As before I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen to the podcast.

Dave opens by admitting the episode he meant to keep short will probably ramble, then tells the story that prompted it. He was writing a long post on Twitter, which now allows 10,000 characters, and was enjoying it. It felt like blogging: the character limit had receded far enough that he’d stopped thinking about it, which he argues is the precondition for any real writing. He’s been saying for twenty years that character limits on Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon split a writer’s attention between the ideas and the counter, and that this is why discourse on the web has degraded into what he calls grunts and snorts.

Then he went up a few lines to revise something and pressed Command-Return twice. In Claude Code, where he now does most of his typing, that inserts blank lines without sending. In Twitter it posts. An unfinished draft, containing ideas he hadn’t settled on and wasn’t sure he agreed with, went out to the world. He couldn’t find it at first; Claude told him where drafts live, there was nothing there, and by the time he checked his posts again it had appeared. He describes the effect as brain cell burning: the chain of thought, the subconscious momentum that writing is for, replaced with anger and grief over lost work.

Who’s to blame? Everyone in the tech industry who designs user interfaces, including himself. Not because anyone sold out, but because it’s expedient to just start coding: you need an editor, you need a button, you write them. Every product ends up with its own editor, each with different limits on length, links and styling, so a writer can’t use one editor for all of them. Dave sees this pattern wherever a market stagnates: an integration that should have happened and didn’t. His requirement as a writer is simple. He wants to always be writing in his own editor.

The episode closes with where he wants to go: a web for writers, and therefore for readers, driven by what writers need rather than by Silicon Valley’s growth motive. The original web was designed that way, and the pieces already exist in Markdown, RSS and WebSockets. He compares it to movies and baseball, where money becomes a stand-in for things it shouldn’t replace. Opening that door, he says, is the main thing left in his career.

Notes prepared by Claude.ai.