I feel like the idea of fixed-point is under-utilized and very under appreciated. There are loads of applications where this is a better choice, let alone more performant.

In the worst case, if your local municipality sides with business over the little guy, that means potential brownouts and water shortages for you.

Sadly, the product line got worse before VSCode came out. Things are much better now.

That said, my gamer-brain wants to call this "Save-scumming at scale." Which is to say, a lot of people already know that this approach works, but maybe they haven't made the connection to abstract CS stuff.

Another strategy that can be used to build robustness is to build your workflow out of idempotent operations. That can be useful for situations where the workflow state is too large to back up. Instead, you just run the job from the top and it's a bunch of no-ops until you start making progress again.

At this point, I'm seriously considering what it would take to build a reasonable budget-AI box that's self-hosted. It wouldn't need to blow the doors off of Claude, just get me most of the way there. Maybe even build it out of used and/or last-gen GPUs and a beefy motherboard.

The "speed" loop reminds me a lot of RAD. In fact, AI might be _the_ thing that helps us deliver on RAD's promises from decades ago.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/software-engineering/software-...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.

These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.

Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.

Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?

- It's all relative to your teenage years, which splits up generations as a result.

- The past is another country.

The good news is: taste and disgust are also learned. So anyone can pick up and move to another worldview, if they're willing to do new things.

I kind of assumed there were already local businesses that already did this? Seems like a decent side-line for any drop-shippers out there. In any event, moving that activity into a local strip-mall would be super convenient for everyone.

We may see Canonical or other commercial Linux vendors come forward with a government or enterprise-flavored solution for all this. But the important thing to keep in mind is that they're not selling Linux per-se. As the GPL prohibits this, these companies sell support for their Linux distro instead. That revenue goes into improving Linux and maintaining their distro (e.g. Ubuntu). But even with all that money changing hands, that they do not own Linux, the Linux kernel, or any other shred of GPL licensed stuff.

https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r...

> But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”

This quote absolutely floored me. The author had a lot of bad management.

I've also taken to using the Socratic Method when interrogating an LLM. No loaded questions, squeaky clean session/context, no language that is easy to misinterpret. This has worked well for me. The information I need is in there, I just need to coax it back out.

I did exactly this for an exercise a while back. I wanted to learn Rust while coding a project and AI was invaluable for accelerating my learning. I needed to know completely off-the-wall things that involved translating idioms and practices from other languages. I also needed to know more about Rust idoms to solve specific problems and coding patterns. So I carefully asked these things, one at a time, rather than have it write the solution for me. I saved weeks if not months on that activity, and I'm at least dangerous at Rust now (still learning).

That said, I have found that I can get a lot of economy from speaking in terms of jargon, computer science formalisms, well-documented patterns, and providing code snippets to guide the LLM. It's trained on all of that, and it greatly streamlines code generation and refactoring.

Amusingly, all of this turns the task of coding into (mostly) writing a robust requirements doc. And really, don't we all deserve one of those?

For the rest of us, trunk-based development with feature/fix branches is more than enough.