The Solution Was to Double Down on my AI Subscription

Since reading David’s article, “the solution might be cancelling my AI subscription”, I cannot stop thinking about how different our experiences are.

Six months ago, right before subscribing to Anthropic’s Claude AI, none of the following custom-built apps existed: a useful, personally fitting bookmark manager; a purpose-built RSS reader that works hand in hand with my bookmark manager; and a simplified task manager that also works in conjunction with the other two. As an experienced user of many RSS readers, bookmark managers, and task managers, knowing my friction points with these apps, I have always dreamed of what would be perfect-for-me versions of them. So I built those, one by one.

Thanks to Claude Code and my vision for what would make the perfect versions of each of these apps, I could build them without being constrained by not knowing Next.js, TypeScript, CSS, etc. I don’t plan to make commercial versions of these nor open-source them. There are a few, and I can tweak them as I see fit and as my needs evolve; this is where I’ll keep focusing. AI empowered me and will continue to do.

You see, the solution for me is to keep iterating and keep my subscription. Two different stories, two different outcomes. Maybe there is something that I didn’t catch in David’s experience.

Food for Thought on a Rainy Friday

What if, as soon as we shared content on the Internet, you couldn’t remove it as soon as someone was referring to it or embedded it in some other content? I’m thinking about the open web here… would this hypothetical web be called the open web anyway? Would we be more intentional when sharing content having this rule baked in? This chain of thoughts was triggered when I came across a website with a blog post with some embedded content from YouTube. Some videos were no longer available and made the blog post more or less diminished.

Manton Reece writing about Software brain:

Maybe our belief in new technology has been warped by cynicism. We’ve been beaten down by ad platforms, manipulated by algorithms. We’ve grown weary of the relentless pace of Silicon Valley. We assume every CEO must be a liar and that even good intentions are corrupted by money.

Manuel Moreale, in his “Dealgorithmed” newsletter edition #007, commenting on a (very long) post from Anil Dash about the end of the web as we know it:

One thing I find entirely unconvincing about that post is what Anil has to offer in terms of action we can take. Support the Internet Archive and Wikipedia? Support the EFF? Donate to Mozilla? Think fondly about Stack Overflow?

Is that going to save the open web? If you want to do something to save the open web, leave social media behind and make yourself a website.

Of all the toxicities afflicting the (open) web these days, social media is probably the most toxic by a wide margin. In the name of discoverability and moneytization, we keep feeding the beast.

I was doing some cleaning tonight in my old documents on Craft, including those that were initially published as shared documents, then migrated to Micro.blog, on my metablog. The articles cover the period from 2020 to last year; the more recent documents are published directly on Micro.blog. While rereading some of these documents, I thought that their relevance was pretty much nil and that I should maybe delete them permanently. I didn’t do it, out of fear of erasing part of my memory.

Gruber’s reaction to Hacker News Discussion on Shubham Bose’s ‘The 49MB Web Page’:

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs.

It’s hard to imagine the web without JavaScript, only as a collection of static, linked documents served by essentially passive file servers.

Just as streaming services helped lower the cost of music, AI is reducing the price of software even more than the subscription model does. The downside is that AI is driving hardware prices up, and it’s uncertain whether we will ever see the return of the always-cheaper hardware trend.

‘The Window Chrome of Our Discontent’:

This entire idea that application window chrome should disappear is madness. Some people — at Apple, quite obviously — think it looks better, in the abstract, but I can’t see how it makes actually using these apps more productive. Artists don’t want to use invisible tools.

Well, if window chrome is absent, what’s left for Apple to differentiate itself from others than UI elements inside a window? Buttons!