neongreen

I’m using exe.dev, yeah, but I don’t feel like it is a quality of life improvement for CRUD apps. Deploying smth that has to be persistent like a discord bot — yeah sure.

“Any agent on any VPS/VM” is an agent with self hosted infra. Lovable is an agent with managed infra. I think having managed infra is neat.

I was on the agent team at Lovable (no longer working there).

I think most solo devs would be better served by using Lovable than Codex or Claude, for the kind of apps Lovable is optimized for (i.e. CRUDs with thirdparty SaaS integrations).. and if you ignore the cost, b/c Codex sub is hard to beat.

Lovable is a normal, fully capable agent harness. With a Linux box. With all the usual features like MCPs, skills, subagents, browser, and whatever else.

You can ask Lovable to grab Rust from nixpkgs, write a raytracer, and compile to WASM, and it will happily do it. You can ask Lovable to write an OS in assembly and run it in v86, and it will do it. (I did both.)

The alternative to Lovable isn't Codex, but "Codex + Cloudflare account". I don't doubt that eventually Codex will be really good at using Workers and Durable Objects and R2 and serverless SQLite and Wrangler -- and having everything Just Work without needlessly exposing it to the user -- but idk I think it's not there yet.

As someone who used to have an incredibly hard time putting my app in front of users, or asking for feedback, or getting rejected, etc:

Posts like this one always made me feel like I was a coward. Like there was.. unvirtuousness.. in not killing one’s darlings, not validating ideas, not quitting things in time, not looking for product-market fit.

I can report that looking for product-market fit, and everything else from the list above, became easier once I started taking antidepressants and adhd meds.

For example, it turns out deciding to punch yourself in the face with reality is much easier when you don’t feel, for example, like abandoning a project would be a giant betrayal and a thing one might in theory do but you must never do ever under any circumstances.

- - -

There are likely many people who have more capacity for self control, and who are genuinely helped by hearing moderately harsh truths because they can (1) take a look at their behavior, (2) realize it hurts them and their chances of success, (3) realize where they’ve been blind to reality, and (4) change.

I suspect that such people assume — maybe correctly in most cases — that if someone hasn’t done (4), it’s because they haven’t done enough (1-3), and this is the appropriate lever to push.

I don’t know how to finish this comment.

> I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly why so may people seem to want the best model available

I've been programming since I was a kid. I enjoy it a lot, I like knowing how things work, I get excited about new compiler features, I stayed up every night for a week when I discovered Lean 4, etc etc etc.

At the same time I realized a few years ago that I just don't want to write any code ever. Or read any code. Coding is addictive and fun, but I'd rather talk to the computer and have things magically get done. (FWIW learning how to use LLMs feels more.. fulfilling, too)

Anyway. GLM 5.2 is nice and all, but I might have to spend half an hour guiding it to come up with a plan I'm happy with. And with Opus it could be 15 minutes. I'm still going to spend an hour talking to LLMs one way or the other, but with Opus it will be a less frustrating hour. If Fable gives me a frustration-free hour, I'll switch to Fable.

I worked at Standard Chartered and it's a bit similar, but it's hard for me to judge how much.

SC has its own Haskell compiler that produces bytecode that you can run locally, serialize, send to be executed somewhere else, etc. Most of the code still lived in a monorepo, though.

We did have a global data store (well, several) that any code could access. I was working on a more "normal" application that was still written in the SC haskell dialect but otherwise mainstream architecture -- postgres, deploying to a boring linux server, etc.

A colleague once described our dialect as "Python that looks like Haskell". This is an exaggeration, but a) we did use a lot of untyped dicts and everything-is-a-giant-relational-table structures, and b) my understanding is that the actual financial modelling was done in C++ and the SC Haskell was glueing things together. Idk.

About uv -- I did try to convert ppl to uv but it probably didn't spread further than my few colleagues at the Warsaw office.. well and also I merged a monorepo-wide documentation system that used sphinx and uv, but idk if it's still alive after I left.

Yes this is Slate

> Even though I acknowledge that "written in Rust" probably means the tool is relatively new, not buggy, and easy to use.

I genuinely chose the language for one of my projects based on this reasoning. I want to be in the nice UX gang.

I have the same feeling. I got used to infrastructure being run as a democracy, not merely “source available under GPL/BSD/MIT”. (It’s a big thing to want, sure, but I don’t mind wanting big things.)

A promise of money in the future is worth less than getting this money now. Present value (PV) here would be - how much you would pay now to get $X after T time.

Turns out that sum of PV($X in 1 year) + PV($X in 2 years) + … converges even though the series is infinite. Look up “perpetual bonds”.

The value of $10 paid annually forever is probably $200-500 depending on [things].

Source: I work in a bank but I’m also shit at finance so take this with a large grain of salt.

I learned about the `scoping` package today. Idk if it works exactly as I expect from other langs, though.

No slow pushes but I’ll be on the lookout for them.