Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant insight, that they struggle to convey to anyone who's not yet had the same insight; or if they've simply gone slightly mad.<p>It's a similar sense I get with reading Nelson (after being able to think about his ideas for a while, I'm quite certain it was mostly genius and only a little bit of lunacy).<p>It remains to see how Delta will turn out.<p>On a side-note; my initial reaction to the headline was; no. Xanadu wasn't missing agents.<p>I do think I see where the author is going, though; and I think I agree that agents might be a new tool that might facilitate some hypertext ideas. Not Xanadu perhaps. But some other, more pragmatic and less magic place - but a place that is a little more magical than where we are now.<p>And it intersects a bit with an experiment we started at work; migrating our modest web site from WordPress to a static site combining 11ty (<a href="https://11ty.dev" rel="nofollow">https://11ty.dev</a>) (we already lean heavily on typescript for our application development) and visual studio code with frontmatter cms (<a href="https://frontmatter.codes" rel="nofollow">https://frontmatter.codes</a>) - and AI/LLMs.<p>AI helps with making a static page version of our site, and adopting to 11ty.<p>The idea is that with trivial push-to-deploy setup, our business people, with the help of AI in vs code, will be able to work directly with 11ty and git to make changes, do reviews and publish changes.<p>A hill that would probably have been too steep for them to climb just six months ago.<p>So in reference to the theme of realizing a better hypertext system with the help of AI, we're sort of doing the same thing, it turns out: mix solid, boring tools (static site gen, typescript, editor, version control, CI, static hosting) and some AI - to hopefully allow more users leverage both tooling and AI in an empowering way.<p>We've just stated the experiment - we may yet fly too close to the sun, and end up falling back to a traditional CMS.
One reason I have some hope for this approach is that we start by removing complexity by going to a static web site first.<p>We remove WordPress, database, configuration, templates - a lot of cruft.<p>Then we can add it back as needed for keeping edits and publishing simple. It might turn out we hardly need anything from 11ty, thanks to AI making editing more automatic.<p>I think (the collective) we, are (mostly by accident) building systems that are at least one dimension or level of higher abstraction than before AI.<p>Unfortunately with AI, higher abstraction doesn't automatically mean less complexity, or better managed complexity.<p>I think 95% of systems being built now with Al and on top of - or including Al - will turn out to be highly complected mountains of madness.
I think not are the same the only thing that differentiates them is adoption. If people show interest in the thing you are a genius if they don't you are mad/crazy.