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.
Ah cool! Great to see accessibility stuff like this. Listening to papers makes it much easier for me to focus on the content.
I made my own little service that converts any webpage to hopefully the parsed content then uses Google TTS and then published it to a bucket and s3 feed and I listen to them on my phone before bed.
Awesome to see other people having the same need as us.
Do you see anything that we could add to the tool to make it more useful for you?
One thing we played around with, which works quite well is directly interfacing it with GPT-realtime. This then allows one to talk to it about the paper. It also solves the problem of the language since any person can talk to it in their own language, which could increase accessibility in science. I have shown it to some Japanese colleagues the other day and they could interact with it in Japanese which was quite amazing.
The key for me has been that they are useful when I'm working on a new product or a very very large feature. After I have planned with claude for a few hours to refine architecture and edge cases, my implementation plans are rather large but broken into phases.
I usually ask it if any steps are good for parallel work, and I kick off multiple agents at that point. Each is assigned a phase. They have to work on different work trees in my flow and I've rather disliked it and I wish there was a better way than worktrees at the moment, but I guess people are busy building those tools, right?
Hell, I'm writing a small tool to let me share a Claude session with my team from their own terminals, so that any of us can take prompt control while we work through plannings and implementation. I'm sure many others are finding these needs!
These things not being android based is always a deal breaker for me because I have so many sources of DRMed audiobooks or ebooks that would just be a hassle on a lot of these e-ink devices, which is something I really want out of these note tablets.
I got a boox air note 4c with the original intention of using it for comic books with some basic coloring, but have found it significantly more useful for notetaking over anything else. UX is still abysmal in some ways that make starting notes a chore, but it's increased my note taking and journaling significantly.
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!
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