Mastodawn

Mx. Aria Stewart

Okay I know everyone hates this article but there's a nugget of truth in it. One of the possible futures we can gun for is this.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/

Make things. Make _personal scale_ things. The tools help bridge the truly high barriers we've managed to put in in the tech industry.

This will have a lot of problems! We don't have collective knowledge for this yet / again. The people with Sysadmin Mindset have been burned out or subsumed into the Cloud Computing machine.

But there's a chance here to take the web better places. We should take it.

(If you're worried about everything turning into paying to rent access to a digital landlord, I have bad news about where we've been since 2012.)

AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web

I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturall…

Techdirt

Julia Evans 20h ago

@aredridel yeah, while I don't feel great about AI and I always feel like I need to be super careful about how I use it, I'm not sure I could realistically have built https://library.wizardzines.com/ (which I've been using as a way to try to become more independent from a provider I'm not happy with) without using LLMs to write some of the code

i do think a lot about the foundations, like I think a big part of why it works is that it's a small amount of code on top of a real framework (Django)

Wizard Zines Library

Julia Evans 20h ago

@aredridel i do find "I had a coding agent build an entire video conferencing platform [on a Saturday]" hard to relate to, for me I find that bigger projects very quickly go off the rails and it feels important to have human decision making go into almost every aspect of the project

Mx. Aria Stewart 20h ago

@b0rk Yeah. And that kind of project without direction only works if it's a clone of something well known and talked about. These things are _great_ at retracing existing steps. Way less good at creating de novo.

Also a lot of those things are “I used up two Claude Max accounts weekly quotas this weekend”, success through a truly absurd amount of brute force.

But also they may not know that they didn't in fact build all that much because Claude is a lying little shit who says things that aren't done are done.

I'm porting something non-trivial from Go to Rust right now and hooo boy did it say it worked well before it worked at all.

Mx. Aria Stewart 20h ago

@b0rk This! It's not a substitute for engineering skill, but most of the engineering skill is “thinking ahead" and “having a purpose to what you're doing" in a lot of cases. These are not things that require knowing all the fiddly details.

The fiddly details certainly help. And we may have hurt people ever learning them. But in this moment, the trade-off is pretty obvious in a lot of cases.

Dawn Ahukanna 17h ago

@aredridel
OBSERVATION: people are using LLMs to code tools for personal projects, the same way they’d use excel for managing/keeping track of financial/numerical information or hire a rental car for transportation.
Most people don’t re-create spreadsheet software!or car but you still need to know how to use the tool effectively.
What most non-devs won’t appreciate: tool user using LLMs to write code, recreates the tool (excel) to manage data & also uses that tool to manage their personal data.

Mx. Aria Stewart 17h ago

@dahukanna yes! For better _and_ worse.

Is an ad hoc heap of mess better or worse than an app someone is renting to you that they can yank the foundations of any time?

Dawn Ahukanna 16h ago

@aredridel
There’s value in investing time & effort to create personal digital tools that enable+enhance skills e.g. automatically sort & categorize your human authored content.
I’m more & more convinced that digital literacy is “self-sufficiency” human challenge underlying observed symptomatic behaviour because some of that LLM produced code could’ve been a human produced script/code using existing tools if people knew how instead of it being held to ransomeware by a “monthly subscription”.

Dawn Ahukanna 16h ago

Related to your “yank and rip out from under you” comment - https://23.social/@leyrer/116307853170954292

“To manage growing demand” … shift gear and then yank!

leyrer (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Time is an illusion, AI time doubly so"

23

Mx. Aria Stewart 14h ago

@dahukanna Hah yeah sigh.

this RAM shortage sucks.

There's a reason I'm not depending on OpenAI or Anthropic.

Dawn Ahukanna 17h ago

@aredridel
Would you pay thousands of your currency to buy a car whose parts have been created and assembled by an inexperienced, unqualified, individual person?
But the above scenario is acceptable if we swap LLM subscription for payment and “write code to instruct a computer” for a car creation & assembly.

Mx. Aria Stewart 14h ago

@dahukanna I am so the wrong person to ask that of. I have a hand-assembled e-Bike made by an unqualified person (me) out of random chinese stuff.

So I guess in a word yes, and I want to build a world where the context supports that.

Dawn Ahukanna 14h ago

@aredridel you hand-assembling an e-bike, motorcycle, car is your project.
If I were going to pay someone to build me a custom e-bike, motorcycle or car I’d expect some expertise, otherwise I’d do it my (unqualified) self & learn something.

But people aren’t learning knowledge (what & how), it’s churn something out+copy+paste.
I do think, if this tech is used socraticly at a personal level rather than sycophanticly en-mass there could have been some benefit from the unethical mass pillage LLMs.

Mx. Aria Stewart 13h ago

@dahukanna Is it though? Like, I'm watching people build stuff — and make messes — but they’re learning. They're not learning how _I_ learned, but people haven't learned that way much in fifteen years or so.

This isn't to say there won't be some bad effects (lots, too many). Having a bunch of crappy slop out there _sucks_. But not the personal scale stuff so much. The careless hustlers, as always, inflicting it on others are a huge part of the problem. Never mind the grifters who're happy to make the Dark Forest.

Dawn Ahukanna 1h ago

@aredridel
You are right about people having different knowledge acquisition modes - usually a specific mix of words/visual/kinaesthetic/auditory learning.

Learning new things is continuous repetition of (making a mess + failure pain course correcting feedback) - https://mastodon.social/@dahukanna/113658386310418928

It’s “cactus hugging” time!
#CarefulCactusHugging

@dahukanna @aredridel the people who would rent a hire car, however, are freaks