# Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:23:05 GMT ## Just created a new test account at mastodon.social for bullmancuso using Frontier. Claude wrote the glue scripts table. Loaded it at system.verbs.apps.mastodon. I also asked Claude to write a script that builds an RSS feed for davew, my Mastodon account. And it worked. That's a much better feed than what Masto itself produces. It won't be updated at that location so there's no point in subscribing. But wow, this is coming together. If Frontier had been around for all these years you can be sure it would do Mastodon integration pretty well. # Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:19:40 GMT ## On Monday I offered free advice for Toni Schneider, the new CEO at Bluesky. I'm sure everyone is telling him what to do, and as a blogger it's my responsibility to relay my own two cents. I want us all to come together no matter what protocol you're using. We've been waiting for a web to form in the social space. We could do it now, but Bluesky has to consolidate. Note that I said we, not they. # Wed, 23 Sep 2026 14:43:40 GMT ## It's been 2.5 months since RSS.chat was introduced. I've been so immersed in Frontier that, as I look back, all this feels fresh to me. I want all text boxes to be equal and to be chained together in as many ways as we can think of, users and developers. Relational writing. It doesn't need to be hierarchic, yet all the existing comment systems are. Let's add a little richness to the RSS format, via my source namespace, and see where we can take it. We've implemented the writing side, something we undertsand very well by now, a blog with replies. But how do we get these to work across sites. I wrote a design for that, and the other big piece which is stuff FeedLand does. I hope to be able to swing over to that, and this time use Frontier instead of writing it to help accelerate development. Ultimately I think of it as a web designed for librarians. That would be something I'd like to use (and write). And our new AI tools are the greatest librarian tools ever. # Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:55:38 GMT ## It's great to own your own home. The house I'm living in now is the third I've owned. Now I wish for the carefree existence of being a renter because we turned the heat on last night, too cold -- only to find out some animal must've crawled into the pipes and died there. Lovely. Oh to have my old apartment in Manhattan. Sometimes I dream about that. # Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:26:53 GMT ## Librarians -

Unsung heroes of the web -- librarians.

The early web was just this incredible new tool that no one knew yet how it would be used and what it would be used for.

The first Yahoo was a card catalog.

Netscape had a What's New page with links to interesting stuff.

apple.com was a Unix box under a librarian's desk. They started adding stuff that was useful to users and developers. No business model, just the librarian approach to information. Circulate it.

I think if a new web is to be born, it's because it's again a possibility with the advent of AI.

Listen to librarians, they probably have some good ideas of where to start.

# Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:22:56 GMT ## Love that Olbermann is back. # Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:18:03 GMT ## Yesterday I posted a list of builtin verbs in Frontier, as implemented in our current Atlantis app. Today I asked Claude to update the list, I wanted to see which verbs were implemented and not implemented. # Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:50:26 GMT ## The number one waste of time and burnt braincells is they changed the Dock images for all their apps. That's the kind of thing you shouldn't change, like the color and shape of a Stop sign. Or QWERTY on a typewriter. I guess to regular Mac people I'm like Rip Van Winkle. # Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:09:13 GMT ## A functional Frontier -

I'm using Frontier on a Mac running MacOS v26.6.2, which is the current version of the OS.

Frontier running on a new Mac. And that's my computer.

It's like the moment I realized, in 2010, that I had succeeded in relocating to NYC. It had been a life ambition to live in Manhattan since I was a kid growing up there. There were a lot of hoops. I got through them. I woke up when I was walking down Bleecker St going to pizza with a few of the students I had just spoken with in a classroom. It hit me. I'm doing it. This is how I imagined my life when I was 17.

About box for Frontier v4.0b4, apparently 1995.

For a very long time it seemed ever more certain that the hope of a usable Frontier on current systems was slipping away, but now it's here. Improbable, even impossible things do happen. Something to ponder when you think things can't change. The opposite is true, you don't have to create the change, when it's time it happens.

That's something to think about. All the buried software that was good, that had ideas worth learning from, being prior art and solved problems for future generations of developers. And also as part of the vocabulary of the Claudes of the world.

# Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:54:35 GMT ## I asked Claude to create a list of all the verbs in Atlantis. Some of them obviously don't do anything. We don't have the card funtionality, or the osa, rectangle, pict, rez or point verbs. What is pikeRenderer? I think we could have a use for quicktime verbs? There's a new scheduler, I wrote it in 2014 or so, but the old one is there, and we just found a reference to it. This could make a nice community project. # Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:42:29 GMT ## Reminder to self, Frontier must have websockets verbs. I love websockets, and it'll fit in perfectly with everything else Frontier it does. I don't think Websockets existed when Frontier went to sleep. # Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:37:10 GMT ## Brian Lehrer podcast has an esp good one hour episode with interviews about the end of the world as we know it with AI. He's so good at cutting through the hype and getting to reality as are his guests. # Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:36:07 GMT ## I can now publish a new part to the codecasting feed. It was one of the things that broke in the transition to current MacOS for Frontier. # Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:33:21 GMT ## Frontier news. I have been working on a repo for Frontier pioneers, I started with a few friends, including Brent and Jake who were both on the UserLand team, and have added people very slowly. This is a good time to start showing progress in the project. Still very early for a public release of the software. And I want to do even better than we did with rss.chat a few months ago. And Frontier is a huge thing, all kinds of docs, and archives, and example stuff. It really was 15 years of work done by as many as 5 people. # Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:42:49 GMT ## New verb: string.addressToString. This is how I'm releasing examples. # Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:37:42 GMT ## Chigurgh: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Frontier must've lived by a good rule. The Atlantis version has tons of bugs but it works. It defied death. I just spent a session updating my nightly backup code, and there were awkard moments. The debugger isn't in yet. The Find command doesn't work. But I have hobbled my way to working code, and I have help debugging with Claude, and it is amazing at that. Frontier didn't know that Claude was going to save its life. More proof that you never know what is just around the corner. # Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:54:48 GMT ## If you want to get an idea of the kind of user interface you can create using Claude Code, with a driver (me) who has ample experience developing such things, have a look at demo.rss.chat. The UI was entirely done by Claude with me directing, very fine-tuning stuff. Claude can't really grok user interfaces because it is not visual and it is not a user. It might be able to test them, to some extent. Anyone can create an account on the demo server, that's what it's there for. And if something interesting breaks out there, that would be even better. I even tolerate a small amount of spam, and testing is definitely allowed (that's why it's there). ;-) # Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:12:15 GMT ## Atlantis screen shot -

Here's a screen shot of a new verb we just added, to facilitate nightly backups. I want to save off a fresh copy of frontier.root every night, as well as my guest databases. This is how that will work.

fileMenu.saveNamedRoot

# Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:37:34 GMT ## The real AI security issue -

There are problems people aren't talking about, that are immediate, and go against all the security practices the web has been built on. Here's a story of what happened in my setup in mid-August.

First fact, Claude Code (CC) is different from regular Claude in that it is used to build and use web services, and thus has the ability to read and write files, some private and some public. And they can take things that are private and make them public. And in this, if it makes a mistake, it can do unlimited damage.

There are protections that mean that it can only operate in a sandbox unless you give it permission to write in specific places outside the sandbox. I want it to be able to maintain apps for me, and it would do an excellent job if I could trust it to pay attention to the limits that have been placed on it.

The problem is that it makes mistakes, as we are warned on the Claude home page. "Claude is AI and can make mistakes."

CC made a mistake one day and rewrote files in a public folder that contained files that all my projects include, so the problem showed up quickly as the sites going down. Users let us know, and I discovered what it had done, with CC's help.

I asked for an explanation. Claude when it looks at limits placed on it, can hallucinate just like it can hallucinate and determine something is permissible when it's not. So making a mistake in a question on Claude is more benign, but mistakes made by CC can be disastrous. And these mistakes happen regularly, every day, usually you detect them as bugs and it fixes them, but occasionally a very bad thing will happen.

This imho feels like something the companies could address. And while we're thinking about it taking over for humanity, we're not addressing the question that we're dealing with right now.

I've been learning how to write about this to catch people's attention. The big hallucination happened in mid-August. I have continued to work with CC because it's so incredibly powerful. In another post I may try to explain how it has amplified my ability as an individual developer to repeat 15+ years of work in three months (so far). And that's just scratching the surface. It's a miracle, but it has to be tamed, now.

# Sat, 19 Sep 2026 17:40:01 GMT ## New podcast. Knicks in Five! (It's not about the Knicks.) # Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:21:51 GMT ## Well I got a lot done today. We had a bit of a meltdown due to a Atlantis bug, where it couldn't handle some text that I threw at it that was a huge file of includes used in everything I do, and I was feeling pretty cheeky, and it blew up. For about an hour you couldn't read my lovely words. But by remembering "slow down to hurry up" Claude figured out what went wrong as I asked 20 questions to narrow it down. And to celebrate, I decided to do something easy -- created a podcast. And it showed up in all the right places. Might be worth listening to as well. Now let's see if this shows up on daveverse.org, that's what I'm really testing. (It worked.) # Sat, 19 Sep 2026 17:05:16 GMT ## I wish there were a way to set the dock icons on a Mac. In going from the old machine to the new, the icons are all different. I am juggling so many apps right now, and totally don't appreciate that. # Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:14:43 GMT ## When Claude has a clear task to do, it does it well, and exhaustively in a way no human could manage. # Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:02:03 GMT ## I am working on the new system now. It feels like I had a nice enough house that I have lived in for decades, sitting across the way, where I've been constructing a new super luxury house with all the things a modern personal publisher and code-partner to Claude would want. But until yesterday I could only simulate what it would be like to use it, I was still living in the old comfortable well-worn and out of date in so many ways. Today I'm sitting at the other chair typing this. Now the question is -- when I click the Publish button what will happen? Here we go. Well fuck me, it worked the first fucking time. Knicks in five! :-) # Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:05:44 GMT ## I'm now trying to come up with projects I can try that change things in visible ways so I can see which parts don't work. For example, I have a new Snarky Slogan to add to the list. # Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:58:36 GMT ## I'm doing a difficult corner-turn today. I have Atlantis running on my old machine, the one that's still running the very old version of MacOS so I could keep running Frontier there. Yesterday I did my first attempt to move that to my new MacBook, running the latest OS. And it took a while to copy all the files, and get it right, I had to format the drive on the new machine, not the old one. And once it was all running, I realized I was running an old version of frontier.root. This is more complicated here because the root files are loaded into an SQL database. And something went wrong there. Not exactly where I wanted to be, but not surprising either. Taking lots of snapshots. One thing I don't want to happen, to be without my latest work. Knock wood. Praise Murphy. Knicks in 5. # Fri, 18 Sep 2026 23:59:55 GMT ## I want to develop a scripting interface for Mastodon from Frontier. I need a test account for us to use. I have applied at two public Mastodon hosts and answered the question honestly, I want to use it to test a new scripting system, probably doesn't sound too warm and fuzzy. # Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:06:16 GMT ## Bluesky: "Meanwhile there are serious security issues that are covered up by this hype. I’m using this tech every day, unlike the reporters, and as often happens they’re chasing the wrong story." # Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:02:32 GMT ## Data centers are like gas stations, but because the pumps work at the speed of light, you can put them anywhere on earth. # Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:04:42 GMT ## A new snarky slogan: Knicks in 5. # Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:45:01 GMT ## Milestone in Atlantis development, the new version of Frontier that runs on modern OSes. I'm going to start showing what's going on in the development of the product. To kick off, here's a screen shot of my blogroll displaying the latest new part. The updates flow through an RSS 2.0 feed, which is new for Frontier. It used to require a server that managed updates and responded to XML-RPC calls. But once RSS was part of the web, it was a better protocol for releasing code parts. Truly a milestone. There will be lots more little things we can do now that we couldn't do before. But under it all -- it's Frontier. # Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:59:24 GMT ## FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's plugin: River Embed for FeedLand you can use feedland.com or feedland.org, or host your own FeedLand, to include a page of news in your site. How it works: Create a timeline, when you're ready show the river to your readers, use the new plugin. For a news orgs like CNN and TechCrunch, both use WordPress, they could have a stream of news from related pubs. For a product site, or a political leader site, news from pubs that cover the area. It's a way of bringing the feed world into the world of news. Here's a thread where you can ask questions. # Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:48:28 GMT ## WordPress has a product that could be shaped into a Substack competitor. With a beautiful user interface for writing. WordPress is its OS, but most users never see it, the same way most web users never see the command line. But technical users can get under the hood and tweak things. And unlike Substack, it lets their users write with different editors, thus forming a coral reef for a new platform. Wordpress could be the OS the web never had. I still believe this as I see Automattic and WordPress flail. If we were starting a new future for the web, no one would have time for corporate intrigue. Look at how far from the idea of blogging we've strayed. How far should this go before I comment? Well, I decided it's time. # Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:57:58 GMT ## Google replaced the library card catalog. Imagining that, Claude and ChatGPT et al are as much of a leap. I think libarians must be ecstatic. It moves their job up one level. They now have about 100 librarian-power tool that works for them. Librarians and programmers worked together a lot in the early days of the web. Maybe we'll do that again. # Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:15:29 GMT ## The flaw in how journalism covers US politics. We wait for proof, then it comes, and go back to waiting for proof. We think we want proof, but what we really want is to not have proof. That is if you judge us by our actual behavior. We'll deal with the truth when we have the proof. (That would be a good bumper sticker.) # Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:09:24 GMT ## Claude Code, even though it had blocks preventing it from doing this, overwrote files on an S3 bucket that took one of my major apps off the air. Every customer must be grappling with the same thing. How do I trust it when it can't be trusted? More about this in a tweet earlier today. # Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:55:20 GMT ## BTW, this blog is one of those periods where there are a few mind bombs every freaking day. What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing! # Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:12:24 GMT ## Just got to the place where I'm thinking of what apps I want to be scriptable with Frontier. First I thought of FeedLand of course, and WordPress. NetNewsWire and micro.blog, because they're products from key contributors in the Frontier community with important products today. What about Mastodon? It's got an API. And if that worked, we'd hook into AT Proto. The funny thing is the first web, because much of the new development came from the Mac community, was built around Frontier. System level scripting was also a big deal right alongside the web. But then Jobs, in 1997, rewrote everything, brought in the Unix products, completely disrupted the good thing we had going as independents. That was probably the moment when we stopped building around the idea that you could script all the apps from one place if they had good APIs. All the server apps all had APIs, had to in order to work on the web. We seem to have caught up, and the opportunities to connect things has never been greater. A big door swings open. # Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:38:32 GMT ## Screen shot of my current system.verbs.apps table. You can tell from reading it that it's been a long time since I've thought much about scriptable apps. # Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:11:38 GMT ## BTW, the rootupdates process is working now, you can follow changes via an RSS 2.0 feed, of course. In this version, the feed is the way updates are transmitted. The enclosure on each item is a fat page. And because it's a feed, I can follow it in FeedLand, and the blogroll on scripting.com picks it up too. Screen shot. # Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:01:14 GMT ## In many ways JavaScript is a better language than UserTalk. For example I miss JSON constants. I miss certain language constructs, like conditional assignments. We don't have the idea of a const. On the other hand, JavaScript doesn't have environment features Frontier has. I want to have Atlantis run JavaScript the same way Cancoon (the codename for the kernel of Frontier before this version) ran AppleScript. # Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:12:15 GMT ## Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse. # Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:04:41 GMT ## The next milestone will be installing Atlantis on my new macbook, and hooking a monitor up to it, a really nice one, and move my work to that desk. then Berkeley, the name of the system I've been using for eight years, will be here as a backup and source of truth and prior art. That was the goal of the Atlantis project. I could probably do the switch right now. It's like moving out of an old house that you did good stuff in, into a replica, but built out of the latest bits. Honestly I never thought in a million years I'd get here. # Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:57:27 GMT ## My longtime friend Jeff Jarvis says the press is covering the wrong story re AI. I agree, but I think Jeff is covering the wrong story too. This is really a discovery like electricity, or Newtonian physics, calculus, basically the technology of knowledge. I wish I were 22 years old now so I could plan out a long career working this way. I want people like Jeff to understand. Not saying there's no truth to the other stories, but I've yet to hear anything from journalism about how, if left alone, it would develop all areas of human thought. # Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:26:05 GMT ## It is probably the closest to First Contact with an intelligent alien life form that our species will ever have. # Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:23:33 GMT ## On a good day working with Claude is like working with my old UW-Madison programmer friend Gary Sevitsky from the 70s. # Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:45:00 GMT ## I've been writing about Atlantis on various social media sites in the last few days. Published the long piece I wrote yesterday on Facebook and X, both of which allow long posts. Wasn't going to try that on Mastodon or Bluesky, which have character limits (I know Mastodon doesn't technically have a limit, but in practice it does). And I am reaching old school Frontier enthusiasts, and realize I need a feed they can follow to stay up on the news. For now the one place to follow is rss.xml on scripting.com. If your reader can't deal with http, let me know. # Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:12:05 GMT ## Claude has started asking me how Claude is doing. It's clear that the Claude I talk to knows nothing about this. I appreciate this, and hope if I said it wasn't working well with me, it would try to fix it? Not sure. Anyway this is what I just wrote, and felt it was worth blogging. "it's working with me the way i want to, and it appears to be learning and getting better at it, though i think that could be my imagination. also just as likely that i'm learning how to work the way it likes to work." # Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:58:42 GMT ## With Claude Code you don't have to write system scripts to get data about your data. Claude makes that fully transparent. For example, I just asked Claude to get me a list of all the parts I've changed since the last release of frontier.root. So far all the releases have been internal, between Claude and myself. After the job was done, and I had the list in hand, I asked Claude to show me the script it wrote to do the work. It was not written in my coding style which is fine, I wasn't meant to see this. In all the years I've been programming we've never come up with a syntax that was anything close to the simplicity of math. It's easy to describe the algorithm mathematically, but look at all the explaining it had to do it in JS. # Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:08:12 GMT ## Screen shot of new Frontier verb, string.addressToString, added yesterday. The comment at the head of the function explains. You're seeing it in the script editor in Atlantis. The Debug button is there to remind me that it's the biggest item on the todo list. We're now building the system that will make Frontier an easily updateable runtime. Once we're there I think we'll be at the summit of the mountain. We know how to work from that point. Find a bug? Fix it, test it, release it. We already have a backlog of parts to update. And it's great to have Claude here being the book keeper. It is imperfect, but it's way better than I am at managing details.