Written in Gutenberg: With great respect for Claude. #

We reached a milestone this morning, completing the project to add a Gutenberg version of the wpEditorDemo app. Claude did the programming on the new version. It required changes to the server app, which I made. It took 2.5 days to do the work, which was more than I thought it would. A lot of was learned. Now I’m figuring out what my next project will be. #

Screenshot of the just-released Gutenberg demo app. #

Heard a report on NPR re why the Dems might win the mid-terms in November. They mentioned gas prices but not concentration camps for immigrants. They mentioned inflation but not the military occupation of Minneapolis and DC. They also forgot to mention that Trump keeps threatening to nuke Iran. #

BTW one thing you haven’t heard, because the press is so self-centered, is that as you get deeper into the AI environment, you get smarter. Not just better informed, that’s what the web has been doing for 30+ years. The AI stretches your mind the way PCs did initially. It makes you smarter. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the (virtual) people we want working with/for us. There are very few human people who seem interested in collaborating. They all want to blaze their own trail, and if you want to improve their product you have to reproduce the whole freaking thing. The web had a different philosophy, adopted from Unix, not the tech industry. We want to work with others. And we do. And it seems there’s an opportunity to cast the entire AI push in the same light, so that the individual developer has the power to make industry standard products. Without the usurpious business models of the Silicon Valley VCs. #

The demo for Gutenberg is at demo.gutenberg.land. Easy to remember, and makes the point. If you want Gutenberg instead of WordLand, you can have it. Hopefully this reinforces what my goals are here. I do not want to favor any one kind of editor. I want every kind of editor here. I want there to be a web of great editors that runs on the web. #

BTW, when playing around with Gutenberg, I wonder why it doesn’t allow me to move blocks around as if it were an outliner? Or maybe it does and I don’t know the UI for that? John Johnston says yes it does work like an outliner. #

A glitch in the matrix. The app that keeps daveverse.org in sync with scripting.com has been offline since Friday, so I’m republishing all the posts since then. They will all appear to have been posted today on daveverse. As they say — still diggin! #

I’ve now done two projects with Claude Code. I added a feature to the server running behind WordLand, and adapted wpEditorDemo to work have a second example, using Gutenberg as the editing user interface. Haven’t released the Gutenberg app yet, that should happen today, Murphy-willing.

I had never written a Gutenberg app before, btw. Claude figured all that out. For most of the project I didn’t look at the JavaScript app it created. When I finally did look I was delighted to see that it used the same coding style as I use, developed over many years. It’s like programming in overdrive.

I had to do the testing for Claude in the second case because it can’t test apps that run in the browser. So it was giving me checklists of things to do and I’d report back on what happened. Still, a lot faster and easier than doing it on my own. It’s a very good, tireless and super well-informed programming partner.

Not sure what my third project will be, probably going to stick with something small. The big move will be working with FeedLand in this mode. There are a bunch of changes that should make it run faster. Also might be possible to make it easier to install for people who are using AI tools. And since most of the action takes place on the server, I think I can get Claude to do better testing than I, a human can do, one who gets tired pretty darned quickly. That’s when things get really interesting, not that the whole thing isn’t really interesting, most interesting dev work I’ve done since the early days of the web.

The logic of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification model applies to government too.

Both political parties view the electorate as sources of money or people who are manipulated by ads and PR bought with the money.

The wants and needs of people, in both government and social media, have nothing to do with anything.

In both cases they work for the benefit of the funders, only.

It’s just a business. And users and voters realize that, but they feel powerless to do anything about it.

Voters attach to any company or person who sounds like they get it and agree and want to fix it. In politics as in tech there are people who actually do want to fix it. We thought that the web would do that for politics, but the users gravitated to the enshittified spaces. And the developers all acted selfishly and wouldn’t work with each other. Now the hope is that with AI tools, individual developers can maintain codebases as big and complicated as the ones maintained by the VC-backed companies. No one talks about this. We should.