On AI - joshua stein
In 2019, I started watching<br>Andreas Kling's programming videos,<br>many of which were live-coding sessions writing his new operating system<br>SerenityOS.<br>He was always pretty fast at writing code, especially since his IDE, Qt<br>Creator, had knowledge of all his C++ code and could<br>auto-complete<br>classes, variable names, and function signatures.<br>Back then it seemed like he had much of the code written in his head and was<br>limited just by his typing speed.
Four years later, he switched to<br>CLion<br>which had early GitHub Copilot support for AI-assisted code completion.<br>While<br>initially skeptical<br>of Copilot, he<br>experimented with it<br>and within months,<br>Copilot was writing code blocks,<br>"reading [his] mind",<br>and<br>writing whole functions.<br>His IDE's auto-completion through AI seemed like it had finally caught up<br>with his brain and he could get ideas out into code faster.
While I found it fascinating watching Andreas speed up his development, none of<br>it appealed to me for my work for years after.<br>I didn't even use an IDE or an<br>LSP<br>in my editor.<br>I was skeptical of AI and probably wrote it off too soon due to its<br>early failures.
I eventually tinkered with Claude in a web browser, asking it questions that I<br>would have otherwise asked a search engine and been directed to a Stack Overflow<br>answer.<br>Once Claude Code came out, I was amazed at the power of giving it access to a<br>directory of code on my laptop and letting it directly read and modify files.<br>Its ability to completely (and quickly) reverse engineer a binary blob with zero<br>context is still pretty awesome.<br>Once local models got good and small enough, I started using Ollama on my<br>M4 Mac Mini<br>to do local offline work.
Like many things, it's possible to like and use a technology, language, or tool<br>while rejecting all of the hype, fraud, and negative communities that build up<br>around them (like Rails, or Rust).<br>Of course, you can also choose not to like or use any of those things.<br>You can prefer to use a hand saw instead of a circular saw, or to drive a manual<br>transmission car instead of a self-driving EV.<br>But I think at this point it's naive to think of all AI technology as useless or<br>bad.<br>The AI industry on the other hand…
In 2020, taking inspiration from Andreas, I started<br>recording my own videos<br>programming on an 8 Mhz Macintosh 512Ke (later a Macintosh Plus) in the<br>THINK C 5 IDE.<br>I had never actually used a classic Macintosh before and I wanted to learn what<br>it was like to program for them as one would have 40 years ago.<br>I made a rule for myself that I would only write code on the Macintosh itself,<br>typing everything on its<br>Apple M0110 keyboard.<br>No modern computers would be involved in writing, editing, or compiling any of<br>the code for my projects.
Since starting that series, I've written (most of) an IMAP e-mail client, a<br>revision control system,<br>Wikipedia reader,<br>an<br>IRC client,<br>then a multi-user, multi-threaded<br>BBS server.<br>It all taught me a lot about the Macintosh and about C, and ignited my vintage<br>computing hobby which has introduced me to many new friends.
One thing about writing my e-mail client that bugged me was that it<br>required a<br>proxy server<br>on a modern server to strip TLS and present plaintext to the poky Macintosh.<br>So after<br>adding Wi-Fi functionality<br>to my Mac Plus, I added a<br>TLS offloading<br>device<br>so my Mac could do<br>TLS decryption<br>independently.
That provided the final giant piece of the puzzle needed to write a<br>"modern" web browser (at least something newer than<br>MacWeb that could parse HTML 5)<br>for classic Mac OS, since<br>everything is encrypted<br>these days.<br>I started<br>working on that browser<br>in 2024, adding other protocols such as Gopher (and begrudgingly,<br>Gemini).
A couple months ago, I was feeling particularly salty about computers and<br>posted<br>these<br>notes:
I have lost all enthusiasm for reading about new software projects, especially<br>dealing with vintage computing. What would have sounded amazing a year or two<br>ago and made me want to engage with the author, I now just assume was<br>something AI spit out and feels hollow and boring so I skim past it.
And writing software feels like being<br>Marge in that go-kart race.<br>Work slow and steady for a year writing something neat that had never been<br>brought to a platform before, but someone can hear about it and use Claude to<br>whiz by you in a week and make something with 10 times the functionality.
Case in point, I saw these today:
A modern web browser for Mac OS 9 with<br>CSS, ES5 JavaScript, and TLS
A 3D printer monitoring app for System 7 with video
A year ago either would have sounded awesome but now I scroll past because I<br>assume AI wrote it all
Today someone posted<br>this,<br>a completely<br>vibe-coded<br>Gopher client for classic Mac OS.<br>Claude even made a fancy website for it.<br>And wouldn't you know it, but<br>some<br>of the<br>code<br>for it even comes from my own projects.
The other week, Andreas<br>tweeted this:
Feels like “I actually enjoy writing code by hand” is about to become the big<br>2026 virtue signal for...