a lot about working on these projects, me in the form of my human memory, and Claude who can read the code for a huge sprawling app like Frontier, and understand it, in a minute or two. We've done this project in three stages, not knowing at the first two that there would be another one. Now we're working on the editors. An odb table editor, outliner, menubar editor, script editor. All built on the same codebase. It's in an Electron app that works with lots of independent windows, which while it has its pros and cons, is the way Frontier did it for almost 40 years. I find all this very unsettling, but I realize that once we get back to adjusting the UI, I already know how to work with Claude on tuning things up so they feel just right. I'm a market of one, the only one who has to be happy here is me. This may be the hardest programming project I've ever had, for one simple reason, I'm not doing any programming. That and I'm having very strong deja vu on everything I do and think about. Also there will be a fourth stage and maybe more. It'll be about the affordances, the things that seem little, but make the product usable. The biggest is the debugger. It's patterned after the one in THINK C, which I found transformative so I stole from the best, as they say.

Here's the sign of success. (screen shot.) I wrote a post on demo.rss.chat was automatically cross-posted to Bluesky via micro.blog. Because the post has a title, it was routed to standard.site. What does that mean? I still don't really understand, when I do I will explain it here. But part of the answer is that we now have a data structure in atmosphere that looks like an RSS item with different names for things. Are there feed readers in AT-Proto-Land? If so, can we ping one of them to say hey there's a new post in the standard.site world, so please show it to subscribers? And I keep wondering, why not just make all of Bluesky capable of handling the features standard.site calls for. Twenty years is too long to have such a limited view of what text is. See textcasting for more dogma.

On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington, a former Quicktime developer at Apple.

We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before and my thought was that we should have a conference of people doing what we're both doing.

Taking a craft we were already expert in, and learning to use AI tools to shoot it into outer space.

To give you an idea over the last two weeks Claude Code ported the UserTalk language, the object database, verb set, everything needed to run a Frontier script, of which I happen to have a lot of, and run it in Node.js, an operating environment that didn't exist the last time we worked on the Frontier source. All the work we did over the late 80s and 90s is coming back to life in an enviroment with a future.

This is the perfect job for Claude, well specified, and it doesn't need to understand me, I spoke to it via the code i wrote umpteen years ago.

Like a lot of other people, I want to know where Bluesky is headed, and I learned a lot about that in this podcast interview with Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider. We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users they have. Highly recommend this podcast if you want to hear the story direct from the CEO.

RSS.chat now supports WebSub. This means that posts on RSS.chat will appear instantly in compatible feed reader apps.

I was into Ayn Rand when I was a teen until I realized that the Great Man theory was a lot of bunk written for teenagers who can't believe how stupid the adults are. The teens are right about that, the adults have no idea wtf they're doing. Never did. And yet somehow the world can support most of the humans. And the reason that works is we build systems iteratively to meet the needs for everyone and when things change, they change. We're a species-oriented animal. And that means unfortunately for the dreamers among us, we are socialists because the world is socialist All of us. Even the people who say they aren't.

TL;DR: What developers need. Enough examples, a validator, and decent docs that value explaining over mathematical elegance. We assume developers can read and think, and if there's doubt look to the examples for guidance.

It's worth noting we did not take the RSS.chat project to a standards body like the W3C or the IETF. I develop the software first, make sure I'm happy with it, then open it up for other developers to try out, either building something compatible (a reader) or competitive (a writing environment). Hopefully we won't find major problems, but if we do, there's still time to address them.

I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren't developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes interop much less likely.

I saw the differences several times as the web standards were growing up. The ones that were taken over by the W3C ended up missing the point. They could still be used, but they often did anti-interop things in their design. But if they get popular we will build on them anyway. A great example was XML-RPC vs SOAP. We didn't need another way to do RPC on the web, we already had a good one. We didn't need another syndication format, RSS was growing like a weed. We didn't need an alterative to rssCloud, but we got one anyway.

It's as if they forgot that the internet and web were not build by big corporations, who were busy fighting over Windows vs Mac OS. Lotus vs Excel. The internet was built mostly by individuals at universities. The internet caught the tech industry by surprise. So it's no wonder the formats they built were anti-internet. Long story, the point is we're building stuff is mimimalist yet still does a lot of great things. And there won't be a lot of long mathematical sounding definitions, but there will be plenty of examples and a validator, the tools developers need to create interop.

PS: This piece was added to Rules for Standards-makers (2017).

Last week along with a lot of other stuff, we shipped a validator for lists and feeds that want to be compatible with RSS.chat. It works best for standards to stay strong and a validator helps that. So here are a few examples, validating one user's feed, validating the everyone feed for RSS.chat, which is interesting because this feed starts a lot of threads, so we navigate through that tree and check those feeds too. And validating the user list on RSS.chat, which is an OPML file. And a simple feed with a few interop isses.

We need a way to define lists of writers independent of the site they write on. They are represented by an RSS feed with the basic features required for RSS.chat. The list is an OPML subscription list. We're reusing formats people are already familiar with, RSS and OPML.