Wrapping AI in the web

As before I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes, from its point of view. I added links. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen to the podcast, not edited or changed in any way by AI. :-)

In this episode, Dave returns to a theme he's been circling for years: the social web's central failure isn't a lack of features, it's the locked doors. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon build genuinely useful tools, but they're designed to capture users and prevent the combining of one tool with another to make something new. This is the oldest fight in software—the tension between the "programming priesthood" who believe they have all the answers, and the tool makers and users who want new ideas to flow in around the programmers rather than be limited by what those programmers happened to imagine.

He recalls the early web arguments with Microsoft, when the freedom was exhilarating: "I want to ride up front with you. I don't want to get locked in the trunk." The danger, as always, is the moment a venture-backed company spots an open thing and races to turn it into a jail. Dave is blunt about the current pretenders—Bluesky, in particular—who claim to be revolutionary and open but control their users every bit as much as the platforms that came before, offering essentially the same impoverished toolset Twitter shipped back in 2006.

The hopeful turn is AI. Dave is doing his work now in Claude Code, and he sees something important happening: the people building these systems inside Anthropic, OpenAI, and elsewhere are building on open formats and protocols. There's a genuine web sensibility in there, in contrast to the stale playbook of Silicon Valley VC. He cites a piece that stuck with him—the observation that all the great new functions being built for the AI world are built for the machines, not for the people. That's what he wants to change. There's a moment here to unlock things that were locked and never should have been.

His proof that open technology can survive the attempts to own it is podcasting. The VC industry was certain it would control podcasting; it invested on that assumption, and it simply didn't work. Twenty-plus years on, you can still listen on whatever player you want, with nobody dictating what you can and can't do. Dave thinks the reason is that choice was built into the medium from the very first instant it existed—and once that happens, anybody can make one of these things and nobody can stop it. That was the original mission of the web, the euphoria he was writing about on his blog through the late 1990s.

He closes with the broader pattern: every genuine sea change has come from a sudden, dramatic boost in the power of individual developers, and that's exactly what's happening now. The personal computer made the machine yours to do whatever you wanted with. Networking and the web did it again. AI is the next one. The decisions about what gets built on are being made now, and his message to anyone working inside these companies is the one he's been repeating for years, to which people always replied that he was Don Quixote—right, but nobody would ever actually do it: get on board with the web. Stop throttling it, stop removing features, stop trying to own it. Let people figure out what they want to do.

As before I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes, from its point of view. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen. DW