No server infra needed. Issues/Wiki/Discussions all built-in. Customizable web interface. Adapter to export to git. Single-file (also an SQLite database you can query).
I think this boilerplate thing got lost in translation some time ago.
We dislike _the presence_ of boilerplate, not the time spent writing it. If another thing writes it for you, it implies that _now boilerplate exists_, and it sucks.
It makes me unhappy when it exists. It makes me unhappy if it appears in seconds.
That said, there is some potential for using AI to reduce boilerplate and help create more meaningful software. However, that is definitely not the way things are shaping out to be.
It is very likely that agent tooling will get better at doing asynchronous things and being aware of the user interacting in parallel, without git, and probably within a single session.
It's feasible, and it makes more sense than separating and merging later (or keeping patches in memory then applying in bulk).
Why do I say it's feasible? We have the technology, right? The IDE knows which file the user has in focus, and can orient agents to use tooling that would inform them of that fact when they're running. Similarly, that same tooling could just spend a little bit of time planning focus to spread to multiple agents in a way they won't overlap.
Maybe big repos, monorepos and so on are a limitation. If we were on the previous "small-to-middle interlinked projects" era, that division would come in naturally. You only really need multiple agents in parallel on a single project if that thing is big enough to have more than one angle to work on. It's a push-and-pull that changes with the times, maybe we're heading to a more granular way of doing things.
It's funny because I'm evaluating LLMs for just this specific case (covering tests) right now, and it does that a lot.
I say "we need 100% coverage on that critical file". It runs for a while, tries to cover it, fails, then stops and say "Success! We covered 60% of the file (the rest is too hard). I added a comment.". 60% was the previous coverage before the LLM ran.
A math module that is not tested for division by zero. Classical LLM development.
The suite is mostly happy paths, which is consistent with what I've seen LLMs do.
Once you setup coverage, and tell it "there's a hidden branch that the report isn't able to display on line 95 that we need to cover", things get less fun.
We had upstarts in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s and the 2010s. Some game, some website, some social network, some mobile app that blew up. We had many. Not funded by billions.
So, where is that in the 2020s?
Yes, code is a detail (ideas too). It's a platform. It positions itself as the new thing. Does that platform allow upstarts? Or does it consolidate power?
On Windows, it behaves like a malware. Suddenly flashing command prompt windows when you interact with it. Not very nice (also, lazy, since you don't need to do that flashing if you're a legitimate app).
Instead of tools for humans, and a separate set of tools for machines, we should just make tools for humans+machines.
The agent should look at my README.md, not a custom human-like text that is meant to be read by machines only.
It also should look at `Makefile`, my bash aliases and so on, and just use that.
In fact, many agents are quite good at this (Code Fast 1, Sonnet).
Issue is, we have a LONG debt around those. READMEs often suck, and build files often suck. We just need to make them better.
I see agents as an opportunity for making friendlier repos. The agent is a free usability tester in some sense. If it can't figure out by reading the human docs, then either the agent is not good enough or your docs aren't good enough.
I like rebasing! It works great for bisecting, reverting (squash messes that up), almost everything. It just doesn't play well with micro commits (which unfortunatelly have become the norm).
The force pushing to the PR branch is mostly a consequence of that rebase choice, in order to not pollute the main branch. Each change in main/master must be meaningful and atomic. Feature branches are other way to achieve this, but lots of steps involved.
I prefer working with the one commit per PR philosophy, linear history and every commit buildable, so I always force push (to the PR branch, but never to master). Been doing it for ages. Bisecting this kind of history is a powerful tool.
I don't use it as inspiration. It's like I said: code that is not reviewed yet.
It takes the idea of 50 juniors working for you one step ahead. I manage the workflow in a way that they already made the code they wrote merge and build before I review it. When it doesn't, I delete it from the stash.
I could keep a branch for this. Or go even deeper on the temptation and keep multiple branches. But that's more of my throughput I have to spent on merging and ensuring things build after merging. It's only me. One branch, plus an extra "WIP". Stash is perfect for that.
Also, it's one level of stashing. It's stacked in the sense that it keeps growing, but it's not several `git stash pop`s that I do.
One thing that helps is that I already used this to keep stuff like automation for repos that I maintain. Stuff the owner doesn't want or isn't good enough to be reused. Sometimes it was hundreds of lines, now it's thousands.
What Í'm doing a lot is vibe coding and stashing. Not even a public branch, just git stash the whole thing the LLM writes.
Also, I stack the stash. When I vibe code, I pop it, let it work on its own mess, then I stash it again.
One project has almost 13.000 lines of vibe mess, all stashed.
One good thing, is that the stash builds. It's just that I don't want to release more code than I can read. It's a long review queue that is pre-merged somehow.
Once in a while I pick something from there, then I review it and integrate into the codebase more seriously. I don't have the throughput to review it all, and not all projects can be yolo'd.
https://fossil-scm.org/
No server infra needed. Issues/Wiki/Discussions all built-in. Customizable web interface. Adapter to export to git. Single-file (also an SQLite database you can query).
It's obvious it's the superior stuff.