Thoughts about “working together”

Today, Dave Winer talks about “working together”, and how he wants to work with other people. The bug in this statement is that Dave Winer deletes things from sites he provides for others to try out his tools, talks about “spam” posts (which is his word for someone trying to make use of his “flow” to promote their “personal projects”) and how he will “moderate” them, and other abusive behaviors. That turns off users and developers. I have personal experience with this, and reports from other users/developers.

Next, he talks about he wants to work together, but what he gets instead are people (collaborators? partners? who?) who want to be him (what does that mean? does it mean they want to be in charge of the project/control the project?). He talks about how people wanted to take over RSS and OPML. I will give him the benefit of the doubt of his lived experience, but my lived experience of working together with people (mostly working in teams in corporate software development) is that a goal is established, roles and responsibilities are laid out, scope and schedule are defined, and the team gets to work until the goal is met. My observation of the way Dave Winer works is that he controls the project, he does all the development and only changes code in an outliner (although Claude is now a silent partner), will not accept PRs, and gets upset when he ends up being the “only person” answering questions in Github issue repos.

Finally, here is a quote from the “Working Together” post he references in the post above:

Working together means this: If someone else has a good-enough way to do something, rather than reinvent what they do, incorporate what they do into what you do.

So – all of the other chat programs in the world were not “good enough”, so they need to be reimplemented using “RSS 2.0 feeds and websockets” (quote from rss.chat repo README file)

From monitoring the rss.chat and demo.rss.chat sites, I see some of Dave’s former co-workers/collaborators are building some things to work with rss.chat. Hope that works out for them!

Podcast about using formal methods in software development

Hillel Wayne explains why formal methods like TLA+ matter, how they help build reliable software, and whether AI will finally bring formal verification into the mainstream.

I enjoyed listening to this, I am planning to watch the video since Hillel Wayne shows some tool demos. I have not used formal methods in my career, but I did investigate them, and did play with TLA+.

Regular podcast and transcript/summary also available at The Pragmatic Engineer.

Should the software engineering profession pursue collective bargaining?

Greg Wilson, who has built a significant career in the field of software engineering, recently wrote a set of essays called “Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code” with the sub-title “a few things programmers should know about society to understand big tech, social media, and AI”. The essays cover a wide set of subjects, with this intent from the introduction: “The essays that follow will explore a few things I wish I had known earlier: where power comes from, how it is used, how its use is hidden, and how people have held the powerful accountable and made the world a fairer place.”. Greg also provides multiple references to other sources supporting the topics in the essays, which I greatly appreciate.

For today, I am going to point to one of the topics – collective bargaining. My experience in software engineering within the aerospace industry is that almost none of the engineers I worked with were part of a union. The only example I have heard of is an engineers union at Boeing, which is an affiliate of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), AFL-CIO. In one of my previous companies, a co-worker made a comment about “we ought to start a union”. I said; “You say the word and I will call the AFL-CIO!”. When I checked into it though, we would have to get people to sign cards to indicate interest, then fight with management, etc. I told this to my friend, and he said “Sounds like too much work”, and that was the end of that.

Recently, I had lunch with a former colleague who is still working at one of my previous employers. His tales of office politics and lack of promotion opportunities made me glad that I was retired. I related the story I listed above, saying that it was an alternative to “stay or leave”. I am not sure if anything will come to it, but I felt the need to share.

I also told my friend about this series of essays – again, he did not express immediate interest, but I think I will send him a link. I think this paragraph from the essay “When The Algorithm Comes for You” is appropriate, given that AI is transforming the software engineering industry (bold text is my addition):

In 2023, the Writers Guild of America struck for five months over issues that included AI. When the strike ended, the WGA had won explicit contract language: AI cannot write or rewrite scripts, and scripts cannot be used to train AI systems. The Screen Actors Guild reached a parallel agreement that included restrictions on the digital replication of performers’ likenesses without ongoing consent [Kelly2022]. These victories established enforceable contractual limits on what employers could do with AI—limits that individual workers negotiating alone could never have secured. The lesson is not specific to Hollywood: wherever workers have collective bargaining rights, they can negotiate from a position of strength. Professional associations, open-source communities, and standards bodies can create analogous leverage in sectors where formal unions are absent or weak.

Since my retirement, I have had time to reflect about my career, the difficulties and successes, and how I could have approached things differently. I think I will add that topic to my “Future Essays” list….

What are the attributes of a “social platform”?

On June 28, 2026, Dave Winer put out a call for social web app developers to work with him if they are including inbound and outbound RSS in their apps. Manton Reece from Micro.blog referenced this in a post on Micro.blog, and had this statement: “I’m actually not aware of any social platforms that support inbound RSS except Micro.blog. It would be great to have more.”. Dave Winer then responded on Micro.blog as follows (partial quote):

I want a world of social platforms that support inbound RSS

Those two posts caught my eye, specifically the word “platform”. Why did they choose the word “platform”? That made me wonder – is this really a call for “centralized” services like Bluesky/Mastodon to add inbound RSS (to allow users to post within these services as “first class citizens” (as if they were posting within official apps for Bluesky/Mastodon))? In earlier comments on this topic, I wrote:

I have addressed this second objection before, stating “What is in it for the “other people’s software developers to add inbound and outbound RSS support”? My answer is – nothing – no users are demanding this – no users are clamoring for a RSS-based “social network” that can communicate as a peer with other social network software.

I had developed a web app in 2023 called MyStatusTool, and this app allows users to follow RSS feeds that support rssCloud (inbound RSS) and allows the user to create their own posts with a feed (outbound RSS). However, I had not thought about the following/display of other RSS feeds as “inbound RSS” until now.

I created this app because back in 2022, Dave Winer kept talking about creating an app that could do this, but he did not actually do anything about it, so I decided to do it! The one feature this app does not have is support for replies/following threads, which “platforms” like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog support. Perhaps that is a key “attribute” of a “social platform”….

From recent posts, I am aware that Dave Winer is “working on something” with RSS and rssCloud to create some chat application. Hope he releases it soon! Hope it has inbound and outbound RSS!

AI News Archive Project – Report 2 (app now available)

In Report 1, I mentioned how I was able to get an app working locally on my laptop within several hours. To recap, this is an app to collect news items exposed through feeds and create a searchable archive that can be used in research. In my next iteration of the app, I changed the database (MySQL to MariaDB) and deployed it on a server. The app is now available here (URL is temporary, trying to think of something besides some form of “newsarchive.com”, but that may be where I end up). I also had Claude create some user documentation which is linked at the top of the app.

For the most part, Claude provided the instructions for how to deploy the app and connect to the database, and the instructions were mostly correct. If the instruction failed, I pasted the error into the Claude terminal, and usually Claude came up with a correction. The biggest problem was trying to get a cron job set up to check feeds once per hour – the provided job entry was not working. After some web searches and Gemini checks/fixes, Claude figured out that part of the command left out a dash on a switch option – ugh! I hope that has been fixed now…

Issues that I have seen have been due to the input feeds (NYTimes feeds have some duplicate stories across their feeds). Also, since I have only been collecting data starting today, the archive is someone small, and only has feeds from two sources so far (NYTimes and ABC News). It was disappointing to find that CNN does not have feeds any more…. I am planning to work up to adding at least one new source a day, but will need to find feeds!

All feedback is welcome – give it a try!

Dave Winer posted on Sunday: “Right now we could put a twitter-like product there that you can set up in a few minutes, run it yourself, and or join one that’s run by a friend.” Is this what he is talking about?

AI News Archive Project – Report 1

In a previous post, I mentioned that my first AI project was to develop an application to create a archive of US newspapers based on RSS feeds. I initially used Claude Code to review a list of US newspapers from Wikipedia to search for websites and RSS feeds. As I posted earlier, this took several sessions to complete this task, and I had doubts that I would be able to create an app without hitting my Claude Pro token limit.

My next step was to create a Markdown document describing the app for Claude to use as starting point. I looked at several example product requirement documents (PRDs) and frameworks for developing apps using AI (Get Shit Done, Superpowers) to find a way to get started. Eventually, I decided to follow Peter Yang’s advice on developing apps:

Don’t know what to build? Just tell AI your problems. Ask it: “What are some simple apps that we can build to help me take time back?”
Create a robust plan first. Ask it to “Create a plan with 3 clear milestones” to avoid mistakes during coding. Spend half your time planning with AI.
You’re the manager, AI does the work. Give it feedback and direction like you would a human employee. Be patient with it

I created a initial plan based on some PRDs I found in Peter Yang’s Github repo. I then asked Claude to review the plan and see if there was anything missing or not clear. Claude responded with a set of 12 things to change and 4 questions before starting any build work – wow! I accepted Claude’s suggestions, provided answers to the 4 questions, and Claude updated the plan (see here).

In the updated plan, four milestones were identified. Claude was prompting me to say “start building milestone 1”, so I did it. Claude then took 10-15 minutes to create code and tests for the Milestone 1 content. I decided to have Claude confirm steps with me as it went, so I could see issues firsthand (and there were issues, but Claude figured them out). If I had “let it run”, it might have finished quicker. During the Milestone 1 work, Claude was able to figure out that I had Wampserver installed on my local machine (which has MySQL, a specified part of the app tech stack), and used that to create the MySQL database for the app. When Milestone 1 development was complete, I did some operations with the app, then told Claude to create a handoff document (handoff.md) in case I hit a token limit during the session.

I then repeated this cycle for Milestone 2, 3, and 4. The handoff document was updated after each milestone. It turned out that I did not encounter any token limit. When the development was complete, Claude then added all of the code/files to a Git repo in the working directory. Here are some screenshots:

App admin screen

App search screen

To me, this was very impressive. It took less than 2 hours to get to this point – a fully functional application with 79 passing tests – amazing! I will post more when I have a version of the app running on a server.

PS – I have created a new category for these posts (AI for Smart Old Farts), if you want to just read these posts.

The new Blurt theme on WordPress.com does not “use RSS to glue” any systems together – it is a WordPress theme, and supports RSS because RSS is built into WordPress. It “looks like Twitter”, but each post is a standard WordPress post. Any other questions?