Skip to the obvious question:
Why?
I asked myself that many times. I already use Ulysses with markdown XL to write my books on a modern Mac. BBEdit and Alpha exist for System 7, and are phenomenal text editors — Alpha is even extensible and probably could be made to parse markdown. Why bother making another? And the probably the most pressing question: is using AI for this cheating, exploitative, or needlessly derivative?
When I was younger and this technology was new, I didn’t have the experience or the budget to justify paying for THINK C. Ten years later, even though I’d taken C and C++ classes, learned a little bit of assembly and how computers really work over the years, it was difficult to justify spending the time learning CodeWarrior (I bought version 9 on an education license!) because ultimately I’m a visual designer who like to code. From simple choose your own adventures in AppleSoft Basic on my //c with GOTOs all the way now, making user interfaces delightful in Vue.js I’ve loved being able to work with a computer to make something real — I love the process of coding even if I’m not particularly skilled at it.
Why not write in Swift for modern macs? I have a very specific use case of actually typing on my restored SE/30, akin to a writer using a typewriter just because. With modern I/O solutions, an SE/30 is a perfectly capable in the modern world — without any of the distractions. Macintosh System 6 was stark, clean, and distraction free — you couldn’t even run more than one program at a time. This seems needlessly slow by today’s mentality but it remains focused, an experience that we struggle with every day.
I could deploy AI as a blind worker and have it write the app for me, but then I don’t learn how to do it at all. Claude can ask questions, help me get unstuck — and not merely act as some magical thing that writes code so I can go sip a drink. I’ll learn how the code works and why, stumble through bugs, mistakes and typos, and emerge with a greater understanding.
Who cares if it’s a marketable app? It won’t be for sale. I’ll likely be the only user. But I’ll know and love every line of code — and avoid all the potential dead ends and overwhelming frustration that might stop me doing this in the first place.
I draw on an iPad because it has undo. That makes it more fluid, more forgiving, easier to explore. The techniques are similar to pen and ink, but using real media would be more frustrating, error prone, and messy. To that end, I could type or hand-write my books longhand, but typing on a computer is a reasonable compromise — I can type well enough to get my thoughts out better than I could write it, and typewriters lack of backspacing is not my friend (though I try hard not to edit in the moment, I don’t need stacks of paper on the floor, either — messy again, see?)
It’s Dangerous Out There…
I asked Claude to “get me started on a markdown app for System 7.1” and three minutes later it had 5K lines of code and full functioning app written.
That triggered a bit of an existential crisis. Why bother? This AI can do this in minutes.
But there were some odd bugs we had to discuss over the course of an hour, and in the end, while the thing compiled, it didn’t work very well.
And there was little I could do about it, because I understood nothing it did.
Mentor? I barely know her!
The next morning I took a different approach: Claude, help me learn how to do this. I want to type it myself.
That changed the dynamic completely. Now instead of waiting for it to finish and having a cup of coffee while it spins, I’m in a dialogue, switching between typing natively on my SE/30 in THINK C and getting help from the AI.
If I get stuck, or don’t understand something, I ask. I also have several books and pdfs at my disposal to cross reference and try other things.
The result is process that’s much more like a mentor and not a diligent servant, and it’s allowing me to stay involved in the process.
Dreams
Putting aside the valid concerns about copyright, agency, privilege, and the environment — learning with a generative AI is perhaps one of the best case scenarios. A relationship where it’s not a crutch but a learning partner; you don’t hand it all your decisions, you leverage its vast breath and depth to augment your own knowledge. It has infinite patience (though its patience is limited by your credits…) and because this codebase is so well documented, it’s a wonderful resource.
Part of it is definitely nostalgia. I have a childhood fondness for these machines. Sitting down at one for me brings a sense of real joy. When I made silly little games on my //c, I was very happy. I never really coded on the Mac beyond some drawing of shapes in Logo in PASCAL, but the Mac has always felt like an accessible place to write software.
Now 40 years later, I finally get to try again.