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).