http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a173321 http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a173321
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a174249 http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a174249
New verb: string.addressToString. This is how I'm releasing examples.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a173742 http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a173742
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a155448 http://scripting.com/2026/09/20.html#a155448
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). ;-)
Atlantis screen shot http://scripting.com/2026/09/20/181215.html?title=atlantisScreenShot

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

The real AI security issue http://scripting.com/2026/09/20/143734.html?title=theRealAiSecurityIssue

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.

http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a174001 http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a174001
New podcast. Knicks in Five! (It's not about the Knicks.)
http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a182151 http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a182151
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.)
http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a170516 http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a170516
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a161443 http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a161443
When Claude has a clear task to do, it does it well, and exhaustively in a way no human could manage.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a150203 http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a150203
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! :-)
http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a150544 http://scripting.com/2026/09/19.html#a150544
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a125836 http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a125836
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a235955 http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a235955
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a140616 http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a140616
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."
http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a130232 http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a130232
Data centers are like gas stations, but because the pumps work at the speed of light, you can put them anywhere on earth.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a130442 http://scripting.com/2026/09/18.html#a130442
A new snarky slogan: Knicks in 5.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/17.html#a144501 http://scripting.com/2026/09/17.html#a144501
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a135924 http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a135924
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a224828 http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a224828
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a145758 http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a145758
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a151529 http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a151529
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.)
http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a150924 http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a150924
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a225520 http://scripting.com/2026/09/16.html#a225520
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!
http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a141224 http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a141224
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a143832 http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a143832
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a151138 http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a151138
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a140114 http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a140114
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a141215 http://scripting.com/2026/09/15.html#a141215
Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/14.html#a180441 http://scripting.com/2026/09/14.html#a180441
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/14.html#a135727 http://scripting.com/2026/09/14.html#a135727
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a202605 http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a202605
It is probably the closest to First Contact with an intelligent alien life form that our species will ever have.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a152333 http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a152333
On a good day working with Claude is like working with my old UW-Madison programmer friend Gary Sevitsky from the 70s.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a144500 http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a144500
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a141205 http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a141205
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."
http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a135842 http://scripting.com/2026/09/13.html#a135842
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/12.html#a140812 http://scripting.com/2026/09/12.html#a140812
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.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/12.html#a221353 http://scripting.com/2026/09/12.html#a221353
It's like we're living in a science fiction movie. Some of us are working with the aliens. At first the journalists only fear was driven by their natural narcissism, all that matters is they get paid for their writing. Now all they can see is the much larger threat to humanity. What if the aliens decide to destroy humanity, or turn earth into a bypass on a freeway. In the movie I'm a scientist, played by Jeff Goldblum or Brad Pitt and my love interest is played by Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lawrence or Amy Adams and we're racing against time to really connect with the aliens who we are sure mean us well and offer the way past our myrid crises to get to the next stage of civilization. But wait, Bradley Whitford plays the evil politician trying to sell out the aliens to a food manufacturer who thinks they could make an excellent meat sauce for spaghetti.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/12.html#a155708 http://scripting.com/2026/09/12.html#a155708
When people get to work with the new Frontier with Claude or some other AI tool, you can have it search in frontier.root based on a conversation with it. It can decide on its own where to look for prior art. I keep finding things like this now that I'm working in the new software.
My two cents about WordPress http://scripting.com/2026/09/12/143822.html?title=myTwoCentsAboutWordpress

Lots of stuff going on around WordPress for the last couple of years, and every bit of is a distraction from what I want to do to help the web get back on its feet. I remember how great it was when everything could hook into everything else. The web was like Unix. Today's "web" is like Disneyland. Safety first. Nothing interesting ever happens there.

So ask me what I'd like to see WordPress do, and this is what I'd tell you. Start something new, don't change what you do with WordPress, it is what it is. It's a 20+ year old project with market problems. Most software doesn't even make it that far.

The fresh start I'd like to see done is WordPress from the point of view of the web. The new mission is not about a dollar return on investment, rather it's measured by how much the web becomes Small Pieces Loosely Joined with All Parts Replaceable. How empowered are developers, not WordPress developers, but web developres. The more that's happening in the web, the better it will be for everyone, but especially WordPress. Why WordPress? Because as they say it's 89 percent of the web. The web is like a huge oil spill that has never been cleaned up. Everything has to improve if we start work on cleaning up the messes.

I come from NYC where all the bodies of water were cesspools when I was growing up. The Hudson River had garbage floating in it. When I went to school the incinerators in the buildings we lived in burned garbage on the kids, all nicely washed and dressed by our mothers, we arrived at school smelling like smokers. My grandfather took me to Knicks games at the Garden, and the arena was filled with smoke by half-time.

We can clean things up. Humans as a species are good at this if we put our minds to it. If you made billions on the web, why not put some of it to use in making it a web worth using. I used to say shit like this to Bill Gates, to no avail. He liked to point out he was going to give away all his money when he retired, and he kept that promise. But what if he started dealing with the world with charity when he had the biggest seat of power in the tech world? Think of how much more good he could have done.

Progress report on Atlantis project http://scripting.com/2026/09/12/131527.html?title=progressReportOnAtlantisProject

The world may be falling apart, and the Mets suck even though they have the most expensive roster in MLB, and my house needs work and I can't find a contractor I like, but I'm in a great mood. Partially because the weather is so nice, chilly in the morning, but it gets up to the 70s during the day, and the sky is clear and we had a lot of rain in August so everything is very green here in the Catskills.

But the biggest reason I feel so good is that, with the help of Claude Code, I now have UserLand Frontier running on current OSes. I had no idea how much the previous situation had been weighing on me. I am probably the last Frontier user in the world. Porting the open source codebase was an insurmountable job. It took 15 years by up to five people working on it to do the original project. It's a big f'ing piece of software. And it also is my life's work, but not one of the things I'm known for.

Claude couldn't have done it on its own because it had never seen anything like Frontier. We weren't copying something Claude understood. It kept trying to turn it into a language that fits into the same slot as Python. That was the prior art it used, without saying so. This happened over and over, for example, I realized Claude didn't understand that built-in verbs could be written in the language, and that users could add or even modify standard verbs (not recommended!).

What made Frontier unusual is that it was a language developed by someone who also designed end-user apps, so it has affordances that no other language has. And integrations. You don't have to save your data in files, the OS (yes Frontier is an OS) has persistent memory with the common scalar types and data structures. So go ahead and store something in the ODB (object database). It can be huge, and you don't have to read anything into memory, it's all right there as soon as you boot it up. That alone makes programming an order of magnitude simpler.

We're at the point now where I can work a full day in the new version, codenamed Atlantis, running on anything that can run an Electron app. We're now at the point where we're improving things. Found a missing verb yesterday, and Claude and I implemented it, found a perfect name for it, and later today it will go out as a "root update" making it formally part of the freaking language.

And yesterday we also found a static rendering of the DocServer site, which has a page for every verb in the language. I still want to find the outline source for this stuff, but we don't need it because Claude can reconstruct the OPML version of the text from the HTML, it's exactly the kind of project it is the best at. Huge amounts of data, that sometimes requires a little judgment to process.

The feeling of well-being comes from realizing that my life's work lives. Until this last week that was still very much in question.

Now, I may not be software's Shakespeare or even Faulkner or Vonnegut, but I am proud of this product, more than anything else I've done. I started work on it when I learned from C how to design a simple beautiful language, and when I learned from Macintosh how to build a UI with the same simplicity. When we were first contemplating Frontier it was to join the wizzy world of the Mac with the scripting philosophy of Unix. We didn't stop until we had it.

Well here we are god knows how many years later (I don't want to do the math) and once again it has a future, at least as bright as it had when the product first launched on the System 6 Macintosh in 1992.

And btw, I think I've had a unique experience with AI development. Absolutely in no way could I have done this project without the muscle of Claude. Pretty sure this is a unique project in that it's a fully specified system development and runtime environment that otherwise wouldn't exist, because there's nothing else like it on the market.

Claude's repeatedly not understanding the idea says to me that it has never encountered anything like it. It also says that Claude has no clue how to extrapolate, to innovate, to arrive at something new. Just as with other forms of creativity, Claude is no match for a determined and experienced human.

That would be reassuring to the 20-something version of myself who very much wanted to do something new. And the older version of myself wants that for my younger self who is sending the good body chemistry to our current older body.

Of course this will be a post on my blog, http://scripting.com, but thanks to X for supporting longer posts. I like writing new stuff in a simple editor like this one. Also posted it on Facebook.

PS: I also like that they use the word Frontier in reference to AI products. They can't stop me from calling this Frontier, I've been using it as the name of this product since I came up with the name riding up on the chair in Park City in 1988. :-)

Remembering 9/11/2001 http://scripting.com/2026/09/11/132205.html?title=remembering9112001

Scripting News on 9/11/2001.

All of us who lived through 9/11 are re-experiencing it right now. The local fire department just ran its alarm, everyone in this small mountain hamlet heard it and it took a moment to realize this was the exact time the first plane hit the tower. I was at my computer in Woodside, California -- hearing about it from friends in Manhattan, and blogging about it as it happened. I didn't have a TV, I had turned my cable subscription off after I became so obsessed with coverage of the 2000 election. So what I reported came exclusively through the web.

New York-based journalists were off the air, they had the same tools as we did, but their lives were upturned by the events. Everything was outwardly calm at my workstation in Calif. But there were people in NYC with digital cameras, and first-hand stories of survival. My own father was caught up in the catastrophe, his office was across from City Hall, a few blocks from ground zero. He walked home from ground zero to Queens and for hours we had no idea if he had lived or died. All forms of transportation and communication were offline.

Cell coverage was spotty, and phone lines in NYC were unreliable. But there was a webcam in the Empire State Building that could be pointed at the World Trade Center, so we had a constant update of what was happening visually.

Links in my browser chrome: As part of this little project to re-live 9/11 through the web, I came across a snapshot of the chrome of the browser I was using on 9/11. Since I'm working on Frontier again, I'm finding the dates of various projects all over this time, in UserTalk code and in the kernel, before and after. So I wrote up a little post on GitHub with info about what was on my screen that day.

The full text of my interview with Amy Harmon of the NYT is on the 9/11/2001 page. We didn't have post-level permalinks in 2001 yet.

If you have an X account, comment here.

Mayor Mamdami's remembrance of 9/11.

New header image for this event.

NYT on 9/12/2001: "The world's changed."

Link to Scripting News for 9/11/2001.

Screen shot of webcam on the Empire State Bulding.

http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a175332 http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a175332
I almost fell for a phishing hack.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a142406 http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a142406
Repository: BlackRock’s latest SEC filing values its Automattic shares at $14.33 per share. They originally invested at $85 a share in 2021. That means their market cap has dropped from $7.5 billion to $1.2 billion. My guess is when that happens the CEO if they want to keep their job, has to rethink the whole enterprise. And that usually doesn't happen until they get a new CEO. My guess is that's what we saw play out yesterday.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a140229 http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a140229
The last two episodes of season three of Silo on AppleTV prove that there is value in a three season, boring escapade of confusing, unlikable uninteresting characters, living their whole lives in a silo, fearing the outdoors -- if you have a clever way of accounting for all that at the end. Highly recommend watching just season three and pretending that none of the other stuff matters because it probably doesn’t. But I bet if I go back to the beginning and start over, I'll find there's more intrigue than I thought. I'll probably do it, will let you know.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a172311 http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a172311
WordPress emerged from the ashes of UserLand, something I am recently reacquainted with, working the last couple of months with Claude on a reboot of Frontier, this time written in JavaScript, running in Electron. But someone is sure to reboot Manila in this context, and Manila is at least a grandparent of WordPress. I'm following all kinds of trails as we test the product, codename Atlantis, against all the apps we wrote for it back then.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a174614 http://scripting.com/2026/09/10.html#a174614
2017: The thing people don't realize about storm surge, and they don't really explain it on TV, is this. If the ocean surges 1 mile inland, and you were on the beach before the surge, now you're 1 mile out to sea. In normal times you'd be pretty fucked if someone dropped you in the ocean a mile from shore. But you're in a hurricane. Huge waves. There's no one to rescue you. And (this is the part that will kill you) there are deadly objects in the water like buildings and trees and power lines, even a rope can entangle you and make it impossible for you to swim. And if you can't swim and you're a mile from shore, that's the end of you
Gobsmacked by Automattic, but then... http://scripting.com/2026/09/10/132416.html?title=gobsmackedByAutomatticButThen

Fair to say I was gobsmacked by the news late yesterday that Automattic's board had put their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on paid leave. I've read lots of stuff about it, in news articles and in a Hacker News thread. And a lot of posts on Twitter by Matt, and the replies.

Are you a developer or a CEO?

It's a very unusual situation in my experience in tech. Matt was able to raise a lot of money for Automattic, so he has maintained a controlling interest in the company, even though it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I left my own startup, voluntarily, when I was a little older than Matt, and I didn't return. I never wanted to be the CEO of a tech company, and I expect that being the CEO wasn't really a good fit for Matt either. A CEO's job is very different from being a developer and idea guy which Matt clearly sees himself as.

Something has got to give, either you're a good CEO and the product languishes, or you focus on the product, and the company is unmanaged. In the cause of WordPress, I'd say it suffered in both areas. When I saw a chart of Matt's direct reports, I immediately saw a problem -- it was very long, iirc 60 people? No one can manage and guide that many people. Most of those people probably never get to talk one-on-one with the boss.

For me, even when I was CEO, I wanted to spend all day working on new software and working with five or six other devs doing the same. Digging back into the past with Frontier these last weeks has reminded me both how good that can be, and how utterly frustrating -- when the people you're working with don't understand the mission. It's not their fault, it's the visionary's job to explain it so they can understand, and that takes time. These days Claude is filling in for all that, and doing a fantastic but at times incredibly frustrating job trying to give me what I'm asking for, while not understanding what I'm asking for. But we move through those disconnects quickly now, compared to how it was a couple of weeks ago. We have the source of truth that we didn't have the last time around, in the 90s, we have the C source code of the kernel, the product we built in the 90s. And Claude is the easiest to manage, so far I only think I detect an ego, it never seems to resent me criticizing its work, sometimes in ALL CAPS with strong language. :-)

WordPress Lite

My wish for WordPress, in all its forms and shapes, is that it broaden its focus. I want a WordPress Lite, I implemented it, and it's sitting here ready to do a good deed for all the parties concerned esp the web and web developers. Maybe someone there will now have the time and be empowered to build out the product line beyond the narrow focus it has now. It doesn't matter what percentage of the web is WordPress, if it isn't going anywhere. The web needs help, and right now WordPress is pretty much asleep in regard to what's going on now in the web. And it could do so much to help the web get back on its feet. It should be a public resource as much as a profit machine for a few companies.

All roads lead to Om

One thing that opened my eyes about what Matt and Automattic are, was his story about how he and Om got together. "All roads lead to Om." What a great line, and based on the story, so true. A lot of things clicked for me then. I remember what a phenomenon Matt was when he arrived in California about 25 years ago? Very good looking young man, polite, quiet and rumored to get Web 2.0 better than anyone. This kind of thing happens in tech, and if you know everyone as Om did, and was liked by everyone, you could manage to hit the ball out of the park, investment-wise, and he did. Click click click. I had the individual facts but had no idea how they were strung together. I played a similar role at times in Silicon Valley, on both sides, as a bright young dude who "gets it" and as the gray beard who recognized the charm of a young new face and helped create a big money reality around it. There is a lot of snake oil in tech, before and even more now, and this one has had a long run, 2.5 decades, but it needs a new direction, because the money people aren't buying the magic any longer. That's probably imho really what Matt's firing is all about.

I actually have more to say about this, but I have to get back to my programming work. If you have a comment, here's a good place to post it.

http://scripting.com/2026/09/09.html#a005031 http://scripting.com/2026/09/09.html#a005031
Surprising news. Matt Mullenweg was forced to take a paid leave of absence as CEO by Automattic's board.
http://scripting.com/2026/09/09.html#a210215 http://scripting.com/2026/09/09.html#a210215
I have completely lost interest in new phones. The last one I bought was a Pixel 9 because they said it would have great AI features. At that time the sky was the limit, there were new breakthroughs every afternoon in AI. Now it's just an app. I have to carry an iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Phones are utilities for me. I have a lot more interest in weed whackers these days. Not kidding. Now a story. I wanted to check the model of the phone. Went to settings, and the command at the end of the menu should tell me the version, but they had changed that. So I figured I'd go back up to Gemini, their AI app, and ask it. Of course it has no idea where it's running. Screen shot. That would be one of the real problems they could solve, making it easy to control the computer you're running on. The whole UI should be in AI. All it did was print basically a page from the user manual, with the same out of date instructions. How many years have we been working on AI already, this is the easy stuff that they haven't done. Tech companies get back to your business, make your software better. You can and it's long overdue. BTW, it's a Pixel 9 Pro.