signals. thinking about shifting my mental framework to identify signals instead of waiting for concepts to be assembled. exploring the amount of energy and opportunities for distractions through the operations of processing what just happened and what is happening to short circuit latent and unnecessary systems. cut through the assembly processes and identify the raw signals. recognizing that naming these "raw signals" is misleading. maybe, shifting observability lower in the stack.
Any conversation
I read
Still trying to figure out the boundaries of these tools' strengths without outsourcing important thinking, problem-solving, and the collective building-up of a mental model of the systems we're developing.
The shape of LLM tools as tools—fit for a purpose, ergonomic—is becoming clearer, and human patterns of behavior with them that do more harm than good are also becoming easier to recognize.
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).
I've linked up my blog (jeff-mitchell.dev) to
textlog. I hope to use the two things together now to build a bit more of a writing habit. The 500 character increase is nice, room to breath but not an essay. Gotta build the muscles slowly :)been building a voice first os using jev and some small voice models. I'm surprised how well it's working and I'm very close to the point where I can go into a feedback mode and tell it what behavior I want changed, it will spin up Claude or codex inside itself and setup the build to restart itself and continue with new code. tempted to let it build itself completely
this is where I live. it’s a plateau. it’s quiet, we have cats and there are goats around and fig and pear trees.
Fired up street view on Google Maps to have a look around. It seems like a pretty relaxed and peaceful place to live. 🌞
I was obsessed with Greece as a kid because of The Chipmunk's Adventure movie where they were dancing on the statues, ha. I was more into he statues (even if cartoon) than the dancing, and yet I have still never been there (I'm 45).
Crete is beautiful, I remember being on vacation there many years ago and hiking a long gorge. It was a really great experience.
Med dyp respekt minnes vi kong Harald av Norge som gikk bort i morgentimene i dag. Fred over hans minne. Våre tanker er hos den som har mistet en mann, de som har mistet en far og svigerfar, barn som har mistet en bestefar. Og et helt land som har mistet en konge. Må Gud styrke han som følger etter.
With deep respect we remember King Harald of Norway who passed away in the early hours of this morning. May his memory rest in peace. Our thoughts are with those who have lost a husband, those who have lost a father and father-in-law, children who have lost a grandfather. And an entire country that has lost a king. May God strengthen those who follow.