This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing).

In my view, Gwern makes a compelling counterargument: Xanadu was a fundamentally bad idea. The parts of it that weren't incorporated into the World Wide Web either solved problems no one actually had, or couldn't have constituted a stable equilibrium between users and publishers (i.e., even if it'd been magically willed into existence, it'd have quickly fallen apart). https://gwern.net/xanadu

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.

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).

It remains to see how Delta will turn out.

On a side-note; my initial reaction to the headline was; no. Xanadu wasn't missing agents.

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.

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 (https://11ty.dev) (we already lean heavily on typescript for our application development) and visual studio code with frontmatter cms (https://frontmatter.codes) - and AI/LLMs.

AI helps with making a static page version of our site, and adopting to 11ty.

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.

A hill that would probably have been too steep for them to climb just six months ago.

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.

We've just stated the experiment - we may yet fly too close to the sun, and end up falling back to a traditional CMS.

This sounds like one agent at each junction point, that may or may not be running the same model and architecture as the previous one, and they need to constantly crawl each other or just a protocol to call each other. But then you have a million of then constructing a docuverse web all having an agent who all need to know each other and its all connections and each a database repository.

Well you only need links that exist, and those that are created.

In a paragraph it may exist in one node that is referenced and that node may be a collection of other nodes, or each sentence or even each word points to other nodes, how much does each model know and what does it keep in its database. A point to the next node is not necessarily durable or versioned, and that goes for each node is connects to.

A single paragraph could have thousands or more sources, references, and each source would need versioning and depending on version it may well point to different nodes in prior or future versions.

A proper version of a paragraph would then need to know this, or expect that all nodes with an agent will be durable and rational and interoperable but if you build on that premise it will not work in the real world.

All unless you keep the docuverse limited in scope to a few data stores and agents who comprehend that spatial universe, and it is a form of an intranet

One of my favorite LLM-smells to train myself to sniff out is how well the author can tie two seemingly disparate ideas together into something compelling or novel. The more ambitious the synthesis and the less impressed I am the more likely I am to assume it was at least partially the work of an LLM.

Previously, "Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer" <https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer>

Ummet Ozcan - Xanadu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMtnH7cABg

I don't think he's waiting for agents.

> Xanadu had a final failure mode, this one self-inflicted

Skimmed the article, saw this, and then my AI fatigue closed the tab.

Reading this makes me wish someone would really try to make Project Xanadu a reality. A network built on Content Addressable Storage and a Version Control System is some thing I'd really like to see invested in.

Don’t Lamport timestamps require all nodes to be known in advance?

Powerful concept but impractical and far too unscalable to be used globally.

A system that never forgets is not always a good thing. I'm not sure what the maximal scope (beyond editors) the author wishes this applied to is, but there are many cases where it is a positive for things to be erased. Privacy concerns is one example.

> So when web technology exploded in the '90s, developers bypassed xanalogical computing in favor of ease: links are simple strings which break if their target moves. Maintenance became users' problems — instead of the system's responsibility — but it was easy for anyone to ship fast, and they did.

developers bypassed - Really not a fan of phrases like these from a CEO.

Usually developers have to work within an organisational hierarchy that doesn't grant them infinite time or money.

Nelson was a pioneer of computing? No, he is a pioneer of computing.

>Ted Nelson has been on my mind a lot this year.

For anyone else that's been thinking a lot about Ted this year, I recommend this (weird) youtube series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...

Well let's not forget Zigzag. This is hyperstructure and Ted's greatest achievement. If you want to try it out, Gzz 0706.jar runs on Java https://www.nongnu.org/gzz/download.html

My Claude session must have been busy writing this as this article was being written.

Warning: this repo likely contains everything that you should not do.

https://gitworkshop.dev/npub17g32uxml7y4rf4jwlju6fd58nhzaafd...

I'm always a fan of Zed blogs but this one I hope is just for attracting investors

>Flat was good enough.

Then agents arrived.

So, with just that we went from 1990s early internet to AI agents.

That's a time jump so jarring that it makes heavily-modified '81 DeLorean owners jealous.

Xanadu sounds like it would work well with git and absolutely abysmal with LLMs.

Doesn’t structured data work best with symbolic not statistical AI?

How awful. And AI-generated. There must be a disclaimer - too many websites steal time now via agents.

Tell me you use an LLM to write everything without telling me...

A clock for a world with no center.

Names that can't lie.

Convergence without coordination.

Storage too cheap to delete.

Machines summoned in milliseconds.

OK, got it.

I wish someone here could introduce me to Ted Nelson, I would have loved to interview him! And yes, I've been building the "Xanadu" vision since 2011:

https://github.com/Qbix <-- hosting and editing your own websites

https://github.com/Intercoin <-- blockchain since 2018

https://github.com/Safebots <-- AI agents since 2026

https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud <-- for example, micropayments

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