Claude and I are blowing through quick fixes. After testing one fix, I wrote: "It works! Again a big difference, it's only happened a few times but when it does I completely lose the suspension of disbelief." Claude responds: "One jolt and the tool becomes visible again." That's why people say my software thinks like they do. Of course it doesn't, but we work hard to stay completely unseen when your brain is in a different universe. More accurately, it lets you think. We go after bugs like this.

Claude Code et al change how software is developed forever. We're never going back.

And it's just as likely that writing on computer networks is undergoing a similar transformation.

I had a lisp when I was a kid, but they trained it out of me. These days I catch myself lisping sometimes. Maybe the training wears off??

I live in a place where the power goes out when there's a big storm. When the power comes back 15 hours later, you appreciate air conditioning in a whole new way.

I'm old enough to remember the Tall Ships in NY Harbor on this day in 1976, the bicentennial. As a NY kid, I wasn't very impressed. I liked rockets and rock bands, sound systems, had started programming then, was working in BASIC at Rapidata, a time sharing company with its ...

In the case of twitter-like systems the limits of the technology basically lost us the web, something most people are just now coming to grips with.

I need new podcasts. The only one I listen to regularly now is the Bill Simmons podcast, but that's because the Knicks won and the NBA is re-forming itself around the Knicks. It's so freaking unusual to have your team, which was once right up there with Charlotte, New Orleans...

I asked ChatGPT for this. "If we had a talking head version of ChatGPT, a human-like image of a person that spoke Claude's words what would it look like?" Claude's words coming through ChatGPT's image. There was a typo, I typed Claude when I meant ChatGPT. So I asked it correctly, with ChatGPT both times. Except I forgot to ask for an image, and got the text behind the image which is generous and revealing. I would vote for a politician who was this honorable, generous and idealistic, a modern day John McCain. Claude speaking from Claude's head, described in words by ChatGPT. Final image, Claude head speaking for Claude AI as an image. Claude speaking for Claude as rendered by ChatGPT.

AI should be like a lawyer or doctor, first responsibility is to the user. And first, do no harm.

An observation about Fable 5 in Claude Code. It's a much better writer than Opus 4.8. One of our next big things is writing docs, and all the info is in Claude. Opus was a disaster as a docs writer. This one looks like it'll be good. Whew.

You can't learn from your mistakes if you aren't bloody truthful to yourself about what happened and what went wrong.

I'm working on an app in Claude that has a server and the server has an API. One day we had an aha moment. I bet you (Claude) can control the app via the API. Yes. And now unless we're debugging something in the UI, Claude just interacts via the API. It feels like a person but you have to remember that it's actually a piece of software. ;-)

I saw a bit of a commencement speech by Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google, where he was talking about AI and getting boo'd by the audience. But he was saying things that were right and should be paid attention to. Most important, and I'm paraphrasing, the AI world is just getti...

A thought for people who think the US can't be fixed. I've seen very strange things happen, like all of a sudden people figure it out and boom next thing you know they're the NBA Champions. It wasn't exactly sudden, but the last leg of was. A gestalt. Now two leaders figure out how to lead. The thing about each of those people is determination, and a belief they were right, and they went right up to the edge and fought. I think the country would unite behind such a leader.

I showed the post above to Claude and that took our conversation off in a new direction. We had been experimenting with the Message Scanner from LBBS, an early version of Twitter I wrote in the early 80s. It's described in this story I wrote in 1988, a summary of what I did leading to the start of UserLand. 38 years later Claude said: "LBBS message scanner running on RSS."

BTW thinking of LBBS as an early version of Twitter is a contortion, but considering how history played out, accurate.

One of the cool things about having Claude Code is that as we develop this product, we have a near perfect chronology of every consideration and decision made along the way. I don't think that's ever been possible before. I would love to see how the people at Bell Labs put to...

BTW, I sometimes ask Claude "what do you think" and it often has an opinion.

BTW thanks to Dave Carlick for noticing when I had fun writing a piece, laughing out loud at almost every sentence. Who's the biggest fan of my writing? Me. But sometimes I think of Dave C.

Some things Claude is extremely tedious at.

Earlier today I suggested doing an AI/UI overhaul for WordPress, and today I see the announcement of that from (apparently) an independent developer. Breath-taking.

The EFF gets everything wrong. It’s observable. Empirical. The EFF stands up for something that’s supposedly good for people and the web, but if you look closer, it’s actually bad for the web and the people, and serves the interest of big tech companies, usually Google.

Another truth, the user interface of WordPress could benefit from a total overhaul. Too many expedient choices over too many years that paper over bad design choices with yet more bad choices. But this kind of problem is relatively easy to fix. Make a list of all the feature...

I organize my work in OPML and have even taught Claude how to work with me in outlines.

I prefer to do my middle of the night iPad writing sprees on Twitter instead of Bluesky because no character limit. No one is going to read the stuff on either platform, so why not go for ease of use for writing.

It's remarkable that some people fondly miss Googles RSS reader app, already gone for over a decade. Remarkable because they captured the market, wiped out all competition (they deserved it, the products were awful) and then shut their own product down, leaving a toxic karmic bomb crater in its place.

As a writer I've stolen lots of ideas. All writers do it. How do you think we get our ideas.

Which is why it's so weird that they object to having their ideas stolen en masse.

We go through this regularly, basically you make a living doing something, and you aren't paid enough.

So every subject in every context arrives at the same place. Why aren't they paying me. I must be paid.

It is a permanent obsession with writers.

I try to be honest and admit that I steal from other writers, but I only steal from the best! :-)

BTW, I was just contacted by a developer who's implementing all the protocols I mentioned yesterday. And I should mention that Manton Reece, developer of micro.blog and a longtime friend, going back to the Frontier days on the Mac, has inbound and outbound RSS and he covers ...

I've never given a commencement speech, but if I did, I'd run through my mottos and explain what they mean and who I stole them from, and how they are a distillation of what I've learned in life. The one I'd mention first, which isn't even on the freaking list, is this one --...