Linux, MySQL, privacy and calm
Any conversation
Sharing your work with others is a hard computer science problem in 2026, the Year of our Lord. You either here the sound of chirping crickets or the sound of "AI Slop" yells.
My past 3 projects went viral. I didn’t write a single line of code in any of them. But I still feel I engineered them. There were a few people that noticed but the majority didn’t see an issue.
You're fortunate in that you've genuinely captured something that people clearly want with
textlog. No one wants another static site generator or coding harness. Ideas that resonate are pretty few and far between now.I’ve been working with OpenStreetMaps a little and I must say, they’ve done an incredible job. The data are very detailed and accurate, I can’t believe they’re free to use. Someone must be paying all those topographers somehow or I don’t understand how this can be achieved by volunteers. This project, Warsaw in Voxels which uses them inspired me to play as well.
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NIH syndrome? I am guilty of it too. I love implementing things from scratch, you learn a lot by doing so and you get to own the codebase end-to-end, so no surprises and fighting around others’ choices. It can get exhausting too though, in the end I succumb to using off-the-shelf components because my primary goals move at a higher level.
I don't see much point in trying to build software at a "higher level", like whole products and services. I'm going to go down low and train myself on the fundamentals. Hopefully in time I'll be able to contribute to the foundational bits.
You're right, it does get exhausting. At some point you just want to rebuild everything, which is not possible.
Sunk cost fallacy is no longer applicable in the age of . Now you can do broad changes without second thought, u can always revert back, without incurring the cost of doing so, since it’s all done so quickly and effortlessly.
I think it will still apply, just perhaps to a lesser degree. Kind of related to I wrote recently (not to shamelessly plug my stuff 🫣)
Really glad to be using Haskell for work - especially in today's climate with agentic coding.
Our team uses containers to keep our development environment consistent across team members, though, and most agent sandbox approaches want to either offload your work fully to the cloud or they want to sandbox the agent harness process itself.
We're not ready for full cloud based development (yet?) and sandboxing just the agent doesn't work for us when the agent needs to run docker.
... because letting the agent run docker gives them a too-easy escape hatch from their sandbox.
So we're currently stuck with using VMs. This turns out to be tricky but seems do-able.
My current approach is to provision a VM image and use Incus for the execution. My main goal is to keep my current workflow of local/non-agent dev working seamlessly and share the source with the VM/agent.
This means sharing my working dirs with the agent VM but overlaying artifact dirs from VM-owned block devices so we don't take too big of an IO perf hit.
I also don't want the agent to be able to
git push so that means we need some quirky git config to rewrite origin paths and thread through some agent specific PATs ("thanks" GitHub) for read-only repo access. These ALSO need to be threaded through to the development containers - they need to clone private repos.... in the end, this seems to work but I haven't lived with it for long.
There are still some quality of life issues to work out, but I think it'll work out.
At this point, I've removed all coding agents from my host - and that's nice.
Curious, why does using Haskell make a difference here?
It's tangential to the sandboxing topic, really. I started the first post with a broader intent in mind and then elaborated on the sandboxing setup I'm working on.
For AI-assisted coding, though, it's nice because Haskell provides a lot of feedback earlier in the development process compared to lots of other languages. It tends to work once it compiles (obviously not all the time).