dirk94018

Author here. I own LinuxToaster and wrote this after getting frustrated with every AI tool asking me to move into its interface.

The short version: Unix survived 40 years because small tools compose. Most AI products are doing the opposite — building walls. I think that's a mistake, and I tried to explain why with some concrete examples from tools we've built.

Curious whether others feel the same friction, or whether I'm just a grumpy Unix person.

But wait.. there's even more..

Jam did a great job with its times and while. But sometimes you want map, so we wrote a couple more command line utilities:

imessage bot toast "reply in a friendly tone"

email bot toast "reply in a friendly tone"

One line agents. You now have an iMessage assistant and an email assistant running. Personality lives in a `.persona` file next to it, so you can version it, grep it, diff it.

No webhook setup. No OAuth dance. No "agent platform." The bot is just `toast` wrapped in a daemon that knows how to read from iMessage or IMAP and write back. Unix composition all the way down.

Fair. The posts have all been from our blog, because that's where I write. I'll make a point of submitting other things I find interesting too. In the meantime, happy to discuss the actual ideas in the article if anyone's curious. If you look at the posts, each one is something very different. AI bots creating a shared reality. Open source having a serious supply chain problem today. Gradient descent applied to code. Writing an inference engine from scratch. Each one stands on its own.

After reading the guidelines...

This IS the original source. I wrote it. The guidelines explicitly ask for this.

A post about supply chain attacks, the economics of open source, and the LiteLLM compromise that happened today is squarely on-topic for this audience.

Is "You're over-doing the self promotion" without engaging a single idea in the article a shallow dismissal?

Management is cargo culting the tooling without grasping what AI is actually good at. Because they don't look at it. Meanwhile smart blue collar guys are only limited by their willingness to ask questions. Because they do. It's the difference between the performance of work and work. The most fascinating aspect about AI may just be what it tells us about people, work, and society.