How to (Finally) Follow Instructions

Way back in 2012 I gave a talk about hypermedia and code-on-demand called "How To Follow Instructions". I've always thought of it as my "lost" talk, one that could have been as influential as "Justice Will Take Us Millions of Intricate Moves". I've also convinced myself that this didn't happen because I never put the text of the talk online. Unlike most of my talks, I didn't write the script ahead of time, and transcribing it was a huge/expensive job.

But ten years later, Whisper makes it cheap and easy to do basic audio transcription with a laptop. I've used Whisper to transcribe my talk and edited it into what it should have been. Some of the talk has aged poorly: the same underlying technology that transcribes the audio also makes it possible for a computer to follow some of the human-readable "instructions" I mention in the talk. But I think it was pretty prescient at describing what was happening in the world of APIs and where we've gone over the intervening decade.