misternugget

Hey! Author of the post here. Sounds like I failed my mission with the post then :)

Yes, like many things, Orbs are "wrappers" around VMs, but the point is that some wrappers enable new ways to hold and use and reuse the thing they wrap, and even give you a different perspective on it.

That's what happened with our team once we had Orbs working. We knew beforehand all the things they're made of (fast to start sandboxes, scale to zero, live streaming updates on all clients, one machine per conversation, etc) but what really surprised us was how it changed our workflow by removing friction we didn't even know was there. The friction of creating new checkouts and worktrees and managing local resources -- it sounds trite, of course, but man, once you can stop thinking about it, it's so much better.

So, yes, maybe they're wrappers but hey, some people say the tortilla is what makes it a burrito, you know?

Engineer working on Amp here.

I'm very surprised that it took them this long to crack down on it. It's been against the terms of service from the start. When I asked them back in March last year whether individuals can use the higher rate limits that come with the Claude Code subscription in other applications, that was also a no.

Question is: what changed? New founding round coming up, end of fiscal year, planning for IPO? Do they have to cut losses?

Because the other surprise here is that apparently most people don't know the true cost of tokens and how much money Anthropic is losing with power users of Claude Code.

Hey! Thorsten Ball here. Thanks for the shout-out. I was quite confused when someone sent me this article: same "Emperor has no clothes", same "it's only x hundred lines", implements the same tools, it even uses the same ASCII colors when printing you/assistant/tool. Then I saw the "January 2025" in the title and got even more confused.

So, thanks for your comment and answering all the questions I had just now about "wait, did I wake up in a parallel universe where I didn't write the post but someone else did?"

Thank you! There's a long way to go still, but it makes me happy to hear when what we think about this, well, new way to program seems to resonate with others.

Working on it!

That is about the idea of rewriting existing tooling in Rust to get rid of node_modules folders, not about prompting users whether to download a language server or not.

One mini-feature I really like: authors highlighting their own favorite or popular articles.

I think I saw it first on Julia Evans' blog (https://jvns.ca/categories/favorite/). I also added it to mine (https://thorstenball.com/blog/) and found the exercise of going through the posts and tagging them very enjoyable.

That's right, someone linked me to this article: https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apple-dry-run-apfs-prio...

Pretty impressive.

> I'm shocked by how many developers check in code that passes the tests but they have not actually tested to make sure it works.

That's actually one of the other topics I wanted to write about yesterday. Chose to write the article above instead.

Yes, 100%. I've seen it many times: manually testing reveals more in 1min than hours of previous discussions/reviews/test-writing.

Hey, author here. Yeah, I worked at Sourcegraph and I do think we built some high-quality stuff and we did write tests. I also think a lot of them were necessary. But, like I wrote here, I think that maybe we/I sometimes overdid it with tests and I'm not so sure about the use of /some/ of them anymore.

Rust's debug-print {:?} quotes the path here.

Hey! I'm the mentioned Thorsten. Linux is actively being developed. Here's a PR from 2 days ago that shows file-opening in Linux starting to work: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/7852

And so far Linux support has been a big community effort. I think more community member contributed to Linux support than Zed teammates. Very cool to see.

So: Linux is in the works. Windows will probably happen after that, or if someone in the community wants to emulate what the Linux users are doing and start before that.

I think that is on the roadmap too, but possibly further down.

I only joined Zed, the company, a week ago, so take this with a grain of salt, but:

I've never really used real-time sharing (tried VS Code's Live mode and other apps) for longer than just 1-2 attempts, but at Zed things are different somehow. Everybody is constantly available in a channel and people just hop in or out. In the last 7 days I spent 3-5hrs every day pairing with others, using Zed's live mode. No video, only audio and sharing code in Zed (no video was weird at first, but now I think I'm starting to get used to it?)

IMHO it's a combination of culture and technology, but when the mix of that is right it really feels game-changing.

Hey! Engineer at Zed here. Linux port is on our roadmap. Hopefully we'll get it done this year!

You know what, you're right. And it's actually something that's been bugging me for a while, I just never got around to fixing it. I'm going to update my config now. Thanks!

(Author of post)

> I've seen a lot of programmers fall into what I'd call the bureaucracy trap. Bureaucracy is often very attractive to a certain type of engineering because it's essentially programming the behavior of other humans.

That is very insightful and reading it now I wonder whether this isn’t the point I’ve been trying to make (author of post). Thank you!

Author here. Yeah, that’s fair, it is over-generalizing (and I even admit to that in the post).

I do think there might be some value (insight?) into trying to generalise things sometimes. In this case it’s me trying to split all software engineers along a single axis and seeing whether it fits. I don’t think it’s a neat split, but the more I think about it the more I think I could, if pressed, sort a lot of engineers into one of these two buckets. Not at all times, but sometimes.

Generally speaking: over-generalisation can be lazy and it was in this case — I write these posts very quickly, as a braindump, and you shouldn’t read too much into it, except that it might be food (snack?) for thought.

Monodraw is one of my favorite macOS applications. It’s really well made and - I don’t know how else to put this - lots of fun. I used it for all diagrams in compilerbook.com and now use it to create diagrams of control-flow graphs that I can then copy&paste as text comments into test cases. Highly recommend it.

Author here. Just wanted to add that I don’t think all forms of snark, sarcasm, and cynicism are bad. Or even negativity! But what I learned the hard way is that there’s a time and a place for this and often it’s not “your team & whenever something pops in your head”. I very much agree with the GP here in that I value mindfulness when it comes to negativity.

Yup, correct. I used Monodraw [0] for that (and the diagrams in the book). Highly recommend Monodraw, easily one of the loveliest pieces of Mac software I used. And it just got an update!

[0]: https://monodraw.helftone.com