Love this, this is what I have been envisioning as a LLM first OS! Feels like truly organic computing. Maybe Minority Report figured it out way back then.
The idea of having the elements anticipated and lowering the cognitive load of searching a giant drop down list scratches a good place in my brain. Instantly recognize it as such a better experience than what we have on the web.
I think something like this is the long term future for personal computing, maybe I'm way off, but this the type of computing I want to be doing, highly customized to my exact flow, highly malleable to improvement and feedback.
This is what I keep coming back to when I am building a little tui manager for my coding assistants + terminal + git worktree manager.
I keep telling myself that if everyone just used tmux or a good emulator they could manage the tabs and layouts, but then I tell myself I just want this to be a tiling window manager as an distraction free OS for development, give me nothing but a terminal and an assistant.
Thanks for the write up OP, I've been going back and forth on whether or not I want to build something just for myself or spend time doing it for potentially other use cases. I keep coming back to that I need to dog food the shit out of this before I show it to anyone.
I worked with a greybeard that instilled in me that when we were about to do some RAID maintenance that we would always run sync twice. The second to make sure it immediately returns. And I added a third for my own anxiety.
You need to sync twice because Unix is dumb: "According to the standard specification (e.g., POSIX.1-2001), sync() schedules the writes, but may return before the actual writing is done." https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sync.2.html
If I had to guess, it is just extra work to do it twice, and you may not need to wait for it for some use cases. The better way would be to add a flag or alternative function to make the sync a blocking operation in the first place.
Oh definitely not, I do it on every system that I've needed it to be synced before I did something. We were just working at a place that had 2k+ physical servers with 88 drives each in RAID6, so that was our main concern back then.
I have been passing my anxieties about hardrives to junior engineers for a decade now.
I'm very fond of Puppy Linux, it's how I learned a lot of Linux skills as a preteen!
I had Puppy Linux on a USB stick when I was a kid. It was the first Linux flavor I used for an extended period of time for two very specific reasons. It was small, I didn't have much time to spend at the library waiting for downloads, and I couldn't afford a very large USB stick.
I had nuked the MBR on our family computer. I never figured out how I'd done it but that the fix was to restore it using a Windows recovery disk. But that took about 2 years of using Linux live CDs as a compute environment, eventually progressing my computer knowledge to trying to install Ubuntu to the hard drive so I could start saving files, and saw that the Windows partition existed on disk and did a bit more research with that knowledge to learn about MBRs and dual booting. The Tech Tv channel back in the 2000s was a great way for a 10 year old to learn about computers!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, and for kicking off the acquisition of skills I've centered my career around!
I've been repeating something like 'keep thinking about how we would run this in the DC' at work. The cycles of pushing your compute outside the company and then bringing it back in once the next VP/Director/CTO starts because they need to be seen as doing something, and the thing that was supposed to make our lives easier is now very expensive...
I've worked on multiple large migrations between DCs and cloud providers for this company and the best thing we've ever done is abstract our compute and service use to the lowest common denominator across the cloud providers we use...
This has been what I've been seeing internally within $DAYJOB down to the split between vibe coding / vibe engineering / artisinally crafted code.
The gaps between engineers using the tools and those not are continuing to grow, and I'm curious to see what tools we get to use internally and what we can't... I've been able to demonstrate significant speed up in development time for features with certain tools but the amount of control some of these companies want in contracts are things the company hadn't seen before, and made it too conservative to go in on.
I also see this space changing so much that I don't particularly care for the tools for individuals now as much as I care about the way I share the workload with my team. I need a way to keep everyone up to date and reviewing code without getting brain drained as fast. Review fatigue is real, and it sucks. I haven't really found one that I've liked in that regard and one that a Fortune N company would want to go in on.
> I've been able to demonstrate significant speed up in development time for features with certain tools
Curious to hear more about this. I can't help feeling such an attempt is fundamentally flawed just as software estimates are. Because you're never building the same thing twice.
That and the thing "I" build with AI is not the same as the thing I would have built myself. So you're comparing some lowest common denominator version of the software with an original work created by a human. Not once have I got an LLM to output code where I think that's what I had in my mind's eye when I wrote the prompt.
> The gap between engineers using the tools and those not are continuing to grow
Yeah, the ONLY place I hear this where it means "AI pushers are getting faster" is on this website, where half of your salaries depend on said belief.
When I go outside and talk to real engineers who I respect, in confidence and away from the suits forcing them to use AI, away from the hype of the industry telling them only one opinion is allowed, they all agree that "agentic coding" is simply not a meaningful improvement in quality or speed of publishing working software in the real world.
Maybe you like it, and that's fine. If you want to pay a lot of money for advanced IntelliSense and you can get your boss to do that for you, have fun. Just don't force it on me.
I don't believe you'll be meaningfully faster or produce better work than I can without the clanker's help.
If I get furloughed I'm going to get a new career working with my hands.
There’s been a few that show the Git history of a project that were (allegedly) fully written with an LLM. Not fully vibe coded, but in a meaningful amount.
I've dubbed my loop of this as 'sicko mode' at work as I've become a bit obsessed with automating everything little thing in my flow, so I can focus on just features and bugs. It feels like a game to me and I enjoy it a lot.
Claude Code keeps coming out with a lot of really nice tools that others haven't started to emulate from what I've seen.
My favorite one is going through the plan interactively. It turns it into a multiple choice / option TUI and the last choose is always reprompt that section of the plan.
I had switch back to codex recently and not being able to do my planning solely in the CLI feels like the early 1900s.
To trigger the interactive mode. Do something like:
Plan a fix for:
<Problem statement>
Please walk me through any options or questions you might have interactively.
I used to do these in college to procrastinate my homework. I always had the most difficulty with the problems that required data structures I wasn't exposed to previously and ended up making really complicated solutions that were inefficient as hell, but fun nonetheless.
I might give them a try with golang now that it's my preferred language. I used to do them in python as that was our intro language.
The idea of having the elements anticipated and lowering the cognitive load of searching a giant drop down list scratches a good place in my brain. Instantly recognize it as such a better experience than what we have on the web.
I think something like this is the long term future for personal computing, maybe I'm way off, but this the type of computing I want to be doing, highly customized to my exact flow, highly malleable to improvement and feedback.
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