Mastodawn

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

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Julia Evans

@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

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Julia Evans 1d 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

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Mx. Aria Stewart 1d 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.

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Mx. Aria Stewart 1d 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.