nzoschke

1,736 karmajoined 15 tahun yang lalu

Housecat.com

Previously VPE at GRAX, engineering at Segment, co-founder and CTO of Convox (S15) and platform architect at Heroku.

https://github.com/nzoschke

comments

3 hari yang laludiscuss

What AGENTS.md and skills are people relying on these days?

I have little to none and am successful building full stack Go apps Claude Code, Codex, and Shelley which covers the spectrum of crazy black box to simple `bash` clanker.

It makes me think the models are continually improving in knowing what to do on their own.

I do put some major work into the classic "Developer Experience" (DX) of my code base. Standard Go tooling, idiomatic Go, well designed initial test harnesses, GitHub actions that enforce some linting.

I think that works better than any markdown instructions ever will.

3 hari yang laludiscuss

> Historically, rewrites are a terrible idea.

This changed for me over the last 5 years.

The first scenario was joining a company where a software product barely worked. We did the traditional incremental refactoring / rewriting, but eventually learned how rotten the core was that rewriting from first principles was the best path forward.

The lesson learned here is that the conventional wisdom probably only applies to rewriting complex but working systems.

Then multiple scenarios in the agentic coding age. Between day jobs and hobbies I've reproduced major chunks of complicated software like Salesforce, Gmail, Pioneer Rekordbox with very lean teams.

Much like the blog post, the trick is to get an excellent verification loop with a compiler, linter, and test harness / test suite around the core behaviors.

It's feeling more and more that designing and implementing comprehensive test harnesses is the real work, once you have that let the LLM cook.

24 hari yang laludiscuss

Fair feedback and sentiment.

As I build this out there's actually less and less AI in the product and more good old-fashioned UX, writing and data entry tools, and automations.

Some examples...

We're simply bringing a CRM CRUD form into an email thread, populated from email sender / domain, for the end user to review and submit.

You can add your own notes into a thread, and copy / paste from

Similarly good pre-defined templates with variables perform way better than AI generated drafts.

Context is indeed key. The person at their email inbox has most of the context in their head, they need good tools to organize that context down for their future self and their team. AI can help but its really about just building a great tool for the operator.

24 hari yang laludiscuss

Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape?

This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out.

I’m building a next gen web mail app at work and there are a ton of UX edge cases but the performance of the core UI is not rocket science.

I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last mile of performance, and to add Outlook support.

https://housecat.com/

The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.

25 hari yang laludiscuss

Codex just walked me through my first experience with unicorn the other day, emulating / stubbing out subsystems from a Pioneer CDJ-3000 to help understand its music catalog database format and network protocol.

It felt like science fiction watching Codex write unicorn to host binaries and reverse engineer them.

bulan laludiscuss

What has worked for me…

Pair programming. I call it pilot / copilot / autopilot. Two real people plus one or two agents working together. Classic XP stuff, the copilot can help remind what we are focusing on, file follow up issues, give instant code reviews.

Bake offs. Do the same task but in two different chats or agents or approaches (TDD vs vibe or legacy app vs next app).

I don’t do these all the time, and they don’t guarantee ROI, but it keeps me focused on one thing to completion intend of getting distracted

bulan laludiscuss

My impression too.

Claude Desktop, Cowork, Code, Design all get meaningful new features week over week.

I can’t recall another vendor with such focus and velocity.

Google products are evolving at a glacial pace. OpenAI isn’t as focused on what knowledge workers need.

bulan laludiscuss

I do love Postgres and DBOS.

I also recently started experimenting with https://github.com/earendil-works/absurd which is also Postgres and even simpler than DBOS. Their comparison is a great read:

https://earendil-works.github.io/absurd/comparison/

But for operational reasons I've started using sqlite for durable workflows instead. Porting the database concepts from either DBOS or absurd PG to SQLite is remarkably easy these days. A small polling loop instead of notify/listen feels fine for smaller workloads.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Great question and I'd love the answer.

I bet the answer is industry changing even if the token cost is high.

This work was impossibly expensive in terms of people hours and time before. Architectural planning, engineering alignment and politics, phased engineering that gets interrupted by changing priorities.

That it's possible to do R&D, the port, and get 99.X test passing in less than 2 weeks is so much more efficient for the humans.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

That’s me with a TI-85 in 7th grade in ‘95 or so.

It was effectively a portable computer that I was allowed to use and play with in most classes.

Started with TI-BASIC, then discovered ticalc.org and the shell and assembly programming hacks, games, and home brew transfer cables.

It effectively started my electrical engineering and computer science career.

I know I’m not alone.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

The screenshot in the post demonstrates show-off TUIs.

That git TUI doesn't offer anything over `git` CLI.

The network / battery / performance TUI is redundant with the tools in the window menu bar.

I love the aesthetic of TUIs but their actual day-to-day install base and usage must pale in comparison to CLIs and GUIs.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

I'm with you here.

In the "before times" an API and web UI that double times as native via Electron was the biggest bang for your buck.

CLI would be a hacker's side project, TUI would be them showing off more. Native would require hiring a team of specialists which is a total non-starter.

In the "after times" API and CLI are getting more love rebranded as MCP and tools.

To the parent topic, I suspect "build a TUI around my CLI" is a slam dunk for an LLM text in / text out machine which is why there is a resurgence of these too.

Hopefully that is the gateway drug to "build a SwiftUI around this", and an antidote to doing everything in Electron.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

I agree, the LLM porting things is a game changer.

Does it also follow that we can have pretty much any shape for valuable apps? API, CLI, TUI, Web, SwiftUI, WinUI...

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

I have a Hetzner box with Caddy too.

The difference with exe.dev is multiple VMs. I have over 20 now with isolated apps, branches of the same app, etc.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

I’ve rediscovered plain old CGI as a great way for users to “vibe code” custom pages on our platform. [1]

The scenario is we have our first party task lists and data viewers, but often users want to highly customize it. Say build a Kanban view or a custom dashboard with data filters and charts.

The box has a coding agent which means the user can code anything vs us building traditional report builder tools.

Go’s stdlib has good support on both the server side and user space. The coding agent makes a page-name/main.go that talks CGI and the server delegates requests to it.

It’s all “person scale” data and page views so no real need to optimize with fast CGI even.

What’s old is new again for agents!

1. https://housecat.com

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Yes I’m trusting exe.dev disks and persistence.

For many apps the weird experimental version is all there is. Call it vibe coding or experiments or non-critical tools. These may not even have a GitHub repo. I trust local git and the exe.dev disks.

Then for serious apps the above is the same shape for development branches. Spin up a VM in a few seconds with the code checked out and running online and editable over an SSH mount is the magic.

Then that turns into a PR on GitHub and a normal review then CI/CD to staging and prod takes over.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Congrats!

My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev.

It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky.

Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive

exe.dev is the first "dev container" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` is safe. Being on the internet with good private / shared / public access saves so much time.

I also use https://conductor.build/ and GitHub but this is starting to feel clunky compared hacking directly against online live reloading apps.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Hug ops to everyone involved in these outages and trying to maintain uptime.

But glad my team is staying nimble and has multi-model (Anthropic, Codex, Gemini), multi-modal (desktop, CLI/TUI, web) dev tooling.

As our actual coding skills collectively atrophy, we'll either need to switch tools or go for a walk when the LLM is down.

In the cloud era I advised against a multi-cloud strategy, as the effort to impact just wasn't there. But perhaps this is different in the LLM era, where the cost of switching is pretty darn low.

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

I’ve haven’t had great experiences with Gemini for coding yet. I’m doing reasonably simple full stack Go apps. Tried Gemini-ClI, antigravity, Pi.

The problems I’ve experienced are less adept at picking the right bash commands to build and test the Go app, and not following idiomatic Go or code base patterns for changes.

A skill hasn’t helped much.

Will need to try this and open code next.

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

Consider djot for the comparison list too.

It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown.

https://djot.net/