Much like my own heaving ~/prototypes folder, there is an avalanche of small projects other people are building in their own spare time (with LLMs), and there is a subsequent avalanche of "check out my cool project" posts. This is cool! However, unfortunately, almost universally, there is very little follow through. If you come back to those projects after a month, most are abandoned.

The creators of the ones that tend to last, at least in my brief experience so far, _do_ write useful blog posts by hand, or put a bit of human effort into sharing what they've built. I guess when I encounter someone sharing their work by way of blog post, it feels to me like they don't really care about actually sharing that work.

Also -- and this is much more a me thing -- I'm just fucking tired of reading Claude's writing. I have to work with Claude most days, and seeing it take over the whole internet is suffocating. Inflicting more of it on others just sucks.

Perhaps not the place to share this, but it's depressing. I hope this proves me wrong.

For instance, Claude likes to run little Python scripts; reviewing them is tedious. Removing `bash` and adding a `python` tool would allow the harness to pre-review and grep for common harmful patterns, or run the `python` script in a `krunvm` or `muvm` to isolate it, etc. This review/isolation would be handled programatically as it's part of the harness; leaving the agent to choose what to do as a skill means the agent can conveniently forget to enforce its own checks.

Rhai looks nice, I'll take a look, thanks! And good luck with Zerostack.

Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be trivially broken into and re-tooled however you like — and for me at least, that’s where a lot of fun lies in computers. When it comes to mainline desktops now, everything is incredibly expensive and deflating.

I've only just started working with it, but clamping `read/write/edit` to only allow editing files in the current directory, banning `bash` and mandating I write tools for the specific commands I want it to execute, has made me much happier. Running Claude inside a VM or similar to sandbox it is nuclear overkill; I've always been surprised that that's seemed like the state of the art.

With a better harness, the model can't choose to rename things with search and replace; if it wants to rename things, it _must_ call the LSP to do it. If it's going to write code, as you suggest, the harness _forces_ linting/formatting to run.

(Reading my own comment back, I am worried that the fucking AI writing style is infecting me :()

This always made me feel uncomfy using `jj`. Something that I didn't realise for a while is that `jj` automatically cleans up/garbage collects empty commits. I don't write as much code as I used to, but I still have to interact with, debug and test our product a _lot_ in order to support other engineers, so my workflow was effectively:

    git checkout master
    git fetch
    git rebase # can be just git pull but I've always preferred doing this independently
    _work_/investigate
    git checkout HEAD ./the-project # cleanup the things I changed while investigating

Running `jj new master@origin` felt odd because I was creating a commit, but... when I realised that those commits don't last, things felt better. When I then realised that if I made a change or two while investigating, that these were basically stashed for free, it actually improved my workflow. I don't often have to go back to them, but knowing that they're there has been nice!

I would, sadly, challenge this. If anything, our desktops and laptops are the exception now. Phones, TVs, game consoles, set top boxes, cars, Amazon echos, ebook readers, tablets, security cameras, autonomous devices like vacuum cleaners — when I think of the myriad devices we interact with that have a computer in them, they are all as stringently locked down as possible.