It’s just too much to take in at once. You start by building a cross compilation toolchain but… why? And you add the bootloader dead last, even though it’s the first thing you see when you boot a Linux machine?

I reckon a better approach would be to build it step by step, only adding new things once you’ve discovered a need for them. First you get the bootloader working, then you get it to actually load the initramfs and kernel, etc… you could even create your own extremely simple initramfs first before adding dracut, etc…

This gets you to a system you can boot and play with asap. And then you can slowly start to discover why you actually need all these things through exploration and experimentation.

A more in depth follow up would be nice if you have time when you’re not on mobile. In particular I’d be curious to hear more about how your intense pair programming sessions go and how you maintain or develop a good mental model of the codebase. Obviously the backend UI is a big part of it but I’m sure there is more.

Any chance any of the projects you are using this on are open source?

In any case, I’m going to give your backend UI a shot at work next week and Astra plus your workflow a shot on a personal project.

That’s why I found the final paragraph to be a bit of a shock - “ More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now.”

What? How? This doesn’t follow from the rest of the post at all. Maybe your new less frenetic and more human scale AI usage would be a good subject for the next post.