Recently, Anthropic changed their Claude Code installer from using npm to a native installer. It works on Linux/WSL. It works on Windows. It works on Mac.

On FreeBSD today, you get a scary yellow deprecation warning suggesting that you and your platform might be a dead end. I think that’s a problem.

History is littered with tasteful products made by artisans who gave the high-hat to unwashed technologies and their users:

• MULTICS / Unix
• Apple Macintosh Look-and-Feel / Windows
• Metallica / Music file-sharing
• Sony / iPod
• et al.

In every one of these cases, worse/grubby/philosophically-impure/commercial/lazier/legally-questionable/scrappier won.

We need to meet users where they are. As the classic demotivational poster had it for phone support desks (of which I am a proud veteran): If We Don’t Take Care of the Customer, Maybe They’ll Stop Bugging Us.

This is Part 3 of a three-part series on my 2025 obsession with NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and NEXTSPACE. In Part 1, I introduced the project and my motivation. In Part 2, I walked through the seven-phase technical journey of porting NEXTSPACE to FreeBSD. Here, I reflect on what AI-assisted development made possible.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on my 2025 obsession with NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and NEXTSPACE. In Part 1, I introduced the project and what drove me to port NEXTSPACE to FreeBSD. Here, I’ll walk through the technical journey itself.

The Slow-Boiled Frog

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

Attributed to Maciej Ceglowski

Starting Off with Claude

As of this summer, I was trying various new laptops and putting them through their paces as far as being my new “Just Focus” on FreeBSD machine. While testing various hardware platforms for FreeBSD support, I started leaning on first ChatGPT and then Claude’s chatbot to get information about how to get diagnostics or correct bugs as I was getting oriented on the platform. Eventually, I consolidated to Claude because I found its answers to coding/systems adminsitration problems to be better.

In my small sessions the duration of a toddler nap or a few hours before bed, I was able to find my optional hardware platform – with much of that velocity added by Claude. In addition to the velocity boost, Claude behaved a bit like a gym buddy or a trainer: every time I reconnected, it remembered the project and the last thing that we did. Amid a high-interrupt life with toddler, this was a huge help.

Eventually, it would help me ship a complex C/Objective-C/Shell project.