http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a145235 http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a145235
I archived prior art as a design method from 2003 on this.how.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a170620 http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a170620
I just tried the latest version of the X editor. It's got all the features of textcasting. I wrote a test post entitled "X has nuked the limits, time for Bluesky to follow suit." I think you can tell I had fun writing it. They don't think anyone hears me, but I think they're wrong about that. The idea that they are part of the web is ludicrous. They're going to get called on it eventually. They should fix it so they are part of the web. Then we can all create. Or if you're not going to be part of the web, for crying out loud stop saying that you do.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a161732 http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a161732
One of the benefits of using Claude for all my coding is I'm now finding out what various things I do as standard practice are called in the outside world. Today I learned what agile is. I of course have heard it used, and even got to know the guy who coined the term.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a133339 http://scripting.com/2026/05/23.html#a133339
There probably is a name for this development practice. Only works on a team with more two developers. At some point in a project after you've been working on Level N in the stack, you may decide you've done all you can there, and it's time for someone else to work at that level. The new person, Smith, is a maintainer, develops in small increments, fixes bugs and most important takes feature requests from the other developer, Jones, who is now creating Level N + 1. Jones is a good person to do this because they know everything about the capabilities of the lower level. But now they're going to pretend they've forgotten all that, and is looking at a whole new machine, created out of the new capabilities of Level N. That's how you build any complex layered piece of software. And because this is the method used in boostraps, you can build level N+1 using tools written in N.
It's really simple http://scripting.com/2026/05/23/135604.html?title=itsReallySimple

My recommendation for Automattic and Bluesky.

  • Bluesky supports RSS 2.0 inbound and outbound.
  • Bluesky eliminates its character limit, allows bold, italic styles. Links. Optional titles. Users can edit their posts. More here.

Automattic already fully supports RSS 2.0 in both directions, in all their products.

This gives us the most interop with the most respect for prior art. No need to reinvent. There's nothing special about Bluesky, they can use what we've all been using for 20+ years.

It's really very simple, let's hook everything together and let the users and developers create.

http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a160029 http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a160029
Another way to look at Claude Code. It's a way to talk to your code, to ask it questions, and tell it how you want it to change.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a153242 http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a153242
I think maybe it's time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can't seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It's a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I'm not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That's what drives me. I see a great place to put an OS with WordPress as the storage and publishing component, and everything else grows up around it. It's one of those famous coral reefs but it hasn't been born yet. The idea would not be to compete with WordPress, it's to make something that fits into our view of the world, that just happens to be the same codebase. And when on the other side they think they have to do it themselves we reach out and say here, just take this over, it's yours. It's so hard to penetrate the awareness inside old organizations with new ideas. I think it's the manifest destiny of WordPress, that what they have now is a nice revenue generating machine, but it's not serving as the web's writing base, which is what imho it was supposed to be. (And I have a bit of standing there, btw.)
http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a152841 http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a152841
I have news for you -- Claude forgets important stuff. I catch it forgetting to do things it was "programmed" to do. It's not a computer, it's not garbage in garbage out. It could be good stuff in garbage out. As I've said before there's a big chunk of the app I'm working on where I don't read code. User interface stuff only. No control of what comes in our out. Trying to not take any chances here.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a145147 http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a145147
This is a multi-billion dollar idea. I want to link to "report-up" concept in something I'm writing. There is no Wikipedia page for that but there is a brief explainer in Google, via their AI. Here's the feature: add a permalink to that response. I'm lazy and will link to it in my writing.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a164304 http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a164304
BTW, I don't think the web was created to make people rich.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a141705 http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a141705
Does it ever cross anyone's mind that according to the rules of war, Iran would be totally justified in attacking the United States?
http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a132615 http://scripting.com/2026/05/22.html#a132615
Vibe-coded software will have a place where users can communicate what they want to developers who can help make it real. The same way you might get medical info from an AI, but would still get your colonoscopy from an actual doctor. Part of the origin story of podcasting is that Adam hacked up a version of Frontier to illustrate what he had in mind for the "last yard" protocol. When I looked at the code it was horrible, hard to believe someone thought of doing it that way. But it got the point across, and that's the moment the podcasting boostrap began. I love using the AIs to tell a visual story, a skill I never had or developed. No reason it can't work the same way for software.
Finding the Microsoft video http://scripting.com/2026/05/22/130714.html?title=findingTheMicrosoftVideo

In yesterday's podcast I mentioned a Microsoft promotional video from the 90s. JY Stervinou on Twitter asked if he had found it, and it was close but it was the video I was talking about. So I checked in with Claude with this prompt.

  • there was a microsoft promotional video in the 90s featuring bill gates and steve ballmer riding up front in a car, it's a ripoff of a volkswagon commercial, the music is catchy song Da Da Da. they drive around and then see a Sun Microsystems computer, they pick it up but it smells bad (apparently) and they drop it off in someone's garbage. i can't find the video on the web, can you?

It found a low rez version of the video on YouTube, with a comment.

  • It's a spoof of the 1997 Volkswagen Golf commercial, with Ballmer and Gates driving a Golf, picking up a Sun workstation and later rejecting it. The "Da Da Da" track is by the German band Trio. One source describes the dropped computer as an old IBM rather than Sun, so accounts differ on that detail, but the Know Your Meme listing specifically says Sun workstation, matching what you remember.

Here's the low-rez video at 1/4 size.

The computer in the video I saw was definitely a Sun workstation. It wouldn't make much sense for it to be an IBM in 1997, Microsoft had already passed over IBM, they were in the middle of the Java Wars with Sun, and there even is a Sun response to the Microsoft video with two actors playing Gates and Ballmer, and in the end Sun CEO Scott McNealy shows up, after (it turns out) Gates smells and the Sun terminal is still in the back seat and users and developers are still nowhere in sight.

I imagine there are a few old time Microsoft people still following this blog, if anyone has a decent resolution version of the Da Da Da video, I'd love to get a good version on the web of 2026.

http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a210820 http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a210820
Podcast: Wrapping AI in the web.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a202336 http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a202336
Just finished No Country for Old Men, the book by Cormac McCarthy. I have seen the movie many times, it's one of those movies that if you're looking for something to watch and you come across it, you might as well go for it because every scene in the movie is pretty good on its own. I didn't realize that they used most of McCarthy's dialog, literally -- in the movie. Near the end, Bell, the sheriff tells a story about old age. "There wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for." I love truths that hit hard. He's such a great writer. And I love that I can write like all the characters if I get a mind to.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a143133 http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a143133
I'm going to release the Claude-generated code that enables it to work with me on projects that are written and managed in outlines.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a135204 http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a135204
Just asked Claude to save this in memory. "in general i create local variables with partial results because 1. i can step through the calculations in the debugger. 2. the order guides my mind when im reading this code, 3. it lets me put a name on a partial value. this is helpful when i want to piece together wtf the code is supposed to be doing. and 4. it makes no difference in the efficiency of the code for a variety of reasons. please save that somewhere." i'm getting a lot of these rules down. i have them memorized but have never written them up because i didn't have a system for saving it somewhere relevant. i always thought ai would be good for going back and reading all my blog posts and creating somethjing readable, but as often is the case, the way it works turned out to be quite different, accomplishes the same thing.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a160922 http://scripting.com/2026/05/21.html#a160922
Marc Andreessen said programmers aren't disoccupied, we haven't become obsolete, quite the opposite, we're all working around the clock. It's true. Everyone is doing it. We got a new brain that can do all kinds of amazing things. You don't get a new super powerful brain organ every day.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a191155 http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a191155
Saying Bluesky is part of the web is like saying Spotify or YouTube own podcasting. They say it, but that doesn't mean it's true.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a123914 http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a123914
I couldn't not say anything about the Knicks win last night in the opening game of the NBA Eastern Conference finals. The Knicks were losing, then winning big, then fell apart, and by midway through the 4th quarter they were down by 22, and the Clevelands were completely in charge. But then the Knicks came back, miraculously tied the game so it went into overtime where the Knicks dominated, and won. Actually it wasn't really a miracle, it was somewhat predictable. The Knicks were playing on a lot of rest, and one of the big advantages they have this year over last is a deep and strong bench and a coach who plays them (last year's coach didn't). So the Knicks didn't get tired and the Cavs were wiped out by the 4th quarter. Their shots weren't long or short, aimed, they had no flow, they weren't getting rebounds, they didn't have good ball movement. While Brunson was driving the Knicks the Cavs just weren't there. When things started turning around in the 4th I was pretty sure the Knicks would win. I had no basis for believing this, coming back from 22 down so late in the game is pretty unlikely. In most cities that's when the fans start heading home, but not in NYC. We stay till the end because sometimes, maybe often with this years' Knicks, the team you think is going to lose actually ends up winning.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a185129 http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a185129
I've been following Jake's work privately, but now he's blogging about it publicly. I totally look forward to running Frontier on today's hardware. I especially want to run Manila on one of my home computers, and use it for Linux server apps. I've forgotten so much about how Manila works, but I expect it'll all come back. We had a great team back in the Manila days -- we all used the product, and it was and will be again one of the most powerful and pragmatic programming environments ever.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a141404 http://scripting.com/2026/05/20.html#a141404
Claude Code doesn't know about "user perspective," but it learns quickly. The UI of the software we're working on is fenced off, I use it, but I don't read code in there. I don't want to know how it works, I want to use it and getting right. This is an important technique. Later once things are locked down, I don't mind learning more about how it was done.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/19.html#a171955 http://scripting.com/2026/05/19.html#a171955
Markdown support is a big feature for people who want to know what we're doing with their text.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/19.html#a114943 http://scripting.com/2026/05/19.html#a114943
Opus 4.6 is much smarter than the other one. It feels like I'm working with someone from Bronx Science. I had been using Sonnet 4.6, which I switched to after reading somewhere that it costs less and it's usually every bit as good as newer models. I would never work with Sonnet on anything again, it's like working with a partner who is both stupid and difficult. Opus 4.6 makes me smarter, by doing the work while I dream up new features, and communicating with intelligence, like a helpful flight assistant. And I see there's an Opus 4.7 available. I have to try it. One interesting fact, until February when Opus 4.6 came out, you could not have done the kind of software I'm doing. There must be a tsunami of interesting stuff on the way. I don't think any of the pundits expect this. My goal is to build the next social system for use in the AI generation is built out of replaceable web components buit around interop and prior art. Let's commoditize the AI layer and build entirely open systems on top of it. For people who weren't around at the birth of the personal computer or the web this is going to be a unique multiple mindbomb moment.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/19.html#a123343 http://scripting.com/2026/05/19.html#a123343
Someday you're going to tell your kids that we once used a social network that limited your writing to 500 characters and didn't allow styling, links or titles. What was it called Daddy? Bluesky. And people thought it was great. Why? They might have been taking drugs.
The Mind of Claude http://scripting.com/2026/05/18/164538.html?title=theMindOfClaude

I have taught Claude Code to write software the way I do.

It has abilities that I don't, for example, I give them 1000 lines of code, highly factored, with lots of thought into making it readable and maintainable, and always falling short (our languages today fight against readability imho), and get this -- it can read different parts of the same code in parallel, and in two or three seconds have a complete understanding of it.

I couldn't do it even if I had a week. I would totally depend on clues left there.

What's even more amazing is that when it writes code for me, it does it my way, mostly without any prompting from me. This was done over and over until I realized I had to tell it to save it and read it when a new session starts. That's how it accumulates knowledge. Anything that isn't in one of those files has to be relearned, and that's most of what it, as a code-writing system, has to work with. It has no "memory" of ever having seen this stuff before, but that isn't a problem because it can accumulate a few years of understanding in two or three seconds. It works very diffrently from the way we work. If I were to show you how to do something three times that would be it, not so with Claude.

When it doesn't know what to do, I take the time to explain how I would have done it, and next time it does it that way.

I kind of did the same thing in a human way -- when I first encountered Unix, I couldn't believe from reading the source code, how transparent it was. That was in the 70s. Since then I have been striving to write code that's as easy to work on. When it comes to realtime software, there isn't really a choice. Though history piles up in the code no matter how diligent you are. But you could give the source to say MySQL to Claude Code, and say "rewrite this as if Dave Winer wrote it" and it probably would do a decent job, though it might take a while before it ran every MySQL app.

If you're looking for good investments, I'd say look for programming problems that are very complicated. We are limited by what we can create by how much we can maintain. But we can have Claude explain for us any time what any of our code means. It can read my mind because I put the work of my mind in the memory of the computer. Which effectively is the Mind of Claude.

PS: Claude has a huge advantage over ChatGPT. Claude is one syllable and easy to remember. ChatGPT is four syllables, and has no discernable meaning. Claude is a person, and I think in general people named Claude are interesting.

http://scripting.com/2026/05/18.html#a141818 http://scripting.com/2026/05/18.html#a141818
2024-era ChatGPT pictures, of which I created many are now like Comic Sans type was in 2010 or so, if you remember.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a135922 http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a135922
I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of the components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a161916 http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a161916
Today Claude found a problem that would only be uncovered if you knew that assigning to location.href didn't happen immediately. If it decides to redirect and then do a bunch of other stuff including making network references, the whole thing could (and did) come crashing down. I would have found that problem, but the actual error message the browser emitted made me think the problem was on the server not the client. The most complicated code in an app is the stuff it runs at startup when it's constructing the world of all its different pieces creating the virtuality expected by the great mass of code. It's the part that once it's working you don't even want to look at it and if you decide to rewrite it you might as well start over, only slightly exaggerating.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a141738 http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a141738
Timothy Snyder made an important point. Trump sees his cause as a religion and sees himself as god. So when someone who is unfairly punished by Trump says they're still glad they voted for him, because (I guess) if god is on the ballot, you have to vote for him.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a210705 http://scripting.com/2026/05/17.html#a210705
Jon Stewart is usually pretty good, but I think he got it wrong when he says the AI companies are stealing journalists' knowledge. Imho they don't create knowledge, they report it. The knowledge isn't theirs to own, and that is for the times there is actually any new stuff. They stick to a few main stories, and still insist that the upcoming election is about the economy. They talk about the $1.7 billion slush fund, but aren't reporting every day in every story how much money we've given ICE. That big funding is going to the concentration camps they're building, the people the incarcerate we hear so little of. This is a government that shot two people in Minnesota, on camera, and shrugged it off. Imagine what horrors are going on out of site in the camps.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/16.html#a150155 http://scripting.com/2026/05/16.html#a150155
I documented the optional source:inReplyTo element for RSS 2.0.
i stopped looking for the weird problem http://scripting.com/2026/05/16/223608.html?title=iStoppedLookingForTheWeirdProblem

i'd wait till a fresh start tomorrow.

but then i realized claude has all the code, so i could just tell it my problem.

can you find it, i asked, realizing i had not given it info on what the problem is.

there's a very weird mistake in the code i wrote just now, and there was a lot of it, i said to claude.

can you find the problem.

had no idea what to expect.

no more than 3 seconds it said I got it!

it was a typo. where i meant to type x i had typed prefs.

juggling a lot of bits in my head, my brain skipped, i didn't notice.

i would have found it quickly in my next session. but now i can think of anything but that problem until then.

sometimes claude can be totally frustrating, but other times the power makes such a huge difference.

http://scripting.com/2026/05/15.html#a160223 http://scripting.com/2026/05/15.html#a160223
I wish they had an outliner in Claude. I would use it. ;-)
http://scripting.com/2026/05/15.html#a161234 http://scripting.com/2026/05/15.html#a161234
BTW, here's the JSONL version of Scripting News. It has the same data as the RSS file, but in the format that AI apps are looking for, so I am told. I thought I'd try to kick this off by pushing an RSS flow through the pipe. It's like using the Grateful Dead to boot up podcasting. I needed something to put out on the wire and I had this feed handy.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/15.html#a160244 http://scripting.com/2026/05/15.html#a160244
Thinking about adding <source:inReplyTo> to the source namespace. Its value is a URL, by default, and has an optional isPermaLink attribute, a boolean, to indicate if it's not a permalink. Works just like the guid element in RSS 2.0. I will also add support for that in the FeedLand database, and flow it out through the socket interface. Actually that's pretty close to a full spec, at least in rss.land where we take simplicity seriously. ;-)
Dave's vibe coding amusement park http://scripting.com/2026/05/15/154439.html?title=davesVibeCodingAmusementPark

I reached a point in my Claude work where now I can do vibe coding, in a world that I used to just be a programmer in. This means if I want to do a heavy lift, I can tell Claude what I want and it can do really big corner turns, which is something I am (as a human) terrible at, and thus resist. Today I redesigned the basic user interface of the app, and didn't read any code, I was just giving orders, and it was doing what I asked, even if every little thing it did would have been a full day's work. It's remarkable how it can do very complex things in a few seconds.

And the web framework i'm working on can do almost all the things I want to do for now, but I want to suck everything into it, and turn the whole thing into a vibe coding amusement park. So many projects I want to do, and so many I want to do with you.

http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a150919 http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a150919
Every social web needs avatars. In an RSS 2.0 feed look for the channel-level image element. It's how they do it in WordPress.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a214251 http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a214251
I have Claude Code hooked up to Chrome. It's crawling around inside the DOM of the running system, like humans do in a debugger. It's a bit like Fantastic Voyage if you've ever seen it. I've been waiting for this moment. Now we can do some really nice UI work.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a153507 http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a153507
This is the first day since the NBA playoffs started that there is no scheduled game. I think that's why today feels so weird.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a153641 http://scripting.com/2026/05/14.html#a153641
For some reason every day feels like Saturday. I don't know why.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/13.html#a142427 http://scripting.com/2026/05/13.html#a142427
I appreciate that X gave me back access to my account that I was locked out of, but they were apparently charging me for Premium when I couldn't use the account, and had no way to turn it off. Okay they can keep the money. But now I want to turn off Premium for the account I was using when I didn't have access to my real account, and can't find the commands to do that. Asked ChatGPT and it either hallucinated or X removed the command. So near as I can tell I now have two accounts on X that I'm paying $8 a month for Premium on.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/13.html#a134512 http://scripting.com/2026/05/13.html#a134512
I'm screwing around with the JSONL stuff again. I'm interested in know about any work people have done that process incoming JSONL data. I'd like to see if I'm even in the ballpark of something useful. Today I'm making it so that my app can be used in production to handle more than one stream. The key thing is it's hooked up to FeedLand via a very simple JSON interface delivered in realtime via websockets. For feeds that support rssCloud, the appearance of the new item in the JSONL feed happens a fraction of a second after it was published. That's how fast the web of 2026 is.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a220615 http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a220615
I have regained control of my Twitter account. I really missed it, truth be told. Thanks to Scoble for helping here. As he so often has.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a212849 http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a212849
This bit of code kept coming up, so I wanted to make it easier to find.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a162052 http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a162052
Expanding items on a FeedLand blogroll should be consistently fast now. Just switched to a different server on the backend.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a145339 http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a145339
Masto, Twitter: I'd like to come up with a list of formats, protocols and products that have become defaults for AI work.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a130150 http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a130150
Yesterday I learned about JSONL, and was of course intrigued. It's a really simple thing, even simpler than RSS, and does basically the same thing. And even better, it's the way the AI industry hooks streams together. So If we can get RSS to serve as a source of JSONL feeds, it's possible that the AI industry will find it useful. My goal is to get every standard of the web hooked up to AI, quickly, before the silos realize they're leaving out something important. Once they figure it out, they'll have no choice but to add real RSS support. So I put together a quick demo app that hooks into FeedLand and posts to a JSONL feed new items from one of a small set of feeds I chose basically at random. And here is the JSONL feed. If you're a developer in AI-land could you try reading this into your JSONL-ingesting app, and let me know if I got it right. Here's a place to comment. BTW, that URL is temporary just for this quick demo.
http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a130030 http://scripting.com/2026/05/12.html#a130030
Good morning sports fans!
http://scripting.com/2026/05/11.html#a131433 http://scripting.com/2026/05/11.html#a131433
Members of the WordPress community. Monday morning is a good time to check out WordPress News via FeedLand at wp.feedland.org. You can also subscribe to the list of feeds this site follows in your own feed reader, and if you have a WordPress news site, please post the URL here so we can send readers to your blog too. I think there are a lot of would-be bloggers out there that need a slight kick in the pants to get going. I'm happy to provide readers if you provide the ideas. There's a lot of power in WordPress that no one knows about. Let's help other users and developers find the good stuff. If you have questions or suggestions, here's a new thread on GitHub.