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 1d 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

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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

@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.