ABOUT THIS EPISODE
As before I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes. I added links. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen to the podcast.
Dave's first podcast in almost a month, which felt longer to him. His system has been in pieces while he moved his work to a new Mac running the new Frontier, codenamed Atlantis.
The code written with Claude Code sometimes makes wrong assumptions. Dave explains the idea of a "source of truth": what runs has gone through many layers of processing, so when something breaks, the cause could be anywhere.
His first post to Scripting News from the new setup worked the first time. It also produced a new motto, "Knicks in five," which leads to memories of his grandfather's season tickets at the Garden and the 1969 Knicks.
Next he rebuilt utils.js to add the new motto. That change worked, but the next level up broke. Along the way: the comforting beep he wants in every app, and Apple's new dock icons, which make him relearn things that didn't actually change.
On the press: in 2010 Facebook's Open Graph API exposed user data openly, and reporters loved it. In 2016 the same data made Cambridge Analytica a scandal. Dave says journalists have no source of truth about technology.
Dave calls the end-of-civilization framing of AI a distraction from real threats like climate change and nuclear weapons. The real risk is mundane: imagine a bank that warned it "can make mistakes." He has seen Claude Code write files it had no right to touch.
He also says that given a well-specified task, it will blow you away. In May, Claude got Frontier's 2014 open source release running on modern hardware overnight.
He compares it to building a new house next to an old one: you move in, rearrange, and walk back to the old house when you need to. Frontier, which he thought nobody would ever know about, exists again, and he feels like a weight has been lifted.
