flashgordon

I would say the bigger worry should be for "non open source". Where I work we buy so much "vendor crap" because they enter through one area of expertise (eg CRM) and upsell into a bunch of other crap they have no expertise in but purely via acquisitions they have done - I am talking about an imaginary vendor that rhymes with "DalesPorce". We have even demonstrated we are able to replicate their meagre (but highly marketed) offerings with our own high quality alternatives with much less cruft by using AI and a combination of OSS (especially by improving the OSS in the process).

The usual argument goes "oh but now you have to maintain it". Guess what - we have dedicated "DalesPorce" engineering teams just to maintain the expensive and buggy/unreliable DalesPorce setups - completely negating the so called "you can be fully hands off" value they promise. Even worse when we measure productivity of these dev teams - Teams on the DalesPorce stacks are 1/5th to 1/20th as productive as teams on the boring old stacks.

My 2c is that this is a great opportunity for OSS. Instead of just building basic early stage offerings they should help help companies embrace the "commodotize the complement" strategy. Not just for the main offering but also in offering uber easy to setup and manage control plane services over them.

Congrats mate - Great to see this and loved working with you all on a very very very tiny part of this! Looking forward to a lot more awesome releases and features!

This. I found superpowers a huge token guzzler. And more generic a skill is the worse it seemed to perform. I have found that skills are something you need to build yourself and for your needs and most importantly be willing to throw away. One team I know blindly checked this into every repo they had. They also had the highest cost per pr across all teams in our org (of about 60 eng teams). AI has already given people superpowers. How sad is it that they now need to be told how to just chat and prompt and use AI effectively as a pair programmer:(

This is what i thought/hoped. But man it is surprisingly buggy. Connections drop so fast and flakily. So many times I steppedd out of the house in a rush hoping remote control would help stay connected. And every time ive been sorely disappointed. Fool me once, fool me ten times....

This is fantastic. Ive been so fortunate to work with the mcp folks last few months on a couple of the SEPs (and my own experimental sdk in go). I used to be a naysayer. "Its just apis" I used to say. "Sheesh the invented another abstraction" I used to say.

What folks dont realize is it is the "P" in MCP that throws people off. When you build a traditional app you have to build forms, ui, req/response handling, bidirectional channels, long running tasks, auth and so on.

With mcp 80% of this common layer is taken care for you. So mcp is really an "app framework" than a protocol (well there is that too).

Unified auth is a huuuge boost. Can't wait to see more cool things!

Im working on a batteries included and (aiming to be) production deployment ready go sdk for all things MCP:

https://github.com/panyam/mcpkit

Not to mention inflation. Whats not clear is whether UBI is cash or does it include access to "basic" facilities like health, education and housing?

I've actually been doing this for a year. I call it /checkpoint instead and it does some thing like:

* update our architecture.md and other key md files in folders affected by updates and learnings in this session. * update claude.md with changes in workflows/tooling/conventions (not project summaries) * commit

It's been pretty good so far. Nothing fancy. Recently I also asked to keep memories within the repo itself instead of in ~/.claude.

Only downside is it is slow but keeps enough to pass the baton. May be "handoff" would have been a better name!

Wait till you hit your 1000th. And its not just "assisted" but lock stock and barelled!

Clint thanks heaps for this. Really good to see a lot of old school CS/Graph theory applied in a nice way.

On an unrelated note - I did notice you were also a lawyer - So umm how what is next for you re this? What should we gear up for :)

Dang this was my reaction too! I thought a large part of it was open source (i remember the old anaconda days). TIL I guess!

I am really flabbergasted. How are they thinking using React for a TUI is a flex? Having 5 sessions open - and all idea - is taking up 98% of CPU. Is this another case of - "When all you is hammer, everything looks like nails"?

Im confused. Are you asking how to make money or how to spend your time if money was not a concern?

Answering the second question - I can find 48hours worth of things to do in a 24 hour day and none of them would be about work or just lazying around (nothing wrong with it). Life has so much to offer!!! Yeah AI can produce things. But theres a reason id consume human generated art. And thankfully real deep mastery still takes effort and passion!!

I mean duh? At the very least wouldnt one just show upt to their job for the "non work related" activities? Or work becomes your "passive income"?

Did they? I can get a 70" "smart"-tv for a few hundred bucks with a crap load of bloatware. But I cannot get the same TV that is "dumb" at anywhere near that price point (I just want a bunch of HDMI ports that I can connect other devices into - including my laptop). Those cost a lot more from what I recall. And part of this was due to TVs being a great port-key to grab your viewing habits etc?

Oh man so many things. I wrote a bunch of cool things a few years ago (and recently too) but have been scared to publish - mainly because even though ive used them in production, I felt publishing means having high quality docs etc. So now the biggest vibe-coding use case is to bring everything I wrote in the past to be "publish-ready".

Here are a few things:

Notations - A carnatic music notation parser, editor and renderer for the web https://github.com/panyam/notations

Galore - A LR parsing playground and library (used by Notations DSL above) https://github.com/panyam/galore

A few protoc plugins (I am very much grpc proto first):

protoc-gen-go-wasmjs (https://github.com/panyam/protoc-gen-go-wasmjs) - A protoc plugin for creating wasm bindings out of your grpc services so you can have your "go based backend logic" on the browser:

protoc-gen-dal (https://github.com/panyam/protoc-gen-dal) - A converter between protoc messages and datastore messages so you avoid writing API <-> DB Models.

Weewar (https://github.com/turnforge/weewar) - A clone of a favorite game of my from the 2000s just for fun. Still in progress.

Plenty more but just dusting off old things has been my biggest thing lately and in the process building tooling to standardize my next gen of apps/sites etc.

There are different degrees of "ai wrote all my code". A very crappy way of doing it is to keep on one shotting it expecting it to "fall on the right solution" - very much infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters scenario.

The other way is to spend a fair bit of time building out a design and ask it to implement it while verifying what it is producing then and there instead of reviewing reams of slop later on. AI still produced 100% - just that it is not as glamorous or as marketing friendly of a sound bite. After all which product manager wants to understand refactoring or TDD or SOLID or design principles etc?

I really don't understand the fetishisizing of the demise of software engineers. Are other knowledge workers like doctors or lawyers going to be exterminated by AI? Or is there even a fantasizing of their demise? The only reason I can think of is shmchaudenfreud (it is relatively barrierless to get into and pays pretty well) and more importantly imo doesn't have cabals like other professions do.

Btw I love using my Claude code to crank out product but I don't get off looking for the day when engineers are a dead breed!

Frankly I really don't know what id don't not in tech. Closest I van think of is some kind of mathematician but don't even know what those "jobs" look like. Academia might be another. But these are all tech adjacent aren't they?

This. Companies are chomping at the bits about developer productivity and how they can do 10x more. What is not clear even if they can fire 90% of their engineers (assuming the 10x productivity gain is real), how are they expecting that even a tiny sliver of that 90% cannot replicate the products - with AI? And if we are in such a world how are those companies' valuations justified any more?

I am really excited at indie software again!

Author here. For those wondering - Claude Code was used but not in the "generate me this huge X with a single shot prompt after 8 hours of thinking" mode :).

Hot damn. Id love to hear the origin story of this.

One thing I still struggle to this day is the float/long conversion from json <-> proto. It somehow works and I still untangle the feeling of magic.

+1 Couple of things I really hate about proto - No generics/templates. No composition of services or mixins (you do have composition in messages but that feels very limited). Also the clunkiness around having to declare more things (try a repeated map field or a map of repeated fields).

My comment about protos was just the spec (and was seperating the binary formats as a different concern). But your concerns are pretty valid.

Totally - The other really nice thing about Golang "type-system" ecosystem is their native ast in the stdlib. You can do so many amazing things from there. Infact if you pledge your life to Go (which I think I have atleast for now) starting from Go and generating everything outwards is not necessarily a bad strategy.

I really like the idea of it. My dream has always been to work with "types" first and foremost across any and all languages (yep it is a dream). And little tools like these are really nice to see push that boundary.

One feedback - if you are truly comparing with "other" tools - you should be looking at grpc and protoc plugins. I have used to great effect for things like:

1. Generating wasm bindings for grpc services

2. Generating "data access layer" types so you can choose how a api proto is transformed to a data domain type and vice versa

3. MCP bindings for APIs

4. GraphQL/BFF bindings with multiple services

5. All of the above "across" langauges.

The tooling is fantastic and extensible - if you are ok to start with a proto view of your world - it sounds wierd and like an N+1 problem but once you are used to it it is surprisingly fun (ok we may have different ideas of fun)

Oh i didnt mean that smart pointers were bad or detriemental. Or even that any of the other gazzilion features of C++ were bad (or detrimental) on their own. Just that C++ has sooo many features that i dont think there is any one in the world who knows who any one feature X interacts with feature Y so your ability to reason about what you have written in C++ is significantly lowered.

If you can say I will only use features A, X an Z of C++ and some how enforce it then you are mitigating a lot of the risk. IIRC Carbon (Google's new lang to migrate their code off C++) came about because they themselves used C++ in a very bounded way (I recall a lot of the templates they created for their use of C++ actually resembled how Go code looked like and may have been one of the reasons for creating Go). But I am not sure how many mere mortals have that kind of tooling and discipline to limit themselves?

Actually this was my first instinct too. Just limit what you use c++ for and write c code with templates and be done with it.

The problems I am guessing start when you are tempted into using the rest of the features one by one. You have generics. Well next let's get inheritance in. Now a bit of operator overloading. Then dealing with all kinds of smart pointers...

I always feel like choosing between rust and go is like picking between node (ts/js) and python when it comes to stdlib out-of-the-box-ness!

This is one of the best responses I've seen. Titles do matter - at least depending on what your goals are. If you want to have broad impact (say leave a legacy or have influence etc) you need a high up title or have your name be synonymous with a project/product used by the group whose respect yoj want to command. And lot the time those above you will have you cranking out things for them. I don't mean this in an evil way. I mean that they have okrs to take care off and you will just be a resource to them.