I've was promoted for producing a significantly simplified replacement for an existing system that was critical. it happened because the culture rewards engineering excellence.
It sounds like they had a previously complex (and I assume problematic) system to compare it to. When complexity is causing problems and the job is to simplify to get rid of problems, it will be rewarded.
If it was made simple from the start, it would have likely been seen as an easy and solved problem, and you never would have been brought in, as no one would ever think about it again.
Often the problems are complex, unless you take steps to simplify them to be easy to solve, usually by relaxing constraints a bit, by carefully examining what are the real business/physical constraints which MUST be fulfilled, and not going for the textbook solutions. This is called engineering, and is rarely rewarded, complexity is praised all around the industry.
The thought you have while coding should be part of your workbook. This is a distillation of all the input and processing at the time, which can be a valuable clue for bug hunting and refactoring.
It’s straightforward: JavaScript is a dynamic language, which allows code (for instance, code implementing an extension to the harness) to be executed and loaded while the harness is running.
This is quite nice — I do think there’s a version of pi’s design choices which could live in a static harness, but fully covering the same capabilities as pi without a dynamic language would be difficult. (You could imagine specifying a programmable UI, etc — various ways to extend the behavior of the system, and you’d like end up with an interpreter in the harness)
At least, you’d like to have a way to hot reload code (Elixir / Erlang could be interesting)
I built my own harness on Elixir/Erlang[0]. It's very nice, but I see why TypeScript is a popular choice.
No serialization/JSON-RPC layer between a TS CLI and Elixir server. TS TUI libraries utilities are really nice (I rewrote the Elixir-based CLI prototype as it was slowing me down). Easy to extend with custom tools without having to write them in Elixir, which can be intimidating.
But you're right that Erlang's computing vision lends itself super well to this problem space.
I'm super on board the rust train right now & super loving it. But no, code hot loading is not common.
Most code in the world is dead code. Most languages are for dead code. It's sad. Stop writing dead code (2022) was no where near the first, is decades and decades late in calling this out, but still a good one. https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
Sure, but why implement a novel language with said feature if your concern is a harness ... not on implementing a brand new language with this feature?
If you look at that code it’s possibly the worst rust code I’ve seen in my life. There are several files with 5000 to 10000 lines of code in a single file.
It looks 100% vibe coded by someone who’s a complete neophyte.
This looked interesting because I prefer rust over npm.
The first issue I had was to figure out the schema of the models.json, as someone who hadn't used the original pi before. Then I noticed the documented `/skill:` command doesn't exist. That's also hard to see because the slash menu is rendered off screen if the prompt is at the bottom of the terminal. And when I see it, the selected menu items always jumps back to the first line, but looks like he fixed that yesterday.
The tool output appears to mangle the transcript, and I can't even see the exact command it ran, only the output of the command. The README is overwhelmingly long and I don't understand what's important for me as a first time user and what isn't. Benchmarks and code internals aren't too terribly relevant to me at this point.
I looked at the original pi next and realized the config schema is subtly different (snake_case instead of camelCase). Since it was advertised as a port, I expected it to be a drop-in replacement, which is clearly not the case.
All in all it doesn't inspire confidence. Unfortunate.
Fwiw @dicklesworthstone / jeff Emanuel is definitely my favorite dragon rider right now, doing the most with AI, to the most effect.
Their agent mail was great & very early in agent orchestration. Code agent search is amazing & will tell you what's happening in every harness. Their Franktui is a ridiculously good rust tui. They have project after project after project after project and they are all so good.
This matters less and less in the new world. that fact that a fully compatible 10x faster clone came up, and is continuously working and adapting/improving, tells you that this is hugely valuable. It has users and it's thriving.
Caring about taste in coding is past now. It's sad :( but also something to accept.
Yeah, I tried to use this clone of pi for a while and its very, very broken.
First of all it wouldn't build, I have to mess around with git sub-modules to get it building.
Then trying to use it. First of all the scrolling behavior is broken. You cannot scroll properly when there are lots of tool outputs, the window freezes. I also ended up with lots of weird UI bugs when trying to use slash commands. Sometimes they stop the window scrolling, sometimes the slash commands don't even show at all.
The general text output is flaky, how it shows results of tools, the formatting, the colors, whether it auto-scrolls or gets stuck is all very weird and broken.
You can easily force it into a broken state by just running lots of tool calls, then the UI just freezes up.
This confused me about openclaw for quite some time. The whole lobster/crustacean theme is just firmly associated with rust in my head. Guess it's just a claude/claw wordplay.
I am building an entire GPT model framework from the ground up in Typescript + small amounts of c bindings for gpu stuff. https://github.com/thomasdavis/alpha2 (using claude)
Don't hate me aha and no, there is no reason other than I can
yes! I just don't understand that as well. Up until some time ago claud code's preferred install was a npm i, wasn't it? Please serious answers for why anyone would use a web language for a terminal app
I find the AI agent highly intriguing and the matplotlib guy completely uninteresting. Like an the ai wrote some shit about you and you actually got upset?
Whether the victim is upset or not, the story here is that some clown's uncontrolled, unethical, and (hopefully?) illegal psychological experiment wasted a huge amount of an open source maintainer's time. If you benefit from open source software (which I assure you, since you've used quite a lot of it to post a comment on the orange website, you do!) this should ring some alarm bells.
He's not upset. He saw an opportunity and is currently surfing it. That is, if it's not entirely fabricated. Expect maybe 5 or 6 stories very similar to this one, or analogous, this year.
Thank you. The guy being this upset about it is telling. The agent is in the right here and the maintainer got btfo; still going on whining about it days later
I've was promoted for producing a significantly simplified replacement for an existing system that was critical. it happened because the culture rewards engineering excellence.
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