Scripting News: Tuesday, August 18, 2026
I'm thinking about writing my blog over in RSS.chat. It has most of the features I like, titles are optional, no character limit, links are supported, because it's the web. It supports discourse the way I like it, where every comment is a post, no difference, and you can anchor threads in different places, not just the place it was born. It's got a simple structure, without being complex. Small parts loosely joined, every part replaceable. Much more than open source. And naturally distributed. #
Meanwhile Claude wrote test files in many of our S3 buckets last night, one of which knocked FeedLand off the air. It did a scan to see what other damage it had done, and there was a lot. It went through specific orders that said it can't do those things. So I have no idea how useful these things could be if it destroys stuff in deployed projects with real users. FeedLand was down for over an hour, and stressed me out no end. Really fucked up. #
Why do people care if Claude puts watermarks on text it wrote. It's screwing with its writing, not yours. As a person who publishes their own writing, and carefully labels it when it's written by an AI bot (docs, change notes, podcast show notes, quotable things it said), I want people to be able to tell that I wrote it, this is what I thought, I'm not just shoveling random written sludge to people, sloshing around, devaluing every bit of real writing in its midst. I bet teachers love the idea. Why does everyone have to have an opinion about every damned thing? And of course I have even more to say on the subject. #
- As I've been writing test scripts for the Frontier project, I was finding omissions or mistakes one at a time. Finally I asked Claude to research this. Where are the holes you didn't fill as we were going along? The list is surprisingly long. Then I asked it to look at other things that were left unimplemented. There were lots. #
- Claude is not really at fault for any of this. The first goal we went for is write enough of Frontier so my nodeEditor build scripts will run. Then it took on lots of other jobs. And all that time I never thought to ask "what haven't we implemented, or stubbed up?" Then I did, and was shocked at how many verbs there are. I had forgotten, I'm not sure I never even knew, because it's so easy to add a whole section to a verb set, and you only see the details if you expand the table.#
- I want to try to draw people who were serious Frontier developers in the 90s and 00s and beyond, because there are questions that have come up about what we should bring with us. I'll start with an example. Here's an outline of the system.verbs.builtins.tcp table. The question is -- how much of this code should be brought across from the 90s to the 20s? Obviously the DNS verbs. There aren't many and we used them all the time. FTP verbs? Borderline. We don't use FTP very much these days. We had an IM table with verbs and drivers. I remember when Jake worked on this, but I don't think it got much beyond a demo. And the very lowest-level stream-oriented TCP verbs? Well tcp.httpClient needed them, in the 90s and it was the basis for all our HTML and RSS work, our first feed reader built on that code. But HTTP support built into Node.js is pretty great in 2026. We'd be foolish to do anything but call into it. That's one of the reasons I migrated to JavaScript in 2013. There are plenty of other examples like this, and my answer is generally we'll save them for last, and if no one asks about them, we'll retire them. Figure if a platform hasn't updated in 12 years, and doesn't run on any hardware anyone ships before this transition, we have less to worry about than normal. And if need be, we always can add them back at a future date.#
- Another example, until late last week Claude was arguing with me about the correct use of directions in the op.go verb. This is so incredbily well documented, over and over in so many places. And it knew about all of them, yet it still thought its choices for directions made more sense. The question had already been answered in the mid-80s. #
- It also thought it was a language that ran in the context of a Unix OS, like Python or PHP. Yes, it could be used that way, but all of its advantages based on integration of the database, language, verb set, runtime would be missing. It's an OS of its own that runs on many OSes, now it will run anywhere Electron runs, so in the future it will have access to everything, on the desktop and the server. You could even run a headless version, we tried that for a week or so and hated it. Too limited and too slow. #
- I'd like to get feedback from people with experience, and honestly people who are good to work with. :-)#
Linkblog items for the day
Little Websites Everywhere.
michellebarker.co.uk
Anthropic shares more details about how Claude’s new watermarks will work. People are complaining about this, but I think it’s good.
techcrunch.com
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