Scott Werner

Read a fun scenario about "software mechanics" from @scottwernerd. Very plausible future and I suspect many would benefit from learning what the old field of cybernetics said about closed loop control systems.

@jspeiser I think you’re spot on, I’ve actually started writing some sci fi with Claude exploring where this kind of stuff breaks and the new types of jobs that pop up to solve those problems: nearzero.software/p/warranty-voi…

The funny thing about no-code tools like OpenClaw: they’ll get so advanced that non‑technical peeps like me can’t safely run them alone. Once you have: • Bots that remember things and act over days, they start “going off script” and you need someone who can debug their memory. • Multiple AI providers, rate limits, apis, and costs to juggle, you need someone who understands how the pipes actually work. • Automations that can send emails, change data, touch customers, you need guardrails, testing, and logs or they’ll quietly break things. • Giant drag‑and‑drop flows with 30+ steps, it’s no longer “no‑code”, it’s just messy code in boxes. In the end, you don’t replace developers. You just move the code from a text editor into a flowchart. Am I wrong?

Warranty Void If Regenerated open.substack.com/pub/near0/p/wa…

I wonder if this is going to be the first case study of things you REALLY can’t be doing in this new vibe coding era. They had a brand and reputation everyone loved (what everyone is saying is the last moat), great word of mouth, now… My feed is now full of people motivated to build a good enough open source alternative to granola, and that’s just the people talking about it. You now also have all the silent people who will just add a new tmux session with Claude working on their own version to never publish publicly but now any new feature they need is a prompt away. You really don’t want the friction of using your product the way people want to be higher than just vibe coding a janky yet good enough alternative…

"⁠There’s no manual for talking to machines. Or there are ten thousand manuals, which is the same thing.⁠⁠"

@travis_code Haha so good!

@scottwernerd Just one-shotted first place on the controller challenge leaderboard. It's the path that does the work.

Has it bugged any of you that everyone you talk to has their own unique prompting technique that they swear by and none of them are exactly the same? Well it's been bugging me and I think I've finally figured out why and why all of them also seem to be effective. open.substack.com/pub/worksonmym…

I think it is broadly under-appreciated what gets unlocked when end users get to fork and customize the software they use.

@alexhillman I tried doing to Twitter articles for a bit but they never got any views so I stopped and went back to primarily doing Substack and just posting links here…

So nobody actually writes articles on Twitter it's all AI slop, right? It's not just me seeing this? Like, every article I see is some AI influencer pumping out the same generic garbage. Who should I be following to nudge the algo towards people who still use their brains?

@nbaschez Was just talking about this trying to figure it out. I love the sci fi protagonist framing, but any thoughts about why ai16z/eliza didn’t break out the same way? Just that it mostly got adopted by the crypto people at first?

People working on "easier/safer openclaw" are missing the point Openclaw is like a motorcycle — the risk and freedom are why it blew up The job to be done is not "help me manage my projects" it's "make me feel like a scifi protagonist"

@swardley >90% here. I’ve hardly looked at code much in the last 6 months

In your work, in production, how much of the new code is written by AI?

@GeoffreyHuntley @ProgramWithAi Awesome sent a dm, I’m sure you’re very busy but would love to find a time to meet while you’re here!

@scottwernerd @ProgramWithAi from thursday morning for a week

my take - true factories aren’t going to happen until we get alien space languages. until that happens we are perhaps building houses (product factories) on reactive clay (ie. python without types)

@GeoffreyHuntley @ProgramWithAi No way! How long are you here?

@scottwernerd @ProgramWithAi i’m coming to new york dude; fly in tomorrow night!

@rushing_andrei @dexhorthy This is basically the premise for the next Near Zero post I’m working on 😂

@dexhorthy Nope. You l’ll just pay $1k/hour to a software plumber to open up the hood, get their hands dirty and patch up the leak with a new washer at 3am.

Here’s what’s gonna happen: - you replace your code review with feedback loops (sentry, datadog, support tickets, etc) - you stop reading the code - software factory fixes everything - one day something breaks at 3am, agent can’t fix it - nobody’s read the code in 3 months - you have 3 weeks of downtime trying to re-onboard and fix it - you lose significant % of your contracts and users - your company is now dead

@pbakaus Really enjoying Impeccable, thanks for putting it together! I actually wrote about it this weekend: worksonmymachine.ai/p/the-ghost-in… and used it for my own skills page at skills.worksonmymachine.ai - it was pretty brutal on my “before” 😂

Impeccable has surpassed 3000 stars, and it seems we're just getting started! Thank you for your support 🙏 P.S.: If you've used Impeccable to improve your designs, I'd love to see your before/afters - looking for some killer examples to put on the website. github.com/pbakaus/impecc…

@businessbarista Actually just wrote about some skills on my newsletter that are really good and launched the first version of my own: worksonmymachine.ai/p/the-ghost-in… Starter kit here: skills.worksonmymachine.ai

Call for kickass Skills! I'm going to be launching a vetted directory for skills soon. Think G2 or Consumer Reports for AI skills. It's going to be heavily curated and rigorously reviewed. We'll be launching with 3 verticals: 1) Product/eng 2) Marketing 3) Sales If you have any great skills that fit with one of these verticals that you feel confident putting your name behind, reply below. It will be heavily tested by our team & a panel of expert reviewers, but if chosen, it'll be listed with your name and an outbound link to your social accounts.

The Ghost in the Funnel. Your Free Tier is Somebody Else’s Twenty Minute Side Project: open.substack.com/pub/worksonmym…

In my recent posts I’ve mentioned that I’d been writing fiction with Claude to explore how the future looks when the cost of software is near zero, and it’s finally ready! Check out the first piece in the series, The Long Freight: open.substack.com/pub/near0/p/th…