The landing page mentions Plan 9 as one of the systems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511072

I was trying to find the root cause of a crash in a Python module which left no errors in the log or console. Fable wrote a test harness that simulated clicks in the UI, then bisected my code until it found the point where it started crashing. It exaggerated the cause of the crash, then ran a series of bash one-liners to make Python virtual environments under `/tmp` for each version of that Python module until it found one that did not crash.

It went way deeper to root cause discovery (a regression in the module causing a heap allocation overflow) than I could have done myself, provided enough info and a simplified example to raise a bug report and then wrote a work-around to prevent that from happening in my application.

I don't let it run completely loose; I review each CLI command it wants to run and I append answers to the "yes" continue action (if I have them) to prevent excessive token use.

HN comments page on that is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40219205

I hadn't noticed his Miscellaneous Fiction section, so this is a nice rabbit hole to find.

https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-08-11-udp/probes_full.j...

That isn't easy to get right.

The GUI interfaces are what newcomers tend to aim for straight away, but they're not good for any long-term "repeatable" build flows and they're no use for CI. I think this is where a lot of the frustration comes from.

create_project -in_memory -part ${PART}

set_property target_language VHDL [ current_project ]

read_vhdl "my_hdl_file.vhd"

synth_design -top my_hdl_top_module_name -part ${PART}

opt_design

place_design

route_design

check_timing -file my_timing.txt

report_utilization -file my_util.txt

write_checkpoint my_routed_design.dcp

write_bitstream my_bitfile.bit

"engineers are stuck using outdated languages inside proprietary IDEs that feel like time capsules from another century.". The article misses that Vivado was developed in the 2010's and released around 2013. It's a huge step-up from ISE if you know how to drive it properly and THIS is the main point that the original author misses. You need to have a different mindset when writing hardware and it's not easy to find training that shows how to do it right.

If you venture into the world of digital logic design without a guide or mentor, then you're going to encounter all the pitfalls and get frustrated.

My daily Vivado experience involves typing "make", then waiting for the result and analysing from there (if necessary). It takes experience to set up a hardware project like this, but once you get there it's compatible with standard version control, CI tools, regression tests and the other nice things you expect form a modern development environment.

It's cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux), detects the most appropriate GPU in your system and tells you whether the model you want to download will run within it's RAM footprint.

It lets you set up a local server that you can access through API calls as if you were remotely connected to an online service.