My (latest) AI Aha Moment

Notes prepared by Claude.ai.

Dave opened with an aha moment he'd been chasing for years. Long before ChatGPT, he wanted to load all his blog writing into a machine and have it grind through everything to produce a table of contents — the kind you'd find in the back of a book — surfacing the items with eighty references pointing at them and the recurring themes running through his timeline. He pointed to the browser wars of the 90s as an example, a period he wrote about heavily and, because his posts were read everywhere then, actually influenced. The dream was to load it all into an AI, read the index, and ask how a given idea developed over time.

What struck me is that his solution turns out to be almost embarrassingly simple, and it only took four years. Because Dave writes everything in OPML — and always has, all the way back to the beginning, sitting in public in the scripting news repo on GitHub — you teach the AI to read OPML, drop everything into one file, and tell it to read the whole thing. His key insight is that you have to tell it more than once: the model doesn't actually ingest everything on the first pass, and it doesn't mind being nagged. You coerce the whole corpus into the model, then start asking questions and have it build the index.

He framed this as the familiar pattern of suddenly understanding one level of the stack while having no clue what's below it — and being at peace with that, because the lower levels are someone else's job. From there he reflected on how societies keep growing more complex out of the same basic human material, and how it never quite occurred to him that he's one of the people who build that stuff. Fifty-plus years of programming, never stopping, even running a company with a day job and a night job where the night job was the software. What he gets off on, he said, is creating new interactions that work for people — the same impulse he sees in Ted Nelson, Engelbart, Ritchie, and Berners-Lee, who just made things instead of agonizing over whether they should.

He closed on two notes. First, a caution against fear: this is version 0.51, not even 1.0, and if the first airplane anyone ever saw were a 747 they'd be terrified — these things arrive gradually for a reason. And second, the thing humans do badly: we push forward and create amazing things, but we never clean up after ourselves. We're hoarders, and what we hoard is CO2.

Notes prepared by Claude.ai. It makes mistakes, but it's a good summary, more or less reflects what I said.