I have news for you -- Claude forgets important stuff. I catch it forgetting to do things it was "programmed" to do. It's not a computer, it's not garbage in garbage out. It could be good stuff in garbage out. As I've said before there's a big chunk of the app I'm working on where I don't read code. User interface stuff only. No control of what comes in our out. Trying to not take any chances here.

This is a multi-billion dollar idea. I want to link to "report-up" concept in something I'm writing. There is no Wikipedia page for that but there is a brief explainer in Google, via their AI. Here's the feature: add a permalink to that response. I'm lazy and will link to it in my writing.

Does it ever cross anyone's mind that according to the rules of war, Iran would be totally justified in attacking the United States?

Vibe-coded software will have a place where users can communicate what they want to developers who can help make it real. The same way you might get medical info from an AI, but would still get your colonoscopy from an actual doctor. Part of the origin story of podcasting is that Adam hacked up a version of Frontier to illustrate what he had in mind for the "last yard" protocol. When I looked at the code it was horrible, hard to believe someone thought of doing it that way. But it got the point across, and that's the moment the podcasting boostrap began. I love using the AIs to tell a visual story, a skill I never had or developed. No reason it can't work the same way for software.

In yesterday's podcast I mentioned a Microsoft promotional video from the 90s. JY Stervinou on Twitter asked if he had found it, and it was close but it was the video I was talking about. So I checked in with Claude with this prompt. there was a microsoft promotional video ...

Podcast: Wrapping AI in the web.

Just finished No Country for Old Men, the book by Cormac McCarthy. I have seen the movie many times, it's one of those movies that if you're looking for something to watch and you come across it, you might as well go for it because every scene in the movie is a performance. I didn't realize that they used most of McCarthy's dialog, literally -- in the movie. Near the end, Bell, the sheriff tells a story about old age. "There wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for." I love truths that hit hard. He's such a great writer. And I love that I can write like all the characters if'n I get a mind to.

Marc Andreessen said programmers aren't disoccupied, we haven't become obsolete, quite the opposite, we're all working around the clock. It's true. Everyone is doing it. We got a new brain that can do all kinds of amazing things. You don't get a new super powerful brain organ every day.

I'm going to release the Claude-generated code that enables it to work with me on projects that are written and managed in outlines.

Just asked Claude to save this in memory. "in general i create local variables with partial results because 1. i can step through the calculations in the debugger. 2. the order guides my mind when im reading this code, 3. it lets me put a name on a partial value. this is helpful when i want to piece together wtf the code is supposed to be doing. and 4. it makes no difference in the efficiency of the code for a variety of reasons. please save that somewhere." i'm getting a lot of these rules down. i have them memorized but have never written them up because i didn't have a system for saving it somewhere relevant. i always thought ai would be good for going back and reading all my blog posts and creating somethjing readable, but as often is the case, the way it works turned out to be quite different, accomplishes the same thing.

Saying Bluesky is part of the web is like saying Spotify or YouTube own podcasting. They say it, but that doesn't mean it's true.

I've been following Jake's work privately, but now he's blogging about it publicly. I totally look forward to running Frontier on today's hardware. I especially want to run Manila on one of my home computers, and use it for Linux server apps. I've forgotten so much about how Manila works, but I expect it'll all come back. We had a great team back in the Manila days -- we all used the product, and it was and will be again one of the most powerful and pragmatic programming environments ever.

Claude Code doesn't know anything about the "users' perspective." Part of the software we're working on is totally fenced off, I only use it, I don't read code in there. This is an important technique. I'm thinking I'm the first person coming through here with my codebase and product mix.

I couldn't not say anything about the Knicks win last night in the opening game of the NBA Eastern Conference finals. The Knicks were losing, then winning big, then fell apart, and by midway through the 4th quarter they were down by 22, and the Clevelands were completely in ...

Markdown support is a big feature for people who want to know what we're doing with their text and what we're not doing. ;-)

Opus 4.6 is much smarter than the other one. It feels like I'm working with someone from Bronx Science. I had been using Sonnet 4.6, which I switched to after reading somewhere that it costs less and it's usually every bit as good as newer models. I would never work with Son...

Someday you're going to tell your kids that we once used a social network that limited your writing to 500 characters and didn't allow styling, links or titles. What was it called Daddy? Bluesky. And people thought it was great. Why? They might have been taking drugs.

I have taught Claude Code to write software the way I do. It has abilities that I don't, for example, I give them 1000 lines of code, highly factored, with lots of thought into making it readable and maintainable, and always falling short (our languages today fight against r...

2024-era ChatGPT pictures, of which I created many are now like Comic Sans type was in 2010 or so, if you remember.

Jon Stewart is usually pretty good, but I think he got it wrong when he says the AI companies are stealing journalists' knowledge. Imho they don't create knowledge, they report it. The knowledge isn't theirs to own, and that is for the times there is actually any new stuff. They stick to a few main stories, and still insist that the upcoming election is about the economy. They talk about the $1.7 billion slush fund, but aren't reporting every day in every story how much money we've given ICE. That big funding is going to the concentration camps they're building, the people we hear so little of. This is a government that shot two people in Minnesota, on camera, and shrugged it off. We let that go too.

Today Claude found a problem that would only be uncovered if you knew that assigning to location.href didn't happen immediately. If it decides to redirect and then do a bunch of other stuff including making network references, the whole thing could (and did) come crashing down. I would have found that problem, but the actual error message the browser emitted made me think the problem was on the server not the client.

Timothy Snyder made an important point. Trump sees his cause as a religion and sees himself as god. So when someone who is unfairly punished by Trump says they're still glad they voted for them, because (I guess) if god is on the ballot, you have to vote for him.

I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of the components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable.

i'd wait till a fresh start tomorrow.

but then i realized claude has all the code, so i could just tell it my problem.

can you find it, i asked, realizing i had not given it info on what the problem is.

there's a very weird mistake in the code i wrote just now, and there was a lot of it, i said to claude.

can you find the problem.

had no idea what to expect.

no more than 3 seconds it said I got it!

it was a typo. where i meant to type x i had typed prefs.

juggling a lot of bits in my head, my brain skipped, i didn't notice.

i would have found it quickly in my next session. but now i can think of anything but that problem until then.

sometimes claude can be totally frustrating, but other times the power makes such a huge difference.

I documented the optional source:inReplyTo element for RSS 2.0.

I wish they had an outliner in Claude. I would use it. ;-)

BTW, here's the JSONL version of Scripting News. It has the same data as the RSS file, but in the format that AI apps are looking for, so I am told. I thought I'd try to kick this off by pushing an RSS flow through the pipe. It's like using the Grateful Dead to boot up podcasting. I needed something to put out on the wire and I had this feed handy.

Thinking about adding <source:inReplyTo> to the source namespace. Its value is a URL, by default, and has an optional isPermaLink attribute, a boolean, to indicate if it's not a permalink. Works just like the guid element in RSS 2.0. I will also add support for that in the FeedLand database, and flow it out through the socket interface. Actually that's pretty close to a full spec, at least in rss.land where we take simplicity seriously. ;-)

I reached a point in my Claude work where now I can do vibe coding, in a world that I used to just be a programmer in. This means if I want to do a heavy lift, I can tell Claude what I want and it can do really big corner turns, which is something I am (as a human) terrible at, and thus resist. Today I redesigned the basic user interface of the app, and didn't read any code, I was just giving orders, and it was doing what I asked, even if every little thing it did would have been a full day's work. It's remarkable how it can do very complex things in a few seconds.

And the web framework i'm working on can do almost all the things I want to do for now, but I want to suck everything into it, and turn the whole thing into a vibe coding amusement park. So many projects I want to do, and so many I want to do with you.

I have Claude Code hooked up to Chrome. It's crawling around inside the DOM of the running system, like humans do in a debugger. It's a bit like Fantastic Voyage if you've ever seen it. I've been waiting for this moment. Now we can do some really nice UI work.