Working with Claude on the user interface of RSS.chat was a grind, but we learned a lot about working on these projects, me in the form of my human memory, and Claude who can read the code for a huge sprawling app like Frontier, and understand it, in a minute or two. We’ve done this project in three stages, not knowing at the first two that there would be another one. Now we’re working on the editors. An odb table editor, outliner, menubar editor, script editor. All built on the same codebase. It’s in an Electron app that works with lots of independent windows, which while it has its pros and cons, is the way Frontier did it for almost 40 years. I find all this very unsettling, but I realize that once we get back to adjusting the UI, I already know how to work with Claude on tuning things up so they feel just right. I’m a market of one, the only one who has to be happy here is me. This may be the hardest programming project I’ve ever had, for one simple reason, I’m not doing any programming. That and I’m having very strong deja vu on everything I do and think about. Also there will be a fourth stage and maybe more. It’ll be about the affordances, the things that seem little, but make the product usable. The biggest is the debugger. It’s patterned after the one in THINK C, which I found transformative so I stole from the best, as they say. #