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.

Xanadu was waiting for agents