It’s been a while since we did a link roundup, so here are a few AI-related things to check out, if you’re inclined. The first one covers an earnest, useful effort to make AI companies pony up to the content creators via collective licensing agreements. This will be cheaper, one hopes, than relentless class-action lawsuits!

“RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing,” Russell Brandom, TechCrunch

On the legal side, the RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films. As in music and film, the goal is to give licensors a single point of contact for paying royalties and provide rights holders a way to set terms with dozens of potential licensors at once.

A host of web publishers have already joined the collective, including Yahoo, Reddit, Medium, O’Reilly Media, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable and Cnet), Internet Brands (owner of WebMD), People Inc., and The Daily Beast. Others, like Fastly, Quora, and Adweek, are supporting the standard without joining the collective.

I also liked this recollection by the great Internet thinker Matt Webb on how he uses and experiences Claude Code. I wish there was more like this out there.

“What I think about when I think about Claude Code,” Matt Webb, Interconnected:

So your inner loop interaction with Claude Code is approval, course correction, and Claude accelerating in autonomy and power as your approvals accrete.

It’s a loop built around positive reinforcement and forward motion. And, because of this, you personally end up building a lot of trust in Claude and its ability to plan and execute.

What you want to do but absolutely MUST NOT do is start Claude Code with the flag --dangerously-skip-permissions which slams it into yolo mode.

Don’t do it! But you know you want to.

Of course, if you’re not Matt Webb, your vibe-coding might be a big sloppy mess. Which is turning into its own industry….

“The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes,” Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media

“Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something,” Sohni told me. “So for them it’s more for prototyping. Vibe coding is, at the moment, kind of like infancy. It’s very handy to convey the prototype they want, but I don’t think they are really intended to make it like a production grade app.” 

Another big issue Sohni identified is “credit burn,” meaning the money vibe coders waste on AI usage fees in the final 10-20 percent stage of developing the app, when adding new features breaks existing features. In theory, it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over at that point, but Sohni said people get attached to their first project. 

And lastly, a big, useful roundup in the NYT on “What Exactly Are A.I. Companies Trying to Build? Here’s a Guide”—not a lot of surprises, but good to get journalistic conversation.