What many devs have pointed out in personal conversations is: The cost of maintenance is no longer just tied to engineer’s salary. just the sheer scale of code, comments and documentation generated by agents is huge for a person to review, which most likely will lead to people having to resort to agents to understand and fix code. Currently, even with subsidies on personal subscriptions, enterprise costs do add up with the token usage.

Atleast when it costs money, self hosting is considered seriously for large orgs

But, it’s the first time in my short career, i have shied away from being on bleeding edge of tooling. Specifically, LLM tooling. Firstly, since LLM’s are not yet needed or good in my field of $work, but; even in my programming hobby, whenever I venture out to explore, it all feels too snake oil to me. And do I even need to begin why the f*k people curl | bash??

I dunno maybe its just old habits, but I can’t bring myself to download a skill or whatever without going through its contents.

And then it just is too much to keep up.

For instance, for a period of time, everyone on hn were glazing claude and then after having a great UI experience on their ios app, i got a simple one month subscription, but by that time, hn already was making friends with codex and pi. My searches for blog posts written by ‘AI/LLM’ normies using it for reasonable tasks, has been disappointing, and just too polluted with people completely vibing and not reviewing any code. And then you have power users whose entire purpose is to try out new stuff, rather than stay consistent on one toolchain and maybe also share a perspective of if the tool is degrading or not.

Sadly, amongst all the agentic hype, the autocompletion mode seems to have fallen behind which I enjoy a lot more since it allows me to architect things in a particular fashion without bugging myself with nitty gritty details.

Hopefully, as these things start costing more money, things will get streamlined to the point where few camps will emerge similar to how the text editors work. I am looking for an update to ‘what the vim of llm tooling look like’ blog post any day now.

For all the agentic loops people seem to have come up with, the research loop or as I call it the “Desperate 10th page on Github’s crappy search results” is still not up to the mark.

Either it might be genuine rate limiting these LLM’s face or just that, they are trained to focus on implementing a solution which would be faster and user acceptable solution. (which seems to be a true looking at people pushing LLM generated code as is).

At least in my personal experience with niche projects and heck even with well documented and famous libraries, along with fancy mcp’s, llms.txt and skills; RTFM has been more relevant than usual for code that I have asked an agent to generate, since it is too eager to reimplement functionality which already exists, only if it RTFM!!

I wish inline completions would have gotten better but it seems no effort is being put into it and it is frozen in time right now. Thankfully, the stuff i use this code for is simple and small scale. I can’t even begin to imagine how actual programmers are feeling about this.

valid point. I am usually okay with LLM generated code since even if it might not be architecturally sound It is usually well commented and has tests and documentation for helping another agent/human debug any issues.

But, just the painful experience of debugging any dlopen related crashes and/or intermittent bugs; and the sheer amount of tokens burnt by an LLM chasing tangents when shown a stack trace; I wouldn’t touch this at least as a packager/consumer of certain apps for personal usage on older distros. So far, AnyLinux-Appimages seem to be a mature solution with great support from the developers, in case anyone lands here for packaging applications to run on older distros.

Handwriting is better as SVG if you are writing digitally, and while everyone has their own vector ink based proprietary formats, I like the simplicity and openness of SVG’s!

Here are some more such tools I feel you might find interesting (or most likely you might already know them) but might be worth having in a single place as a list.

Nash is stand alone note as HTML. Source: https://github.com/keepworking/nash I recommend nash for when i feel people might get overwhelmed with tiddlywiki.

htpad: Handwritten scratch pad saves stuff to SVG. Source: https://github.com/akissinger/htpad I just use this for drawing on screen since teams annotation sucks.

Minimal PWA template. Source: https://github.com/chr15m/minimal-pwa A minimal template that should ideally work, but i wasn’t able to get it working with marimo wasm notebooks.

Currently, my focus is to use python either using pyscript or hopefully just use marimo to have python apps for simple things. I don’t want to learn js and avoided this side longer than i would have wanted. But python WASM ecosystem has grown significantly to a point where i feel investing time in building these tools.

Currently, marimo is having issues with the completely offline part but hopefully, that gets fixed!

Also, funny enough that this pissed me off so much, that I started asking LLM to search for something on reddit. I don’t care about the answer since due to it being reddit, LLM is not helpful, but what we get access to; is the citation/links exactly to the post you want and never had trouble in the ios webview within the apps. Use it as a billion dollar scraper and you won’t be disappointed with AI.

In fact the industry i work in we don’t have git, but something similar to SVN (and proprietary, expensive and pathetic UI/UX)

Since, I am not in software industry, I won’t comment on whether such people might survive for more than 5 years without knowing about ‘VCS’.

However, I have slightly died inside when some Computer science students (graduate school, mind you) were using google drive with manually created timestamps as a backup strategy. The submission for this entire semester long actual project was on Github. as a final single commit uploaded a day before. (And no this wasn’t a squashed commit from a different repo.)

There might be a blurry line between people not sharpening their auxiliary tools vs never using or being slightly curious about them.

I am more of a glamour and bling on my tools person, and I don’t expect every engineer to derive the same pleasure that I derive just from tinkering with them; however, does make me wonder if there is a point when such an approach to not fully caring about simplifying your workflow (aka being lazy), might spill over into making poor engineering decision?

The setup was a breeze! Did not try it with a server yet, but i don’t think anything would be radically different.

I am not a celebrity on github and not even agents bother with my repositories, however, even before the bot pull requests/issues, I always made sure to enable only the things I felt I would want to use and provide a way for someone to reach out in case I was expecting collaboration/feedback.

I realized that anyone can create a PR to upstream, when I accidentally did so using the github web UI on mobile. Felt embarrassed and immediately closed it. But, then it made sense that why people were frustrated with this sort of thing happening to big repositories.