My Successes with AI-augmented Code as of March 2026
Being a computer dork of a certain stripe, I’ve had a TODO(.md) in my
personal wiki for a long time that was full of IT / tooling tasks that I wanted
to do, but that I never found the time:
- Port the NeXT desktop to FreeBSD
- Clean up my blog repository of incorrectly committed binary assets that were bloating out my storage footprint and slowing up checkouts
- Remedy data loss in my blog due to a botched cleanup operation
- etc.
I delivered every one of these with the help of AI. So I thought I’d take a quick inventory from roughly last year at this time to now.
FreeBSD Users: We Need to Talk About Claude Code
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.
The Positive Case for AI-Assisted Development
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.