As before I asked Claude.ai to do a synopsis, from its point of view. I added a link to Brent's post and a postscript. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen. :-)Dave opens by riffing on a post by Brent Simmons, who described feeling, for the first time in his career, that he has his app completely under control — no chaos in the source code. Dave almost believes it's possible, but notes the catch: you can only get there on the fourth or fifth implementation of a g...
As before I asked Claude.ai to do a synopsis, from its point of view. I added a link to Brent's post and a postscript. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen. :-)
Dave opens by riffing on a post by Brent Simmons, who described feeling, for the first time in his career, that he has his app completely under control — no chaos in the source code. Dave almost believes it's possible, but notes the catch: you can only get there on the fourth or fifth implementation of a given piece of software. The more complex the app, the harder that is to achieve.
He reflects on the tension between experimentation and stability. You can't try out new ideas on a mature codebase without actually building them out fully — there's no halfway. Like driving a car, you can't get a real feel for a feature if you leave out the steering wheel. So you build the whole thing, knowing you might throw it away.
Dave admits he's not in that place with anything he's working on now. The one exception, by design, was Frontier — built to be extended by users, which gave it a different kind of coherence.
From there he shares a vivid memory: demoing an early outliner at the West Coast Computer Fair, probably 1979, with Ted Nelson standing right next to him. Nelson watched the demo and said, simply, "That's virtuality." Dave unpacks what he meant: the suspension of disbelief. When software is truly good, you forget you're using it. Your fingers work at the base of your spine, your ideas appear on screen, and your full conscious attention is on the work itself — not the tool.
He extends the analogy to skiing: your first run you're thinking about mechanics and fear; by the third run, you're just going down the hill being yourself. That's the same feeling. Bike riding gets there faster with less overhead, which Dave notes is, honestly, a better deal.
He closes by thanking Brent for the thought, and wonders if AI tools might make that state of software mastery more broadly achievable.
Notes prepared by Claude.ai
PS: This is Dave. I never got around to explaining what was awful about reading Ted Nelson's book. It was awful because I thought I had had original ideas, but someone got there before me, Doug Engelbart, and Nelson wrote up Engelbart's ideas in great agonizing detail in Dream Machines.
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