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Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
IndieWeb
Manton Reece - Blogroll
Hacker News isn't a software masterpiece. All the pieces have to be there to make something as real as HN happen. As with Craig's List, Markdown, HTML, WordPress, RSS 2.0, Lotus 1-2-3 and of course these are just some of the building blocks of the tech stack we use today many years later. A press release does not count as validation.
I recommend this post on vibe coding.
There's a lot more to development than coding.
I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what you had in mind.
I think people find it amazing that they can create code, not just that the machine can create it. I know what that's like because I get a rush from creating images, something I never had a skill for, so all of a sudden being able to express myself with drawings was a breakthrough for me. ;-)
I've spent a few decades making commercial quality software in a variety of contexts, and so far I wouldn't rush to get rid of my dev teams based on the idea that the bots can do their work.
I think more realistically we have powerful new tools that we as yet have not learned how to use, but it's pretty exciting to see what may be possible.
Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly -- in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.
WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026.
Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is what I see on the Posts page.
Does EmDash have a feed reader built in??
Suggestion for feed reader devs. Put a Check Now button on the page for a single feed. It shouldn't overburden your system because it's just doing an HTTP read and a little parsing. Not much more work than reloading a page in the browser. The benefit is you can see a current view of the news according to a specific feed without waiting. Makes the web roughly instantaneous for every feed, even ones that don't support rssCloud. FeedLand has such a button.
Things are changing a lot. Huge flow of ideas, and some catching up to do. Mind bombs in every direction.
Last night while watching sports I learned via ChatGPT about MCP.
Here's what it can do and people *are* using it for this
You could turn ChatGPT into an easy editor for WordPress posts.
Just as I have developed the habit of getting it to create a handoff.md file when I'm done with a session, I could write something with ChatGPT helping, I don't ever do that myself but i might, if it were easy. and when I'm ready to publish, I'd say "Please publish this on my daveverse site now." I might specify a category or two, or set defaults, it's good at that stuff. I've taught Claude to write code in my style, so I can maintain it (to answer Aral Balkan's question on Mastodon).
This is something we can and should research.
Let's give one of the ai apps a fairly good idea for an app we want to use, and help it -- not by coding, just by answering questions about how it will work, and Iterating over the product until it works like we want it. Sometihng simple, like perhaps a text editor for Mastodon. Something that isn't squished in a tiny little text box, and has icons for bold, underline, links, etc. It could be useful.
Then let's look at the code with an open mind. I think i've given it enough examples of good maintainable code that I could get it to produce maintainable code.
This was in reply to a Mastodon post by Aral Balkan.
Please follow me at my new Twitter address: bullmancuso. Whatever anyone thinks of the company the product is still unique, there are people and communities there that I need to communicate with, and I just don't have that kind of network anywhere else.
My first real post in the New Dave On Twitter, or N-DOT.
When I think of "Slack" my brain immediately translates it to "AOL." I'm not kidding.
BTW, suggestion to web-based companies that send out notices via email. It's good to do that, but make sure somewhere there's a link to exactly the same material on the web. It can only build traffic for your ideas, earned media.
There's so much bullshit, why deliberately add more -- in hope of being either funny or memorable -- and only succede at annoying.
We prefer to try to keep things real here. Archived Scripting News OPML source for March 2026.
It's peeve time. I've just listened to a song that inspires me on Amazon Music. A song I've been humming and singing in my head all morning. After it's done, the voice of Alexa comes on and says "BTW, you have two new messages. Would you like to hear them?" Now I have to think about how much I hate this. I had an exalting experience I want to savor and the frickin robot intervenes. If I say "don't do that again" it says basically "Sorry Dave."
BTW the latest episode of 500 Songs is about The Who and Tommy. I of course had the album, which means every song is deeply embedded in my personal LLM. This episode, in two parts, was one of the best most recent ones. As with what Get Back did for the Beatles, when you know more about the people creating the art it has so much more value.
YouTube now puts commercials in front of songs. I used to be able to point to a low rez recording of a song as part of my blog. Now I have to think about all the links I've put in my archive that lead to shittified Google. I had never used that adjective before, I think, this certainly qualifies.
I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort."
Yesterday I ran a podcast, a voicemail to NakedJen saying she could/should use Claude or ChatGPT to create software. Later that day she told me about the software she had written. I tried using it, and and then interrogated ChatGPT which had been her programming partner, to explain what she did and what the app does. I'm not sure I have the actual story yet, have to talk with Jen live. But it turns out that the thesis was correct, and she was already using ChatGPT, had even given it a name -- Harry, and was delegating tasks that I would want to use. Of course she was. Now I have to learn more from her about what she's doing. Stay tuned.
On Feb 8, two months after Firefox announced they were pivoting to AI, I wrote a piece saying in 9 points what I would do if I ran Firefox, instead of what they were doing. Now a few weeks later, has there been any further development of this idea?
