Suspension of Disbelief in Software

Suspension of Disbelief in Software

From Scripting News podcast by Dave Winer

March 18, 2026

About this episode

Dave Winer discusses the challenges of achieving stability in software development and reflects on the concept of suspension of disbelief in good software.

As before I asked Claude.ai to do a synopsis, from its point of view. I added a link to Brent's post and a postscript. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen. :-) Dave opens by riffing on a post by Brent Simmons, who described feeling, for the first time in his career, that he has his app completely under control — no chaos in the source code. Dave almost believes it's possible, but notes the catch: you can only get there on the fourth or fifth implementation of a given piece of software. The more complex the app, the harder that is to achieve. He reflects on the tension between experimentation and stability. You can't try out new ideas on a mature codebase without actually building them out fully — there's no halfway. Like driving a car, you can't get a real feel for a feature if you leave out the steering wheel. So you build the whole thing, knowing you might throw it away. Dave admits he's not in that place with anything he's working on now. The one exception, by design, was Frontier — built to be extended by users, which gave it a different kind of coherence. From there he shares a vivid memory: demoing an early outliner at the West Coast Computer…

People in this episode

Host: Dave Winer

Topics covered

  • software development
  • suspension of disbelief
  • code stability
  • experimentation
  • history of computing

Keywords

  • software
  • development
  • stability
  • experimentation
  • virtuality
  • outliner
  • codebase

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Claude.ai

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