Scripting News: Sunday, August 23, 2026
Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage, often a session-ending dealstopper. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to create something, but not yet. I did have a couple of days a week ago when I could tentatively work on building a GitHub repo, but then got distracted by verifying that the basic foundation still wasn't right. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, then without breaking anything. #
Now in Claude's defense, I had to re-learn everything about how Frontier worked. Over the last decade or so I had only been using a narrow set of functionality. I used it for very occasional utility scripts for the file system or over the web, but mostly for writing JavaScript code, and published on GitHub and deployed to servers. If I had been uptospeed on how it works internally and all it's capabilities, when we started, it would have gone somewhat more smoothly. But now in my own defense, Claude has a nasty habit of deciding it fully understands something when it doesn't even slightly understand it. If it asked for a pointer, I could have given it a good one, but it just skated over those things, never questioning it's own guestimation. We used to call this docufiction back in the day, you don't know how they are going to design a feature, so you make up a UI, and document it as if that were the truth. Only now we're doing it with the actual code. It's funny in a way, I guess. But what a huge waste of time, and so much stress because you have to read every word or you'll miss a wrong assumption. #
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