AI augmented Repl driven dev has got me back into Clojure and it's been changing my life (full on JVM nerd: Kotlin mostly on the backend).
The syntax is the best in the world (how computer's really operate?) but it's always been a pain to setup the tooling for me. I'm dumb like that. Now with AI it's become super easy to get back into the REPL and I'm in heaven.
Totally moving it back into workflow and proposing to bring it back into the dayjob.
That's not what they meant. Lisp/Clojure syntax (s-expressions, code-as-data, functions as first-class values) maps closely to the theoretical foundations of computation - lambda calculus, which is arguably the mathematical essence of what computation is.
May I ask what your workflow actually looks like? There's been a fair bit of clojureposting over the last few days, and I've decided to jump in and learn.
I love the idea of an AI integrated repl (like what Jeremy Howard and team have done with solveit), it's far more in line with my preferred vision of the AI augmented future of coding. Less "swarm of agent" more, "learn with the agent".
Absolutely, spin up a TCP server in Ruby, make it run `eval` on what it receives and tell the agent how to call it with netcat or whatever, works like a charm :)
It's cool to rediscover Applescript for me (I'm late 40's) but it's a funny thing where I can like smell the NeXT in it almost nostalgically but it's quite handy in this new era of hijacking mac mini's (OpenClaw obviously is one way to do it, but why not just straight to the core).
I personally think coders get better with age, like lounge singers.
It's got nothing to do with liking it or not. This is ChatGPT:
> The masterpiece quality of Halt and Catch Fire lies in how precisely it shows the zero-sum reflex at work.
> Disagreement becomes disrespect.
> Respect becomes status.
> Status becomes survival.
> When Cameron’s game doesn’t align with business strategy, it isn’t a tactical debate; it’s an assault on her identity. When Joe pivots the company without consensus, he isn’t merely decisive; he is declaring sovereignty. When Donna asserts operational control, it reads as treason to those who conflate ownership with authorship.
Whether something sounds like a human, a book, or a language model doesn’t really affect whether the behavior it describes exists.
The claim is simple: in creative orgs, disagreements often escalate into identity conflicts because people map ideas to self-worth. Halt and Catch Fire portrays that escalation pretty clearly.
If that doesn’t resonate, what has your experience looked like instead?
> Whether something sounds like a human, a book, or a language model doesn’t really affect whether the behavior it describes exists.
It matters.
> the hardest thing to scale is not software. It is trust.
For example: Is this your sincerely held belief, the conclusion of all of the preceding words, and the point you were trying to express?
Because it reads, superficially, like shallow self-help pablum.
If you want your readers to differentiate these words from those words, you at least owe them the assurance that you've thought this through, and are willing to defend this idea.
If this is your own idea, it might be worth some consideration beyond its superficial presentation. If this is the output of an LLM trained on shallow observations and presentation style, it is not worth consideration.
If the claim is simple, why didn't you just state that, what is the AI Generated nonsense prose adding to anything? Prompting an LLM with 'Write me an essay linking Halt and Catch Fire to the idea that in creative orgs disagreements often escalate into identity conflicts because people map ideas to self-worth.' then pasting that into a substack is low-effort slop, embarrassing to post; embarassing to read.
The post is about people turning disagreement into a status fight. Your reply is mostly a status fight about the existence of the post. Kind of strengthens the thesis.
You can debate the argument: what’s embarrassing is feeling the need to announce to strangers that they’re wrong on the internet.
And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.
Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.
What's so great about it is:
- mushroom theory of management works
- trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible
- throw all the corporate bs away, just build
- competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works
- real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down
as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
The problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.
I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.
1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining:
So many people have been there. Working to put something together, but with gaps that are hard to close. I have been there.
Even billionaires like Zuck bite off more than they can chew and flail around.
For that matter, Jobs at NeXT succeeded in an unlikely way in the end. But for much of NeXT's existence it chronically couldn't get enough traction. They ended up droping the hardware. Then down purposed their OS into a developer platform to run on other OS's. So disappointing. But they did such good work, when Apple had a need, they were ready.
And NeXT was the spiritual successor to Apple's internal "Big Mac" project which never even made it to market before it was killed. (The project leader Rich Page and others started phoning the already-fired Jobs, begghing him to step in, when Big Mac was deep-sixed.) The Mac had come after the Xerox Star, which failed commercially, and the Apple Lisa, which failed commerically: then it too nearly failed commercially, until the desktop-publishing market finally came together around it. And even then industry wiseacres like John C. Dvorak had years more fun mocking it (not completely without justification) as an extravagant toy and a market also-ran.
Of course Compaq was Houston rather than DFW. The case design for the first portable was scribbled on the back of a paper placemat at the House of Pies diner on Westheimer.
They still could have had Donna working at TI, which has a presence there.
During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.
So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
It also annoyed me that the Commodore 64s used for their online service were shown with DOS prompts. I think the set designers thought "Commodore 64s are old; old computers ran DOS; therefore Commodore 64s ran DOS"
Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc.
Correction: Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and QuantumLink (insofar as Mutiny is QuantumLink, anyway). Season 3 can be roughly summarized as "LOL, Norton".
My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.
I got the sense that Kidders side was approximately equal to my father’s side, as my father said he provided a lot of information to the author through interviews and was happy with the account that ended up in the book. I’ll see what I can find though.
I ended up working for the lead of the competing team within DG (whose product lost to the book’s protagonist) for many years right after college at a different company he founded. I suspect he has a slightly different perspective on the whole thing, but I never asked.
Sadly my father and many of his contemporaries are no longer with us. But I’m really happy that this book exists as a durable & accurate snapshot of the period. The computer history museum also has a wonderful collection of interviews worth checking out, which includes several of the staff from DG [1]
This is really cool, I don't want to think about infra tbh just want to build. Is there a wold where an on-prem version of this exists? I buy a box, install shell script, and it just works?
Yo, fluid is built with on-prem in mind, specifically VMs. This is my initial use case for it. I am currently working on a remote version of fluid, where instead of CLI tool, it would be more of a codex/claude code app with a UI where you can install a server and then command hundreds of agents at once to work on infrastructure. Is this what you had in mind?
Thanks for your comment. Same here, Gen X. Off social media since pandemic. As Nassim Taleb says if it's really important someone will tell you. I feel like I'm on an island. I'm never outraged at all. Of course I hope there's more justice and equity in the world, but I am at peace with things and have no hatred or rage compared to when I was glued to social media.
That's my experience trying to use OpenSCAD from the cli for some home remodeling projects, there I was, neo-vim open, trying to do 3d with pure text files. But at the end of the day the platform felt very limited. Also "Big OpenSCAD" is hilarious.
Type's are for compilers ;) jk. I'm fully lover or type's but removing the constraint is easy in clojure. teams resist.
<3 the opposite of boring.