Thanks for sharing. The demo linked below looked pretty cool, I think this might be a nice complement to Glamorous Toolkit in some of my personal and work flows.
Notes isn't exactly dead. A couple of years ago I helped a swedish county extract social services data from a system built on it, which is still in use by quite a few other counties.
Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.
I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.
I can only really compare it with Access, and between the two, you can get a bit more done a bit more easily with Notes over MS Access, but that's another application that didn't get a clear path to modern usage.
I wanted a stackable desk tray shelf thing for my desk in literally any size for my clutter. Too lazy to go shopping for one, and couldn't find one on any of the maker sites, so I had claude write me an openSCAD file over lunch break then we iterated on it after-hours. By end of work next day I had three of them sitting on my desk after about 3 hours of back-and-forth the night before (along with about half a dozen tiny prototypes), and thats including the 2hr print time for each shelf.
I want a music metadata tool that is essentially TheGodfather but brought into the modern day and incorporates workflows I wish I had for my DJing and music production. And not some stupid web app, a proper desktop app with a proper windowing toolkit. I'd estimate it would take me 12-18 months to get to a beta the old way, to the exclusion of most of my other hobbies and projects, instead first Gemini then Claude and I managed to get a pretty nice alpha out in a few months over the summer while I was unemployed. There's still a lot left I want to add but it already replaced several apps in my music intake workflow. I've had a number of successful DJ gigs making use of the music that I run through this app. Funny enough the skills I learned on that project landed me a pretty great gig that lets me do essentially the same thing, at the same pace, for more pay than I've ever made in my SWE career to-date.
A bunch of features for my website, a hand-coded Rails app I wrote a few years ago, went from my TODO pile to deployment in just a couple of hours. Not to mention it handled upgrading Ruby and Rails and ported the whole deployment to docker in an afternoon, which made it easy to migrate to a $3 VPS fronted by cloudflare.
I have a ton of ideas for games and multimedia type apps that I would never be able to work on at an acceptable pace and also earn the living that lets me afford these tools in the first place. Most of those ideas are unlike any game I've ever seen or played. I'm not yet ready to start on these yet but when/if I do I expect development to proceed at a comfortably brisk pace. The possibilities for Claude + Unreal + the years and years of free assets I've collected from Epic's Unreal store are exciting! And I haven't even gotten into having AI generate game assets.
Would you share the music app? Do you have a public repo or demo somewhere?
You didn't really describe it very much, so it's hard to say what it actually does. I'm interested in evaluating the quality of vibecoded projects people actually use.
At a later date, perhaps. I haven't messed with this project since I got employed and it was written over summer 2025, when the tooling for agentic development was a lot worse. (Very ADD here) There's also the open question of how best to package a python app that makes use of PyTorch and SciPy for distribution to nontechnical users. I want to solve that before I start putting this in other people's hands.
Careful with the term 'vibe coded', that does not characterize how I work.
Vibecoding is the term for building software with LLM tools. Did you do something different?
I'm just getting tired of hearing claims of incredible software being built with LLM-based tools, but when I ask to see them, I get nothing.
Your claim of 12-18 months for a windowed music metadata app seem weird. That seems like about a week with Dear ImGui and some file format reading libraries to me. Am I missing something?
> Vibecoding is the term for building software with LLM tools
without manual review and guidance. Coasting along purely on vibes. Hence the name. Agentic development is the middle ground where you're actively reviewing and architecting.
Dear Imgui isn't a 'proper' windowing toolkit. It's immediate-mode, it doesn't use OS affordances. Its not WinForms or GTK or QT (though to be fair QT isn't quite native but its by far the closest)
I never made any claims of 'incredible software'. I am building things that I need and want. I will give them to the world if I so choose and if they are good enough. And its not there yet.
And considering that I have almost zero domain knowledge in the area of DSP or audio analysis, that I'd only have a couple hours a day to work on it at best (energy, motivation, and other factors notwithstanding), and the amount of learning it would take to get to the point where something like that would be "about a week" is where most of that 12-18 months goes. And yes the metadata and GUI parts are easy, but the code that generates the metadata that is good enough to perform with? Across every possible container/meta/audio format? That produces quality results on both beatport downloads and 96khz vinyl rips? I'm trying to build something to consolidate my original music library (hundreds of thousands of files) with divergent sublibraries on multiple (proprietary) DJ platforms. Basically cleaning up after 20 years of fucking around without a plan. That's hard.
The belief that there is no fundamental difference between mammals navigating fractal dimensions and imprisoned electrons humming in logic gates has to be considered a religious one.
No, it's called functionalism. To me, it's actually the opposite, assuming there is a fundamental difference between simulated neurons and real ones seems almost religious.
While it's true that we aren't there yet, and simulated neurons are currently quite different from real ones (so I agree there is a big difference at the moment), it's unclear why you presumably think it will always stay that way.
If you actually have a way to fully, without reductions, simulate matter, that's probably a Nobel prize coming your way.
The common scientific understanding is that this is not possible, at least not without extreme amounts of energy and time.
The dimensionality, or complexity if you'd prefer, of your logic gates is quite different from the cosmos. You might not agree but in my parlance a linear and a fractal curve are fundamentally different, and you can try to use linear curves to approximate the latter at some level of perspective if you want but I don't think you'll get a large audience claiming that there is no difference.
As far as I know we've also kind of given up on simulating neurons and settled for growing and poking real ones instead, but you might have some recent examples to the contrary?
For the qualities we care about, it may turn out to be the case we don't need to simulate matter perfectly. We may not need to concern ourselves with the fractal complexity of reality if we identify the right higher level abstractions with which to operate on. This phenomenon is known as causal emergence.
> That is, a macroscale description of a system (a map) can be more informative than a fully detailed microscale description of the system (the territory). This has been called “causal emergence.”
> A highly compressed description of the system then emerges at the macro level that captures those dynamics of the micro level that matter to the macroscale behavior — filtered, as it were, through the nested web of intermediate ε-machines. In that case, the behavior of the macro level can be predicted as fully as possible using only macroscale information — there is no need to refer to finer-scale information. It is, in other words, fully emergent. The key characteristic of this emergence, the researchers say, is this hierarchical structure of “strongly lumpable causal states.”
Who are "we", and why would I care about them here?
There are situations where approximations are good enough for simulations, sure, but that's not the subject here.
I reject the idea that chatbots have feelings or intellect because they output text that is similar to what a human might write in some hypothetical situation or other. To the extent that they can have those properties, it is to the same extent as Clark Kent can, if one were to accept such a conflatory and confused discourse.
The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over.
Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?
> The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me
I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent.
For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.
Would you consider taking a dump and then butchering an animal and then eating without washing your hands first, to be an issue of intelligence or knowledge?
The whole thing about washing hands comes from (some approximation of) germ theory of illness, and in practice, it actually just boils down to stories of other people practicing hygiene. So if one's answer here isn't "knowledge", it needs some serious justification.
Expanding that: can you think of things that are "intelligence" that cannot be reduced like this to knowledge (or combination of knowledge + social expectations)?
I think in some sense, separating knowledge and intelligence is as dumb a confusion of ideas as separating "code" and "data" (doesn't stop half the industry from believing them to be distinct thing). But I'm willing to agree that hardware-wise, humans today and those from 10 000 years ago, are roughly the same, so if you teleported an infant from 8000 BC to this day, they'd learn to function in our times without a problem. Adults are another thing, brains aren't CPUs, the distinction between software and hardware isn't as clear in vivo as it is in silico, due to properties of the computational medium.
Because comparing the human brain and the way it is thinking and seeing and interacting to/with the world to physical/mechanical things like CPU/SSD brings with it huge abstraction gaps, to the point of making the comparison null.
The definitions of the words are contingent on human experience, even more so than "code" are "data" where we try to be more mechanistic, and still most people make the mistake of thinking they're distinct categories (spoiler: they're not; whether something is "code" or "data" depends entirely on your perspective).
If we want to draw computing device analogies, then the brain is an FPGA that is continuously reconfiguring itself throughout its runtime.
One might consider it the magnum opus of Thomas Hobbes, a pioneering political thinker who had a massive influence on both conservatism and liberalism. For conservatives his arguments on human nature that conclude that we are inherently brutish and violent and cannot be allowed to rule ourselves are very attractive. He proposed an early social contract theory as a solution, which liberalists have found very attractive.
Hobbes was an intellectual on the right, which is a rather uncommon subject here. He was rather well versed in the science and scholastic methods of his time, and took pains to try and think his views through and make good arguments. This is more than you could say about, say, Rand or Mises, thinkers under the same umbrella who loathed intellectuals.
Now the right is plaguing us with crypto- and outright fascists who don't actually know anything, don't want to know anything, and especially don't want us to know anything. E.g. this recent interview with Marc Andreessen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA&t=56s , who, with unbridled confidence, makes the claim that original sin was invented by Freud in the 1920s and that no "great men" of history wasted time on introspection and self reflection.
I might be an enemy of the right, but Hobbes I can respect and enjoy reading.
Watching that again reminds me that this guy is so poorly educated and not learned. Sure he was an engineering student at UIUC and wrote a neato browser, but wow he does not know history or philosophy well.
But he does the grifter trick of making coy observations like that 1920s bs. And he had so much time and wealth to improve those insights!
Or, he knows but this narrative makes him feel better about his behavior.
I'm not so sure he is grifting, do you have any clips where he slips and shows himself to be knowledgeable of his society and its history?
I have a similar view of Musk, Thiel and Karp, and some others I can't be bothered to remind myself of. Perhaps the Mandelsons belong to this crowd, but I suspect the Kochs have a bit more of an intellectual slant.
It's known to take a lot of discipline to keep your mind sharp and study when your power grows and other people make your life convenient and shielded from the misery of the masses. Marcus Aurelius makes this a core issue of his Meditations, the strife needed to make true and confident measurements of oneself and not get lost in superstition. Perhaps it is an impossible ideal but the ambition is at least interesting, in contrast to whatever Andreessen and his ilk are doing to themselves.
It's a grift tactic (even the exact type of laugh when he brings up Freud), but I agree with you that he's not literally grifting, more like a white-washing.
Thanks for bringing up Meditations -- it was gifted to me three years ago. Although I roughly knew Stoicism, it was my first time reading it. It helped reaffirm my focus on OSS as a channel for personal improvement and contribution to society. With so much world chaos, probably a good time re-read it.
If that's your thing, maybe complement with Augustine's Confessions. He had a somewhat complicated relation to stoicism but was one of the most important patristic writers to make use of stoic ideas.
It's a document that details an interesting person, who takes both ethics and himself very seriously, much more seriously than is common in the contemporary occident.
"For conservatives his arguments on human nature that conclude that we are inherently brutish and violent and cannot be allowed to rule ourselves are very attractive."
I really hope you are European. What you said is true of (most) European Conservatives. If you are an American, that is the most incorrect thing I have read all week. American Conservatives are the exact opposite of what you describe.
The core of the American right wing is to reject the idea in your quote in all ways. The individual is the highest ideal in libertarian ideology. This is why the US Republicans never, ever align themselves with political parties in other countries. They have a completely different set of beliefs. And for some weird reason Europeans completely ignore this and will even react violently when it is explained to them. Its just weird...
Conservatives draw towards authoritarian or "strong" leaders reflect this idea, while its at odds with the more individualistic philosophy.
There is a cognitive dissonance there.
You seem to be lumping conservatives and libertarians into the same group, but I think that's a mistake. I agree with your description as it pertains to libertarians, but conservatives tend to recognize as Christians who recognize certain deficiencies of humans and look to a higher power as a source of rule and law.
The American Right of the 80's through 00's maybe. But today's right wing seems more authoritarian than anything post-Trump. There's this weird sort of thirst for a strong-man government on the right that seems to run counter to the individual liberty arguments they tend to make. I don't get it and I wish it made sense.
Sure, the US is weird as it is a one-party state that constitutionally and supposedly is fundamentally liberalist, which has the effect that the only viable collective politics becomes fascist or fascism adjacent. Hence the insistence on historical revisionism, genocidal military campaigns and slavery-like institutions.
To the extent US politics is libertarian it is also very selectively so, it does not extend to all people and discards individualism as a universal ethos, either explicitly or by blaming its victims.
With all the LLM bots they need a new way to sort out the people from the machines to not lose ad revenue and to help their spook friends.
It's better for them if this "responsibility" rests with another organisation, they don't get blamed as much when the information leaks and it is replaceable.
If someone reads this and wonders what JBoss is, the contemporary variety is called WildFly and it is actually rather easy to install and play around with.
Yep, I'm using JBoss as a catch-all for older "big-iron" style Application Servers - modern Jakarta EE (10 onwards) is much more slimmed down, and a solid option.
unsure re Maven, 4.0.0 has been around the corner for years, but I think there is space for a modern alternative that is JPMS first, supports semantic versioning (i.e. tilde/carat notation) with lockfiles, and doesn't require a bunch of plugins out of the box for common use-cases. Maybe Mill (https://mill-build.org) - i've yet to try it.
Mill looks kind of nice on the surface but I haven't seen it in action in any serious project. I suspect the flexible DSL might come with a maintenance burden.
XML is nice, if your pom.xml is massive, just suck it in through JAXB and program against it, perhaps render it to a web page. XSLT can also be helpful. We're not supposed to look at XML as plain text.
Not really, no. It is similar but worse than Maven in that it requires quite a bit of time investment to configure, and shares the drawback of Gradle that it is configured in a programming language instead of a configuration language.
Switching out Maven for a larger maintenance burden might be reasonable in a large organisation that is swimming in competent employees, but most do not.
As for obvious contender, I'd say that would be Gradle, which is harder to get someone started with than Maven and due to the DSL allows you to invent weirder footguns.
Did everyone just agree to forget about Gradle? It was everywhere not too long ago. I think I even prefer it to Maven, in a choice between a rock and a hard place type of way.
As you’re familiar with the JBoss space, why would someone use an enterprise container over a simple HTTP server (Tomcat, Jetty, etc)?
Currently I’m trying to externalize as much as possible to the service mesh. I want teams to stand up a basic unencrypted HTTP server that accepts the company headers and just works with as minimal of a runtime as possible.
I wouldn't use application servers today, but they were solving many of the same issues as whole kubernetes clusters do, decades ago.
The Java (now Jakarta) EE standard on top is a good base for third party implementations to "speak a common language", e.g. it's not that hard to move between Quarkus/spring/micronaut etc, even if not all support the actual standard.
Yeah, same, but Elixir gigs aren't as common as Java gigs. However, if one ends up in a Java role, chances are that Elixir would be a good porting target for the systems since it typically can replicate the architecture but with less fuss and has pretty good support for interfacing with Java.
One of the main reasons I like vim is that it enables me to navigate code very fast, that the edits are also quick when I've decided on them is a nice convenience but not particularly important.
Same goes for the terminal, I like that it allows me to use a large directory tree with many assorted file types as if it was a database. I.e. ad hoc, immediate access to search, filter, bulk edits and so on. This is why one of the first things I try to learn in a new language is how to shell out, so I can program against the OS environment through terminal tooling.
Deciding what and how to edit is typically an important bottleneck, as are the feedback loops. It doesn't matter that I can generate a million lines of code, unless I can also with confidence say that they are good ones, i.e. they will make or save money if it is in a commercial organisation. Then the organisation also needs to be informed of what I do, it needs to give me feedback and have a sound basis to make decisions.
Decision making is hard. This is why many bosses suck. They're bad at identifying what they need to make a good decision, and just can't help their underlings figure out how to supply it. I think most developers who have spent time in "BI" would recognise this, and a lot of the rest of us have been in worthless estimation meetings, retrospectives and whatnot where we ruminate a lot of useless information and watch other people do guesswork.
A neat visualisation of what a system actually contains and how it works is likely of much bigger business value than code generated fast. It's not like big SaaS ERP consultancy shops have historically worried much about how quickly the application code is generated, they worry about the interfaces and correctness so that customers or their consultants can make adequate unambiguous decisions with as little friction as possible.
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