Yeah, so it’s been a minute since I’ve written. With a toddler, marriage, work, etc. my tiny little bits of free time have forced me to choose between blogging or Doing the Thing. Let me tell you about the Thing I Did.

I ported Sergeii’s NEXTSPACE project from Linux to FreeBSD—the operating system of my “Just Focus” laptop. NEXTSPACE recreates the NeXTSTEP desktop environment, that gorgeous UI from Steve Jobs’ NeXT computers. On top of this, I integrated GNUstep, the Free Objective-C development environment and graphical interface builder modeled on NeXTSTEP. This crisp UI and insightful programming environment were so elegant and ahead of their time that Apple would build OSX (now MacOS) on it. There’s a reason Sir Tim invented the World Wide Web on this platform.

While I’d been too young in 1989 to know about NeXT, I sought to re-create what John Perry Barlow described in my favorite episode of “This American Life #74: Conventions”:

the only computers…where the whole notion of design was really important to the product—elegance of design.

Or prove myself to be proudly of that cohort of individuals named by Barlow as “Unix weenies by Armani.”

Right before the end of 2025 I finished my proof of concept. It worked. I’ve made a few improvements since then and have chased down some battery-burning inefficiencies. In fact, I’m using it right now.

And along the way, I worked with AI through the development. My C is far too primitive, my Objective-C too narrow to deliver this beast of a project. So the success here suggests a certain type of success for AI-assisted development, in this case with Claude and later Claude Code. Some of my experiences suggest the positive case for AI that I hope critics can earnestly engage with.

Ultimately, succeeding in The Thing didn’t leave much time for blogging. Until now.

Photo Credit: Elan Rushkin

Starting over alone, anew, afresh, in California a half-lifetime ago, I came to find out that the maw of the weekend can swallow you whole if you’re not careful. There are so many hours that you can easily do nothing thanks to the embarrassing riches of having time enough to do anything in a state being chock-full of everything. In order to etch numbers in my sundial and create speedbumps on the slide to Monday, I invented orienting rituals like my Saturday night radio ritual.

So, on San Jose’s warm Summer-into-Fall nights, I found myself whiling away Saturday night with KQED playing. Honestly, I’ve spent time more poorly.

But episode #74 of “This American Life” changed my life.

• I laughed (Making change at the math convention).
• I roared (“Dark Shadows Lives/Rules!”).
• I groaned (“Any advice for all the dishwashers?”)
• I found an omen of my future ("NeXT was one of the only computers…where the whole notion of design was really important to the product — elegance of design")
• …and then I wept (“It’s like, this is where I left her. And she could be in any one of these seats…just sleeping.”).

I had never been so powerfully moved by radio, and I haven’t been so moved since.

The promise of computing was that it would take drudgery away. And it has: I no longer have to squeeze in a bank visit on a lunch break and I can get disinformation pumped into my home without having to go outside to listen to the town idiot. Up next: flying cars.

But computing, in doing so, has created digital chores that the more obsessive of us (👋) need help automating away. Ironically then, the automation needs, uh, automation. While tools like AppleScript/Automator suggested a way forward, I’ve not seen their use become commonplace.

The drudgery has not been dispelled. Most workflow automation remains “None,” as best that I can tell. Maybe in a push, the wizard class might put in some light coding (👋) to help out. At the outset (2024-current moment), LLMs suggested to me that at last automating workflow development without specialized knowledge could be democratized.

The results were disappointing as ChatGPT-4o bungled the simple task of processing images again and again.¹

Let’s use the following lenses:

1. Generalized knowledge
2. Domain-specific knowledge
3. Operating System / Platform ease-of-use or integration

to examine how automation workflow software with Apple’s Automator or LLMs might yet help us bid farewell to our digital chores.