Tinderbox goes AI

Posted by Paul Korm
Aug 12, 2025 at 09:22 PM

Looks like Eastgate is working on a new version of Tinderbox that uses the MCP framework to integrate Claude desktop to a Tinderbox document. Might be interesting and useful. Might be an attention sink. One day we’ll have brave developers who assure us there is no reason to use their product with LLMs.

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 13, 2025 at 02:36 PM

Indeed. It’s worth reading this article for tech insights into exactly how rushed and unprofessional MCP is: https://julsimon.medium.com/why-mcps-disregard-for-40-years-of-rpc-best-practices-will-burn-enterprises-8ef85ce5bc9b

Paul Korm wrote:
Looks like Eastgate is working on a new version of Tinderbox that uses
>the MCP framework to integrate Claude desktop to a Tinderbox document.
>Might be interesting and useful. Might be an attention sink. One day
>we’ll have brave developers who assure us there is no reason to use
>their product with LLMs.

Posted by eastgate
Aug 16, 2025 at 08:55 PM

I think I have a decent record of directing my attention! In any case, MCP support is (a) not terribly difficult, and (b) absolutely fascinating. I’m writing a series at https://markBernstein.org/ about (b).

Julien Simon’s piece conflates all the many scenarios for cooperation. Yes: CORBA was fascinating! Have you opened anything with OpenDoc lately? Sure SOAP was great. Absolutely, banking apps need lots of care.

But the lesson of the Web — really the lesson of the 21st century — is that you engineer everything as if it were a bank, you’ll easily be out-maneuvered and outrun. I say this with some reluctance: I was on the program committee that rejected the initial research paper on WWW because its treatment of dangling links — 404s — was superficial and ignored lots of good prior work. Berners-Lee and Caillau were right, though: the simplicity of the protocol really matters for adoption.

I write a tool for analyzing and visualizing notes, and I’m writing a book about reimagining the intellectual position of Computing. I’m a gu, with lots of questions. Claude is astonishingly good at locating good sources. Not perfect, but no research assistant is. It is extraordinarily well read. It can read a crash log. It can read a man page. It can find the best reference for Nero’s rotating dining room, which is something I actually needed for the book the other day.

I think that’s promise enough to merit a few days of development work.

MadaboutDana wrote:
Indeed. It’s worth reading this article for tech insights into
>exactly how rushed and unprofessional MCP is:
>https://julsimon.medium.com/why-mcps-disregard-for-40-years-of-rpc-best-practices-will-burn-enterprises-8ef85ce5bc9b
>

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