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 lon...

An absolutely delicious temperate cloud-free day in the Catskills, so I got up from the computer and enjoyed.

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 act...

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 n...

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.

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 WordP...

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

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.

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,...

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.

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.

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.

Good morning sports fans!

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 suddent 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.

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 JavaScrip...

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 that kept me from getting anywhere. 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. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, actually without breaking anything.

Two podcasts I can recommend without reservation.

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...

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.

Maybe someday Claude will understand what a Frontier-like app environment 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.

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...

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.

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 we...

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 to hurt the US. Or wake us up to the reality of war. 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 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 stock up, but we he were, where would we use them? We've already attacked Iran with our probably obsolete trillion-dollar military. 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.

I'm thinking about writing my blog over in RSS.chat. It has most of the features I like, titles are optional, no character limit, links are supported, because it's the web. It supports discourse the way I like it, where every comment is a post, no difference, and you can anchor threads in different places, not just the place it was born. It's got a simple structure, without being complex. Small parts loosely joined, every part replaceable. Much more than open source. And naturally distributed.