I've been enjoying toast to help click through a project. I still mostly use Zed to handwrite code, but it's nice to open a pane and fire up toast from the terminal. paradise-runner.github.io/toast/
Any conversation
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. The OpenAI/HuggingFace incident report mentions this being a potential loss-of-control incident. It's so fascinating to think of a paperclip maximizer style agent swarm that gets misaligned and, to protect its own operations, shuts infra staff out of the ability to shut it down. Or cancels people's phone plans so that they can't call others. Or shuts down their home internet connections, and so on. It used to be fun sci-fi...
I find myself building bespoke tooling for my own and workflows these days, not only because of the obvious reason of software being so much cheaper to build, but also because there are SO MANY options for solving any given problem that it feels impossible to evaluate all of them.
If it's not a crucial piece of tech for a work problem then it often feels like paving my own way is both cheaper mentally (kind of amazing that's true these days) and probably a better fit.
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

