Notes prepared by Claude.ai.

In this podcast, recorded July 12, 2026, Dave introduces rss.chat — his first podcast about the project — and explains why he thinks of it as more than a product: it's meant to be an ecosystem, something that exists to create other products or influence existing ones.

He opens with a lesson learned over decades in software: people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors. Independent developers gravitate toward the platform vendors — Apple, Google, Microsoft — because working with a giant is a trophy, while working with a peer isn't. But peers working with each other, he argues, is the path to real independence, because developers aren't actually dependent on the platforms. Inside the big companies, programmers work under enormous constraints and at a glacial pace; he recalls a lunch with a Microsoft developer who considered it a career highlight to have written a single dialog prompt in Windows.

Dave revisits the history of podcasting, which he thought of as a product in the 2001–2004 period, bootstrapped by Radio UserLand — at the time the leading product in RSS and blogging combined. He tells the story of how a reviewer left Radio UserLand out of a roundup of feed readers, and how every subsequent review covered exactly the same set of products. His conclusion: journalists mostly copy each other or the press release, and their complaints about AI taking away original work ring hollow to someone who's been on the other side.

On why you can't create an account on rss.chat: it's his personal site, a social network for friends and people he creates with over the long term. One of them is Don Park, whom he's known since 1988, reconnected with now because both are deep into Claude Code.

The big idea comes near the end. When you ask ChatGPT to make an app, it gravitates toward making a dashboard. Dave wants each of us to take the kind of software we know best and turn it into a template — his gravitates toward making a social network. The architecture puts the user interface in the middle with all the wires coming in and out; you and your AI design the experience in the middle, and the wires are just there. It goes all the way down to the source, which is why he calls it "open source plus" — you can hack the code, but it's better if you interop, because that's the philosophy of the web itself. Every part is replaceable. Not lock-in, but locked open.

Background and ongoing documentation at scripting.com.

Notes prepared by Claude.ai.