Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.

Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.

Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.

I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.

I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.

Maybe add in some different "AI reviewer" type things, one to read broadly for enjoyment and give feedback, another as an editor to fine-tune particular sections. Even with these it should provide feedback, not re-written sections.

But I love the TUI approach and keeping things simple and organized for you, so you don't have to bother with all that. Bonus if it had some nice LaTeX / epub / PDF / html reader output.

I’m not an oxide customer, just a fan. I have lots of ideas around how something like this should look, being disappointed with the complexity and also shortcomings of products on the market for this stuff, both in the cloud and on prem.

I also don’t like targeted new taxes, like taxing sports gambling and recreational drugs, because it unnecessarily entrenches those in our society. Even worse is when they earmark it, like using casino money to fund schools.

https://github.com/thegagne/aep-conformance-test

Did pretty well, only took a day or so. I first had it inventory every MUST, SHOULD, and MAY in the spec, and then let it rip. I did guide it quite a bit to get what I wanted, but at the end I’m pretty happy with it as a first draft.

Helped me learn the spec and will be helpful to hone my dotnet AEP server, and aepbase.

There already existed an aep e2e validator which does a similar thing, but this is more thorough and generates a nice report. It will tell you not just whether your API follows the spec, but also what parts of the spec it does not implement.

I managed a bunch of XServes for a while, they were incredibly good hardware. The Mac Server software kinda sucked (not the LOM stuff, it was as good as any of the LOM from Dell, which is to say, not amazing, but workable).

I was really glad when they fixed the old one that had a big "X" that would delete your load balancer without a warning dialog. But I was not happy that the load balancers got increasingly complex, with settings hidden at multiple layers that you had to independently configure.

Load balancing IS complex, but this is their core business, and in many other places such as DNS, Cloudflare put a lot more thought into making it simple and intuitive to use.

Getting this stuff right takes lots of strong leadership and long-term decision making with determination and wisdom to provide the best experience for customers. Unfortunately I am not confident that is how the business is operating, especially with strong talent being let go or leaving due to lack of fostering of a healthy working environment.

But who will take their place?

I am not a power user for Dendron, I mostly just use it for journaling, keeping track of who is who and what is what, and organizing architecture / ideas before they find a home somewhere else. Mostly a journal.

I do like that it’s in VS Code and I can leverage those tools and now, AI, to help.

The main functionality I use is the new daily journal from template feature. Do you use more surface area from it? What is the most useful features for you?

That last category of people are also now likely to go create something themselves with AI, but don't really want to or can't start a business from it, so they may add it to the pile of free software others can use.

Not everyone HAS to profit from their work, though I do think those who make it their passion might benefit from finding a way to do that.

I do think there is room for a few good paid text editors in the world, but most people won't pay directly for them, though they might use them if they are bundled ala Google Docs / O365 Word.

Simple utility stuff I believe should fit in this category. Things like a text editor.

The profit comes from elsewhere, larger more complex systems.

Of course someone can TRY to profit off a text editor, but unless it solves complex enough problems (like a full blown IDE, but even then...).

The issue is there is intense demand for it, and ALSO easy supply. If someone attempts a profit driving rugpull, another will pop up in it's place.

I am still using Dendron because it meets my needs, but I'm always half tempted to replace it, and I'm fairly confident I could come up with something that meets my own needs in a day or two, and it would likely also be valuable to countless others. I just keep assuming that someone else will spend that day or two, and my pain points with Dendron are not that bad for me to spend the time.

It has been super helpful and the ecosystem is growing around it.

The real benefit is having a standardized pattern for APIs, with automation and predictability built in.

Not everything can be modeled as a resource, but for any API that fits that, it’s fantastic.

It’s a bit restrictive at times, but those restrictions often shed light on bad architecture/data modeling.

They worked through a lot of feedback last year and cut a 2026 LTS release to give strong confidence to start building tooling around it.

Check out https://aepbase.io/ for an example and fun way to get started.

I made my own project, with one of the goals being discounting tokens, but found that the real goal was just ensuring quality and making things more programmatic.

https://ktext.dev

Basically ends up being agents.md in a schema driven yaml file. Thinking about extending it to also generate or replace skill.md.

I think the proliferation of markdown is cool, and lowers the barrier for entry, but it’s also very unpredictable and loose. I think over time we will drive these to be more like config files instead of free text.

Basically a structured context file, that can be used to generate AGENTS.md, and also can be validated and scored.

I think it could help with this problem.

But I’ve moved to using https://aep.dev style APIs as much as possible (sometimes written with TypeSpec), because the consistency allows you to use prebaked aepcli or very easily write your own since everything behaves like know “resources” with a consistent pattern.

Also Terraform works out of the box, with no needing to write a provider.

This is basically a structured, efficient version of claude.md.

Every time you launch a new Claude Code session it will need context for the codebase. Rather than letting it spend a bunch of tokens looking around and discovering it, why not provide it with a compact, high quality version?

Ktext has two parts: a CONTEXT.yaml which adheres to a JSON Schema, and the ktext CLI that helps create, validate, and export it.

Was going to launch later this week, and the site needs some tweaks, but the tool is ready.

Give it a shot!