But I’m using my own “IDE” inspired by herdr and pane, worktrees down the left and panes on the right, but besides terminals the types of panes also include:

- A native Obsidian-level markdown editor with support for comments that agents can see - Claude code with chrome for context size, and a custom UI that looks more like the web - A diff viewer with support for comments - A browser - Can tag worktrees with PRs and issues - Everything (except the browser) works seamlessly over ssh

It’s all zig+gtk, all vibe coded. I rarely open vscode these days.

Maybe the herdr plugin ecosystem can support all this too. I kinda want to get out of the business of hand-polishing UI.

I’ve been experimenting with writing a living spec — API endpoints, schemas, how things work at a low enough level that the LLM can fill in the details - and that’s been working well.

It also forces me to do the hammock-driven development necessary to build the right thing, and as a byproduct it keeps the design in my head longer.

For this part, are you using a tool-calling harness like Pi or Codex? Or did you sort of hack it together with prompts that tell it what json to emit?

I just got the rest of the “application layer” for my setup working yesterday, with a small set of evals. Auto-filing voice notes is what’s next for me.

TL;DR: it was far better than the rest of the world in 2020, marginally better in 2021, but 2022 was a shit show. I still remember Dec 7 as the day zero covid ended.

During the World Cup (2022, still zero covid in China), they started blurring out the crowd because people were noticing that nobody in the stands was wearing masks. They’d been told that the zero covid policy and draconian lockdowns were keeping them safe, and outside China was a Covid hell-hole. Protests followed four months later.

Nobody in China was told about western covid vaccines, much less allowed to get them.

VPNs aren’t widely used — there was a study posted here some months ago that estimated VPN use at around 1% of the population, too little to matter.

That’s why they’re a bit lax. They can afford to let some through to grease the wheels of commerce. You do have to be seriously unlucky to get into trouble.

(I was there during Covid, and some years before and after)

Fable 5.1 is a lot better than Fable 5 btw (edit: in terms of writing style). Not sure about opus 5.5 yet since I’ve only got one session in so far.

I had a FitBit Charge 4 some years ago, but it stopped working after a couple years.

Then I got a RingConn 2 last year, but like TFA I've decided that I don't like the ring form factor.

Thanks for this great reminder that we can choose the kind of person we want to be.

How far does the HAL go? Screen 12 and 13, and writing directly to VRAM? WAIT for vsync? Call absolute for mouse usage?

Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant.

Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things.

Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to.

This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.

The main reason we don’t use it anymore is that the default handlers don’t return the error type, which means error handling and HTTP status tracking get tricky and non-idiomatic as soon as your handlers start calling functions that can fail. It’s essentially a function coloring problem.

One could argue that HTTP status is a totally separate thing from normal errors, and I get that perspective, but that’s a significant ergonomic hit to take for the sake of philosophical purity.