# Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:26:42 GMT ## If I knew how AI would work with software, I would've done things differently to prepare for this. I find myself wanting to ask questions about my code that I don't have proper tools to answer. I have to get all my code managed with the new system, but not sure that's even the right way to go. Once I started using it to build full bits of deployed code, not to just answer questions about the work I'm doing one day at a time, I've become confused about planning my own work. # Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:52:40 GMT ## Coder is derogatory term btw, as if our work was like a telegram coder, but it's understandable I guess because all the lay people see is us typing on a computer and being grouchy when they interrupt our train of thought. Coder is analogous to calling a chef a chopper. You have to understand the activity you're proposing that AI is replacing. And I find all the discussions about art very harmful -- because AI opens up graphic art to people who never thought they could do it. I bet you some absolutely fantastic artists are blossoming right now. Calling it slop is just as disrespectful as calling art expressed in software "code." BTW they said the same bullshit about bloggers and we know how that turned out. # Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:56:33 GMT ## I gotta say some days I start with a lot on my mind and am driven to write. This is one of those days. Maybe I'm inspired by the torrent of posts by my blogger friend ma.tt. Blogging can be a solitary thing or a relative thing. When you blog about something I have something to say about, I write on my blog and link back to yours, that's relative. The problem with comments in the old blogging world is that my comment resides on your blog. No more of that. I want equal stature for all writing, your comment should appear on your blog, yet still be easy to find from the other person's blog (and this is very important) with their support, it has to be something they want their readers to see. Otherwise the comment is still on your blog where your readers can see it. # Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:47:10 GMT ## 24 years ago I had life-saving heart surgery. The treatment was not available to my grandmother who had the genes from which I inherited the condition. She died very young, but that was normal in her time, there was no treatment for this kind of disease beyond, don't exert yourself too much for the rest of your (short) life. Do you think heart surgeons are less useful now that we've had such amazing innovation in one freaking lifetime? Right now we're just beginning to discover new ways AI gives us the same kind of new power that bypass surgery gave to surgeons. # Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:59:00 GMT ## If we can get the web to come back, Scripting News could have new relevance. The age of the silo really hurt my rep. But I think people will ultimately appreciate that I never turned by back on the web. It was either the web or the highway as far as I was concerned. I've already lived under the thumb of a corporate platform vendor. I'd rather give up than try it again. And by the web coming back, I mean when products are expected to interop, the way podcast clients interop. I don't care if they're forced to do it, or do it willfully, with gusto -- but I know and so do people who tried to develop on owned platforms know, that it just doesn't work if there's a BigCo in charge of your destiny. There's always an acquisition or reorg just around the corner that sacrifices your future, often for no reason other than they don't care. # Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:32:09 GMT ## As you know Jake Savin is getting Frontier to run on current Linux and Mac OS systems. Today he posted a wonderful screen shot. It's how Frontier's built-in web server says "hello world." # Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:50:01 GMT ## We're still fixing problems created by the switch to https on the web. Reported a problem yesterday, was surprised to find an inconsistency in the way WordPress represents guids in its RSS feed for a post and in the API. This morning I posted an issue on the WordPress repo on GitHub. I don't think they can fix either approach without breakage, so they probably have to leave it as-is. I updated wpIdentity package to normalize guids it gets from the API to lowercase, so even if they change the implementation my software won't break. Another reason we're still paying for what Google decided we needed. What we don't need -- BigCo's f-ing with the f-ing web. # Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:49:36 GMT ## Happy Friday The 13th! ;-) # Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:13:47 GMT ## Substack would be the web's printer, if they supported inbound RSS. # Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:19:03 GMT ## Bluesky is actually pretty close to being on the web. The biggest missing piece is inbound RSS. They already support outbound, it could use a review and tuneup, but that half is mostly there. I would even go a bit further, if they really supported RSS, it would be the web. # Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:03:06 GMT ## Just added Daring Fireball to my blogroll. What a huge oversight. Glad to get this fixed. # Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:36:05 GMT ## WordPress feeds and guids -

Try entering this into Claude or ChatGPT:

Here's a screen shot of the Claude response.

A while back Matt was giving me grief, in a friendly way, about how scripting.com still uses http addresses. I could switch over, but then all the images and included files posted before 2014 or so would break. The minor gain in security on a site that doesn't ask for any private information, is totally not worth throwing out all the work I did on a site that actually has historic importance is just a bad deal. It would be a solving a problem no one but Google has (and it's not even clear what that problem is, and why I should care). There's a principle here too -- letting one company dictate to us how the web works, well I got into the web to get away from that.

Anyway, the reason they still use http in a place where one expects https is apparently is the same reason. It would break things that they don't want to break. I'm not suggesting they change it, but somewhere in my codebase somehow the http addresses are getting converted to https, and I haven't (yet) been able to track it down. I'm pretty sure it's a bug I unknowingly introduced.

Postscript: When I'm calling through the API, I get back a record that has a different guid from what's in the feed. Seems like the API and the feed should be in agreement. This is the code that gets the post record. My guess to get them into agreement, I'm going to have to hack this, changing https to http. And there is the reason they can't fix this, and just have to live with this mess. I think overall the people who manage the feed and the API are doing a pretty great job, btw. You have to know I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it.

# Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:24:14 GMT ## Claude code notes, day 2 -

Thinking of AI and how it relates to software development, I'm working in the old mode and the new mode. The old mode is I build a project over a few years. I try to bury bits of functionality behind interfaces, either APIs or UIs, and hope I can forget how they work and just access them via the interfaces. Repeat the process. In the new mode, I rely on the machine to remember all that. Claude Code is the key to doing that, using a GitHub repo. And then two or more people can work at the higher level. Obviously the next thing is to see if there aren't some interfaces we can build that are even higher level. The evolution of AI and languages go hand in hand. On the other hand, human beings being what we are, it's just as likely as there will be a wild proliferation of new even more complex interfaces, because now we can rely on the machines to remember the complexities, and their limit is, compared to humans, practically infinite.

# Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:13:05 GMT ## Trump’s naive attacks or threats against Iran, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Cuba and lack of support for Ukraine guarantee that every country that doesn’t have nukes is going to be working overtime to get them. Assuming they don’t already have the equiv of the Strait of Hormuz. Assuming the world survives Trump do you really think they’re going to let the US have as much power as it has up until Trump? They and we have to limit the power of all countries big and small. Trump is the warning that you can’t assume things will always be as they always have been. # Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:12:22 GMT ## Claude Code notes -

Yesterday, I put another couple of hours in my from-scratch right-sized Claude project. I decided we should switch from a browser-based app with no server component to a Node.js app with a browser-based UI. I felt it would be substantially easier to develop as a server app, and would more easily be enhanced with a SQL database running behind it. So I learned how to do that with Claude Code. had to slap its wrist when it tried, twice, to look at and change code outside of the freaking sandbox. I was promised it never would do that. I have the server running in PagePark, which has a built-in Heroku-like system I wrote a few years ago so I could manage all my apps from a CLI app, on Unix at Digital Ocean. Then we created a nice UI running in the browser. Two hours. And how did it make me feel? Mind bomb!

An important best practice is to always start fresh threads by asking the old thread to prepare a handoff.md file that I can give to the next one, so we don't have to always start over. It takes some getting used to because coding doesn't work that way. Everything about your app is in three classes, CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There's also package.json for server apps. And I always have a worknotes.md file for every project. And that's it, the runtime isn't like Claude or ChatGPT. You have to get practiced at starting fresh threads because there's only so much data the app can store for your project. Somehow having the handoff.md doc it effectively does garbage collection? And there are limits to what the "make me a handoff" can do for you, it does forget things between threads. I don't understand how people with large projects don't go completely crazy.

It is incredibly stubborn at insisting on giving you orders or deciding for itself what it will do. According to these AI's the human will isn't important, I couldn't possibly have arrived in the chat with a goal. I am blown away by what I can do, but I absolutely hate how these bots try to dominate, always, and never remembers. There should be a macro for: "I will tell you what to do."

# Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:24:29 GMT ## The Guardian is the coolest news org, paywall-wise. Why don't they innovate, and create a EZ-Pass for news, and run it for other high quality, reader centered pubs. We pay $1 per article read. That's how I as a reader want to do it. I don't like subscriptions. # Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:27:38 GMT ## I found out recently that my blog is in of the default startup set for NetNewsWire. What an honor to be included. Thanks Brent! ;-) # Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:06:35 GMT ## Toni Schneider, Bluesky's new CEO -

Bluesky has a new CEO, Toni Schneider former CEO of Automattic. I have known Toni for many years, dating back to his startup, Oddpost, that I praised on my blog, and his partner was then quoted in Wired saying Scripting News is media. That meant a lot to me at the time, and it was true. I was very proud that I had played a small part in their success.

I had a virtual meeting with Toni a couple of years ago about their identity product, then in development, urging them to include storage in it, but as far as I know that didn't happen.

Toni believes that Bluesky is a distributed social media app, but I've been all around this, wrote some software for their protocol to see if I was missing something, and concluded that it's typical tech industry hype, there's no reality to the claim. They're selling something they don't have, and I don't think they can do it and preserve the feature set of their product.

Here's a search for Bluesky on my blog. You can see that I have taken a great interest in the product.

Scripting News unfortunately is not as influential as it once was when I praised Oddpost, but I think this advice is equally valuable as it was in 2002. I think the shortest path for Bluesky to achieve its vision is to hook up with WordPress, that would give us a path into it that is decentralized. If we ever talk about this, ironically, I will be selling Toni on his own product.

# Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:15:30 GMT ## Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t because I don’t know." # Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:33:46 GMT ## An app I'd like someone to do. I want to underline the word reason in a blog post I wrote, below. I want to point to a page with a definition of the word, as a verb, not a noun. As far as I can see there is no page on the web for that. Your app will have a dialog at the top of the page where you type the query, and it generates a page with a static URL that I can point to where the definition will display if the user clicks my link. I would paste the URL where I want it. And that's just the start, the key thing is short replies to queries needed to support something you're writing. I'm surprised Google doesn't do this. And I'd much rather use someone other than Google, but it has to be someone who will be around for a while. You can put an ad on each of the pages, but don't overdo it, or you'll incentivize a competitor. # Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:23:20 GMT ## Manton's Inkwell -

My friend Manton Reece has a new feed reader called Inkwell. The thing that's great about Manton is he tries out new ideas. This is a feed reader of experimentation. Let's see if this works, Manton asks. We'll find out. I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways. I think before long they won't laugh at the idea that RSS is at least as good as AT Proto. (That's a joke, RSS is so much better in so many ways.)

BTW, I'm not sure how Inkwell will fit into my life. I want to try the features of his product, but I am already in FeedLand, all my feed subscriptions emanate from there. I could import my feeds into Inkwell, it supports OPML import, but the subs would not stay in sync. Something for Manton to worry about in a few months or years. No doubt a lot of people are going to love Inkwell, I love it because it's new and creative and represents a substantial investment in RSS. We all got an upgrade today thanks to Manton.

If you want to get an idea of how it works, he did a video demo for his beta testers.

# Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:08:58 GMT ## AIs can reason -

I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app.

Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently.

I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be.

And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood.

# Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:30:34 GMT ## Let me tell you something about AIs. They are not in any way ready to develop the kinds of apps I make. I spent a full week trying to get it to do so. What happened here is that we all were blown away, correctly, with what ChatGPT could do, and loved that it kept getting better. I've used it and Claude to make apps, and that is also amazing, unprecedented, maybe the biggest innovation ever. But. It doesn't have the memory you need to keep a full app in memory at once. And the tools we have now, compilers, editors, runtimes, do remember the whole thing, they are really good at that, but they don't understand at the level a human can and does. And sessions are too limited. And it makes unbelievably huge mistakes. Maybe they will get there, but we also had high hopes for the last breakthrough, the web, in its early days, and it didn't achieve its promise. Turns out the web gets you Trump, and Trump just discovered he has nukes. Cory talks about enshittification and that's right -- but it's even worse than that. The tech industry always oversells the innovation. I am one of them in that regard. In this one I'm so far just a user. Also I haven't given up. Still diggin! # Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:11:09 GMT ## Carville is obviously right. No political party can afford to demonize a group of voters based on gender and race, esp when they make up approx 33% of the electorate. # Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:15:32 GMT ## Reporter at the Guardian: "We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie." It's true. I was covering tech realistically starting in 1994, was writing for Wired, people thought I was being too hard on them, but I was actually like you too easy. But people didn’t want to believe tech was evil, they believed that the young people that were running tech were idealists and maybe they were when they started, but by the time the billions started flowing and they stopped caring about people and started only caring about money. A piece I wrote in 1996, after going to a tech industry conference." # Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:29:43 GMT ## He was a trust buster -

If he were alive today he'd be busting silos.

# Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:51:26 GMT ## Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users. # Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:19:27 GMT ## I was looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters angry and arguing about nothing, dramatic music mocks the awful writing and acting. Does it get better? Reviewers loved it. I've seen this before. Previous seasons were great, so the next season automatically must be great too. # Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:46:25 GMT ## Cory, RSS has never been dormant -

I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom.

Happened to the Mac too

A blogroll for 2026

My old ass

# Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:51:20 GMT ## Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news? # Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:05:29 GMT ## Remember when, just weeks ago, the Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congress. The video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video. # Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:59:16 GMT ## I remember liking the first three seasons of Industry on HBO, so I just watched them again. It's a Succession clone, in a way, not exactly the same story, but the same type of story. I waited until the final episode of Season 4 had aired to start at the beginning. So now I'll be watching fresh stuff, which is kind of scary because I found that I had forgotten some of the big plot points, I wonder how much of the new season I'll understand. I also found it dragged toward the end of Season 3, where they do a trick with the audio, make it sound really portentious and dramatic with a promise of evil, for events, which without the music would seem mundane, tiresome, kind of pathetic actually, embarrassing and just plain stupid. But at least it was just part of one season, there are some series that are all about nothing, made to seem important. I try to imagine the writers' room at such shows. Do they know how ridiculous it is? Maybe they don't care. Next up is The Pitt, which everyone says is great, esp doctors, tried watching it but couldn't stand the gore. # Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:59:48 GMT ## If you have an X account, esp if you have a lot of followers, please RT this post. I'd like to get my real account back. Thanks for your help. # Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:05:40 GMT ## On the other hand, it's hard to get Claude.ai to really apply itself to my own software. It likes to drive. Same with ChatGPT. # Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:16:25 GMT ## The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was going to evolve. I asked if it remembered how Rules worked in MORE. Yes, it explained it correctly. Then I said I'd like "faceless" rules, where we could edit the source so the outlines looked the way we wanted them to look, using Rules. In the time it took me to write a sentence here, it finished the job. I added a home page for the AI outliner folder with links to the other docs in the folder. Then I did a bunch more changes, I could go on like this forever. It was like working with a team on a product, only the team turns around new versions in seconds, and eventually runs out of space (gets tired?) and I have to start another thread. I just did a transition and it seemed to pick up pretty close to where we left off. I have a lot of ideas here. Expect an explosion of new versions of popular software writing by individual people. We'd better make sure the standards of the web are really well documented. # Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:58:10 GMT ## What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good girl?" Rub behind the ears. When they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing. # Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:05:59 GMT ## We had a problem today with one of the servers, it meant a bunch of services weren't working. Never found the actual problem, but something changed and the misbehaving server started working. Learned a lot about managed databases on Digital Ocean. # Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:54:55 GMT ## I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser." Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other cells using point and click. If you go down this path, ask it to keep a user's guide current, and then ask it to put in features, and just describe them in standard spreadsheet terminology. The trouble starts when you want to make something that doesn't have a standard terminology yet because it's new. # Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:33:27 GMT ## Then I had to ask Claude.ai to write me a nice little outliner that runs in the browser. And it did. With a flourish. It was designed to make me the guy who designed outliners for most of a lifetime, and I have to say it was very nicely done, for a two-minute project. Even for a two-week project it's pretty nice. Then I asked it to do a priorArt outline, and it looks really good in the this.how template. The power of standards. And I had a full day of work even while Claude.ai was doing these mind bombs for me. # Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:57:59 GMT ## I asked for a feature of the outliner from Drummer that it automatically opens a file in read-only mode if there's a URL parameter with the address of an OPML file. Like this. # Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:22:57 GMT ## Really Simple pizza -

"It really tastes like a pizza!!"

# Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:03:13 GMT ## Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s, now heads up the MacArthur Foundations. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-) # Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:11:00 GMT ## I tuned into the Fediforum -

I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)

They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.

Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.

It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference.

Some of my takeaways from the meetup.

# Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:33:57 GMT ## If you followed me on Twitter, please follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the f, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes. # Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:35:30 GMT ## A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders. # Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:33:12 GMT ## opmlProjectEditor format -

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff.

It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it.

I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that).

Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this.

Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub.

I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops.

Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format.

# Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:11:59 GMT ## Archive for Scripting News in February 2026, in OPML, as always.