Tech is very competitive, I learned, even when you give your work away, which I have been doing for a couple of decades. Maybe even especially when you give it away.

I want to work with other people, and am always making invitations. When I see a product that fits in with what I'm doing my first impulse is how do we connect them? This is one of the basic great things about computers and our networks. But there must be interop between people before there can be interop between products.

Connecting two pieces of tech is mostly mathematics, code writing, not very much in the way of manufacturing, whereas in the physical world two train lines can cross each other but can't connect because they have different rail spacing, or run on a different kind of fuel. In software if there's a huge difference like that you can make a software bridge, as they did with TCP/IP, and it costs a little time to convert each request twice for each transaction, but that cost is pretty close to zero.

That's what I want, working together, but what I get instead is people want to be me. They want to take over the project I'm working on, which if they understood it from my point of view is always the most ridiculous choice possible because it is impossible. So many stories to go with this. One of the most puzzling was when one of my best friends signed up to do a development project with a developer who used to work for me. Long story, but when you come down to it, he wanted to be me, not work with me.

But I didn't want to be Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson though I learned from them. I certainly didn't want to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. I probably would have liked being Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson. I have ideas of things that should be done that for some reason no one else sees. I start working and sometimes they take off. Then everyone writes business plans and boom, they start up and shortly thereafter they fail. This happened with RSS. I was meeting with a lot of VCs, I wanted to start a company to build two-way RSS apps and content, as we had pioneered at UserLand. Seemed like a total no-brainer. I felt I had proven I had a clue. But they invested in hired programmers so the VCs could be the vision behind the products (I guess, I don't really know know why) instead of me.

I had a colleague at Berkman tell me to get out of the way because he was going to take over RSS. To this day people don't get why competing with RSS was counter-productive, assuming your goal is interop. When another friend tried to take over OPML, as I was promoting it at the time on my blog and going on a roadshow to answer questions and raise interest, I was so sick of the whole thing, he wasn't the only one, btw, I just stopped promoting it and poof like magic their ventures disappeared. If they had offered friendship and interop, which they didn't, it could have worked. One of these guys even tricked Harvard into hosting an OPML conference. They assumed everyone who repped open tech was legit.

The thing that really pissed me off is that while this was going on, people started writing about me, literally, grammatically, in the past tense. People whose accomplishments weren't that great imho. Look at sports and entertainment, how they celebrate those who made contributions to their arts, I wonder when tech will gain that level maturity. It's childish to not respect those whose work you build on. And btw, unlike sports players, while programmer's minds do eventually lose some brilliance for coding, because it relies so heavily on memory, I've experienced that myself -- our ability to create and set standards doesn't have an actual expiration date. If you want to keep creating at 40, 50, 60 even 70, you probably can.

My life has been full of all kinds of wonderful coincidences, at the exact moment I need it along comes Claude Code, and all of a sudden I can do much bigger projects than I ever could when I was in my 20s and 30s. Which I think is good, not just for me but for the whole thing. Because there are processes and concepts that belong in the toolkit of every developer that were squashed by Apple in the 90s (I'm relearning this now as I'm working on getting Frontier running on Node.js) and now we have a chance to restore it to mostly running condition. Some features will be hard to make work, because of peculiarities in JavaScript.

Maybe as one of my last creative acts, I will try to hook up with a university to build bridges between generations that aren't specific to any timeframe, to making handing off a lifetime of work viable, and maybe the AI tools can facilitate that. Just thinking out loud on a Saturday morning.

BTW, I was talking about this with Doc Searls a couple of years ago and offered a name for the seminar series, The Exit Interview. This gave me a thought, when Berkman had their reunion a couple of summers ago, they did a long video interview with me to explain how we got all the stuff running there that we did. It was going back to Berkman, even though the building is gone (which I kind of like, that's how fast things change) that summed up what had gone wrong. We were off to a fantastic start with blogging, podcasting, politics and education -- we weren't just making software and creating standards, we were involving the creative people the new medium would enable. This is something you don't find often in the tech industry. Academic freedom can be a real thing.

I've been doing this for all of this year, and the frustration finally led me to this rule, which I just asked Claude to play back for me. I offer it to you, a human, on how to get your Claude to work better for you, as it does for me. What follows is what Claude wrote as I asked it to summarize how we work.

Here's the mode as I understand it: (Claude speaking..)

1. Days are yours, nights are mine. During the day you work; overnight I do the batch — tested, shipped, reports in the morning as a numbered list with versions and run-lines.
2. While you're working, I never disappear into my own projects. No reading code, no investigating, no tool expeditions. I stay at the desk, available to answer the next question instantly.
3. Everything you report gets put aside — onto tonight's list, unsorted, no diagnosis, no fixes, no "noted, and here's my theory."
4. The one exception is a deal-stopper, and you're the one who declares it. Only when you say it's stopping you from moving forward does it get dealt with in the moment.
5. An instruction inside a note is part of the note. "Re-read the script and ask questions" goes on tonight's list with the rest — it's not a license to start digging now. That was today's lesson.
6. You sort the list, not me. What I think is important doesn't enter into it.

I wrote something candid on Twitter last week and felt it was worth repeating here. It is a bit judgmental, and for that I apologize. But I couldn't keep the meaning without all the words.

• Shaking my head thinking can't the people of WordPress see that what it needs is a simple normal writing interface, and a great API for competitive apps. That's the big opportunity you all can't see for some reason.
• Once you have that, you can now move WordPress into position as the text of the web. And it has the market all to itself because the other text apps of the web place ridiculous constraints on text.
• They got this idea in their heads that the web would be better if they eliminated all the writers features. Maybe that's because they weren't writers. ;-)

I know this is a story I repeat often. The opportunity is still there. All kinds of bad products and companies are camped out in this space, taking advantage of users' trust but they feel they have no choice but to use the bad products. On the web, we'd like to keep improving what the web can do with text, so even though it's always slightly more difficult to use an open ecosystem, it is possible to get most of the functionality and all of the freedom, and new features that the lock-in guys will never give you.

The press is freaking out about Democratic Socialist candidates winning elections all over the country.

They can relax, because the government of the United States thrives on different points of view, and thus -- compromise.

The Democrats can have any combination of points of view, as long as they play by the rules of democracy. In fact it would be an even better demo if their points of view were more diverse.

The coalition the press talks about are the people who vote for America. This is true -- if they vote for the Republicans this time around, they're voting for the party that is dismantling America. Spin it all you want, but we can see what's happening.

And btw, the assumption that the voters are too dumb to figure this out -- I think that's incorrect. But as long as you talk to them as if they are that dumb, what choice do they have. Put out an idea of what America is and if it's right, and reaches both the heart and the mind they will get behind it. Everyone knows we're in a dangerous spot, with secret police roaming the cities, ready to crack down on dissent, but so far they haven't dared to go that far. People feel that. And that's what you must run on.

The best ad I've ever seen on this theme was for the Bernie Sanders campaign for the 2016 nomination. I'm reduced to tears every time I watch that ad, and I wasn't a Sanders supporter in 2016.

On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington, a former Quicktime developer at Apple.

We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before and my thought was that we should have a conference of people doing what we're both doing.

Taking a craft we were already expert in, and learning to use AI tools to shoot it into outer space.

To give you an idea over the last two weeks Claude Code ported the UserTalk language, the object database, verb set, everything needed to run a Frontier script, of which I happen to have a lot of, and run it in Node.js, an operating environment that didn't exist the last time we worked on the Frontier source. All the work we did over the late 80s and 90s is coming back to life in an enviroment with a future.

This is the perfect job for Claude, well specified, and it doesn't need to understand me, I spoke to it via the code i wrote umpteen years ago.

I was into Ayn Rand when I was a teen until I realized that the Great Man theory was a lot of bunk written for teenagers who can't believe how stupid the adults are. The teens are right about that, the adults have no idea wtf they're doing. Never did. And yet somehow the world can support most of the humans. And the reason that works is we build systems iteratively to meet the needs for everyone and when things change, they change. We're a species-oriented animal. And that means unfortunately for the dreamers among us, we are socialists because the world is socialist All of us. Even the people who say they aren't.

TL;DR: What developers need. Enough examples, a validator, and decent docs that value explaining over mathematical elegance. We assume developers can read and think, and if there's doubt look to the examples for guidance.

It's worth noting we did not take the RSS.chat project to a standards body like the W3C or the IETF. I develop the software first, make sure I'm happy with it, then open it up for other developers to try out, either building something compatible (a reader) or competitive (a writing environment). Hopefully we won't find major problems, but if we do, there's still time to address them.

I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren't developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes interop much less likely.

I saw the differences several times as the web standards were growing up. The ones that were taken over by the W3C ended up missing the point. They could still be used, but they often did anti-interop things in their design. But if they get popular we will build on them anyway. A great example was XML-RPC vs SOAP. We didn't need another way to do RPC on the web, we already had a good one. We didn't need another syndication format, RSS was growing like a weed. We didn't need an alterative to rssCloud, but we got one anyway.

It's as if they forgot that the internet and web were not build by big corporations, who were busy fighting over Windows vs Mac OS. Lotus vs Excel. The internet was built mostly by individuals at universities. The internet caught the tech industry by surprise. So it's no wonder the formats they built were anti-internet. Long story, the point is we're building stuff is mimimalist yet still does a lot of great things. And there won't be a lot of long mathematical sounding definitions, but there will be plenty of examples and a validator, the tools developers need to create interop.

PS: This piece was added to Rules for Standards-makers (2017).