asim

Let Claude write the blog post https://go-micro.dev/blog/3

There's still a lot to be said about refinement e.g a lot of inconsistencies or half truths.

Ah yes it was that one cheers

Location: London, UK Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Go, distributed systems, APIs, etc CV: On request Email: asim@mu.xyz

Most recent work https://mu.xyz Most well known work https://go-micro.dev GitHub profile https://github.com/asim

Every agent I've seen in Go has been so straightforward. Take exe.dev's Shelley. Great example of clean code and very effective tooling. Worth a try if you haven't used it.

This is my gut feeling also. I forked the project and got Claude to rewrite it in Go as a form of exploration. For a long time I've felt smaller useful models could exist and they could also be interconnected and routed via something else if needed but also provide streaming for real time training or evolution. The large scale stuff will be dominated by the huge companies but the "micro" side could be just as valuable.

This is very interesting and timely. I've been working on something to replace a lot of addictive or exploitive services we use today but there's some caveats. Will people pay? They pay for Kagi but will they generally pay for other things like news, maps, video, chat, weather, etc. The second question is what's stopping people from really quitting? I get the feeling it's sort of habits that we get stuck with. Even I still use Google. But the mention of brave and knowing brave has a generous free search tier for their api makes me think it's possible to replace Google search. But habits die hard. New habit formation may require an alternative approach hence so many buying into ChatGPT.

One issue I also find with this sort of thing. It's hard to have a longer discussion that leads to building good alternatives. A thread appears, we comment and then it disappears. There needs to be more public discourse that leads to tangible results... To real issues that get solved.

I'll take it! I've been using Opus 4.6 with GitHub Tasks sparingly but any sort of continued usage is very expensive. This would be handy, like 10x my efforts.

I think we're about to see an explosion in "mini apps". It's taken 10+ years for us to catch up to WeChat and China but this regulation and other issues are going to block a lot of innovation and we're better off surfacing tiny PWA or SPA like apps that get loaded in native apps or we just do away with that entirely. The time has come.

We got here iteratively..not all at once. So the path back...it's iterative. I shouldn't even say back. We're not going back. We have to go in a new direction. And again it's evolutionary. So ultimately a lot of these big systems and big tech companies aren't going anywhere and they will be integral to all infrastructure for the foreseeable future whether that be technical, financial or related to public services. But as individuals we can slowly shift some of our efforts elsewhere in ways that it might matter.

Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.

We have a duty to help them..and I don't think society gets this right in other places. We're not proactive about it. In religion and islam there's something called dawah, effectively preaching, but the idea is you're calling people to something with higher purpose and to eliminate all these bad habits. And I think it's the same whether online or offline. We need to help people. First you have to help yourself but then you have to go back and get everyone else. It speaks to a moral imperative we should all have to help our fellow man.

Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.

What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.

Wow I'm impressed. I didn't actually think we'd see it encoded on chips. Or well I knew some layer of it could be, some sort of instruction set and chip design but this is pretty staggering. It opens the door to a lot of things. Basically it totally destroys the boundaries of where software will go but I also think we'll continue to see some generic chips show up that hit this performance soon enough. But the specialised chips with encoded models. This could be what ends up in specific places like cars, planes, robots, etc where latency matters. Maybe I'm out of the loop, I'm sure others and doing it including Google.

Yea sorry it probably comes across as pre-determined but you as a person have likely spent a long time becoming good at something and have a certain personality and experience based on your life, so I guess what I'm saying is, that sort of creates a role for you, and when you understand what that is, you can really hone in and do good work. Sometimes its not obvious to us and when we see something we might want to go after it. That's fine. I guess my point is, don't look at the shiny thing and chase that. It's not what's going to fulfil you in life e.g Peter probably wasn't chasing the shiny thing. He was trying to solve a personal problem and it resonated with a lot of people. But when people see something be successful or this kind of wildride where you end up with a hugely successful project and go to a huge company like OpenAI, they focus on the wrong things. The inner insecurity takes over and you wonder, why not me, and how do I do that. But essentially it comes back to, solve problems. Solve interesting problems, work on things that you think are meaningful, and whatever the success might be, that's for someone else to decide. But I think people chase "fame", cause that's what we essentially see. Validation through popularity. It won't fulfil you. Trust me. But yes to your point. We're coming at the same thing from different angles.

But that's the point it's not defeatist. It's more about saying there is something for you to do. There is a role for you to play but that's not necessarily the role that you see somebody else playing. So sometimes we see somebody else doing something and we think whoa that person is successful and we become envious of that and then we want to emulate that. But we forget that maybe that's not what's intended for us. Maybe that person is really good at that thing or that's what was for them. But for us we might be good at something else and there might be something that we are uniquely positioned to do so. The point is not to be defeatist but not to focus on what somebody else has right. Focus on what you have and focus on what your ability is and focus on what's going to improve your quality of life and the people around you and don't focus on the negative aspects of what is effectively fomo

Well that was a crazy month. Kudos to this guy for recognising his goals which is not to start another company. It is very easy to get intoxicated by the idea of something being so successful that you can capture the value, especially after having struggled for so long with a previous company. I think it's every founder's dream to like just hit lightning. But this stuff is incredibly stressful and it's important to be able to look into the future and ask yourself. Is this what I want? Is this what I need in my life? And the answer here is no. This person can deliver value elsewhere quite easily and get the reward without as much stress. We should all take a lesson from this whirlwind journey. Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it. A lot of people feel a little bit of envy or jealousy. I used to feel that when I was working on something and I saw other people succeed and I wished that that had happened to me. But if it was meant for you it would find you. And the fact that it hasn't found you means that it was not meant for you. We all have our role to play. There is something important for us to do and that's not necessarily something that is world famous or amasses thousands of GitHub stars. If after reading this it's still bothering you. Take a walk and reflect on the good things in your life.

Thanks!

He probably means when I took VC funding in 2019 and started to rip apart the framework to try build a platform and business. The 2-3 years after were very chaotic.

My goal was never to serve the community but instead leverage it to build a business. Ultimately that failed. The truth is it's very difficult to sustain open source. Go-micro was never the end goal. It was always a stepping stone to a platform e.g microservices PaaS. A lot of hard lessons learned along the way.

Now with Copilot and AI I'm able to go back and fix a lot of issues but nothing will fix trust with a community or the passage of time. People move on. It served a certain purpose at certain time.

Note: The company behind connect-rpc raised $100m but for more of a build system around protobuf as opposed to the rpc framework but this was my thinking as well. The ability to raise $10-20m would create the space to build the platform off the back of the success of the framework.

Oh man I'm tired. This reminds me of the docker era. It's all moving fast. Everyone's raising money. And 24 months from now it's all consolidating. It's all a nice hype game when you raise the funding but the execution depends on people finding value in your products and tools. I would argue yes many of these things are useful but I'd also argue there's far too much overlap, too many unknowns and too many people trying to reinvent the whole process. And just like the container era I think we're going to see a real race to zero. Where most of the dev tools get open sourced and only a handful of product companies survive, if that. I want to wish everyone the best of luck because I myself have raised money and spent countless years building Dev tools. This is no easy task especially as the landscape is changing. I just think when you raise $60m and announce a cli. You're already dead, you just don't know it. I'm sorry.

I wouldn't call it the new high level language. It's a new JIT. But that's not doing it justice. There's a translation of natural language to a tokenizer and processor that's akin to the earliest days of CPUs. It's a huge step change from punch cards. But there's also a lot to learn. I think we will eventually develop a new language that's more efficient for processing or multiple layers of transformers. Tbh Google is leapfrogging everyone in this arena and eventually we're going to more exotic forms of modelling we've never seen before except in nature. But from an engineering perspective all I can see right now is a JIT.

We all have opinions about ci/cd. Why? Because it's getting between us and what we're attempting to do. In all honesty GitHub actions solves the biggest problem for a lot of Devs, infrastructure management and performance. I have managed a lot of build infrastructure and don't ever want to touch that again. GitHub fixed that for me. My build servers were often more power hungry than my production servers. GitHub fixed that for me. Basically what I'm saying is for 80% of people this is an 80% good enough solution and that's more important than everything else. Can I ship my code quickly. Can I define build deps next my code that everyone can see. Can I debug it, can others contribute to it. It just ticks so many boxes. I hope ci dies a good death because I think people are genuinely just thinking about the wrong problem. Stop making your life more difficult. Appreciate what this solves and move on. We can argue about it until we're blue in the face but it won't change the fact that often the solution that wins isn't the best, it's the one that reduces friction and solves the UX problem. I don't need N ways to configure somehow. I need to focus on what I'm trying to ship and that's not a build server.

We need a language and a transpiler. Honestly the LLM has many uses. Agents have many uses. And we are narrowing down how to make them deterministic and predictable for programming machines and software. But that also means we need something beyond natural language for the actual implementation. Yes we've moved a level up, but engineers are not product managers, so as much as we can define the scope and outline a project like a 2 week sprint using scrum or kanban, the reality is deterministic input for deterministic output is still the way to go. Just as compilers and higher level languages opened the doors to the next phase, the LLM manages this translation and compilation, but it's missing a sort of intermediary language, a format that's going to be much better processed and compiled directly down to machine code. We're talking about LLVM. Why are asking LLMs to write Go code or Python, when we could much better translate an intermediary language to something far more efficient and performant. So I think there's still work to be done.

I started working on something similar but for family stuff. I stopped before hitting self editing because, well I was a little bit afraid of becoming over reliant on a tool like this or becoming more obsessed with building it than actually solving a real problem in my life. AI is tricky. Sometimes we think we need something when in fact life might be better off simpler.

The code for anyone interested. Wrote it with exe.dev's coding agent which is a wrapper on Claude Opus 4.5

https://github.com/asim/aslam

Take the positive spin. What if you could put in all the inputs and it can simulate real world scenarios you can walk through to benefit mankind e.g disaster scenarios, events, plane crashes, traffic patterns. I mean there's a lot of useful applications for it. I don't like the framing at this time, but I also get where it's going. The engineer in me is drawn to it, but the Muslim in me is very scared to hear anyone talk about creating worlds.... But again I have to separate my view from the reality that this could have very positive real world benefits when you can simulate scenarios. So I could put in a 2 pager or 10 page scenario that gets played out or simulated and allow me to walk through it. Not just predictive stuff but let's say things that have happened so I can map crime scenes or anything. In the end this performance art is because they are a product company being Benchmarked by wall street and they'll need customers for the technology but at the same time they probably already have uses for it internally.

I think this is quite an interesting question. Especially for the developer audience. If you're an engineer, then you likely have similar tendencies to a lot of other engineers. You want to spend time alone, but you also feel the need to combat this loneliness, isolation and depression that it leads to. You want to connect, but struggle to do so. The internet, software, reddit and other places became a safe haven, but then they perpetuated what was hindering you in the first place. I say these things because I'm that person. I lost decades to this sort of escapism that comes from an online world. Unfortunately the answers rarely work for us at the time we're going through this. It's rare for someone to just break out of the cycle. Something has to change, but it's a change that comes from deep within yourself.

Sometimes you have to reflect on the why. Why am I here, why am I in this situation. And often it's that deeper internal reflection that starts to motivate something, change something. Listen, I lost decades. And I still struggle. But no one else can solve this for you.

In terms of the loneliness epidemic itself. You have to split it into many separate categories. Isolation comes in many forms. For the online generation, who grew up with the internet, we are specific category. But I'll tell you, the path to fixing it has more to do with understanding why we are here than filling the time with arbitrary activities or socialising. Yes we need human connnection and yes we should explore, learn and grow. But fundamentally the first question we should be asking, why am I here, what is my purpose, now what should I do with that.

In my case, I did find talking to someone helped, but only after coming to the realisation that I needed to talk to someone and then proactively seeking it out. As much as we want to solve the problem for many people, they have to walk a path before they can see the truth. We can offer alternatives, but people will only find what they're looking for when they're ready.

Still on https://mu.xyz - a personal app platform without ads. Now includes a mini apps builder via LLMs which unlocks a lot of potential. And also an agent to navigate it via voice so I can use it hands-free in the car.

Weird this thread came back...ok..must be relevant!

This is good. I worked at google and lasted less than 2 years. Many other things happening in that time - came in via acquisition, worked on backend for that, dad died, transitioned teams, etc. But I was 27-28 and couldn't really navigate that world after my first job at a startup. In some ways, I wish I'd found a way, but in other ways, I know it wasn't meant to be. It's a good list, if you want to do 10 years at Google or elsewhere, internalise that list and it's lessons.

No thank you for that example at least because I feel like I got hit in the face with a big fish. Of course trying to sell to other carpenters is mistake! Unless it's really refined tools they need, not the stuff you built with them. I guess the framework was a tool Devs need but I could never sell it...

Now carpenters selling to regular people. Ok finally my brain clicks. Take the easy route. Sell to people who don't code and help them win. Then it's about specialisation I guess. You could build anything, maybe there's a focus area. I did build https://mu.xyz but yet to figure out that user demographic.

Thanks for the thought experiment

People read a lot of different things so I'm going to throw this one out there. I read the Quran. I read it continuously and it takes a while to finish but every time I read it I discover something new. People tend to discount a religious text as not for them but I think actually the translation or English narrative needs to fit the people and the times. Also the medium by which we read. I wrote an app to that effect to help me.

To anyone interested not just in reading it but asking it questions here's the app I wrote https://reminder.dev

I wrote https://go-micro.dev - A go framework for microservices. I've written a few other things in my time (https://github.com/asim) and tried my hand at hosted paid APIs which was moderately successful but failed as a VC funded business. I think I've just existed so much in an era of free consumer services like Google and open source software that it's skewed my perspective a lot. Like why charge for this, it could be free..m