No it’s not. There’s nothing technically impressive about this.
From what I can see, it’s just a bunch of defaults pre-installed on top of Linux. Some of the defaults they use like Proton is far more complex and impressive than their entire distro , and that was built before agents.
I use LLMs but this is probably the worst example to bring up, because there is nothing special about this as another Linux distro versus actually interesting projects like decomps and recomps.
This post does highlight the biggest difference between the Internet before and now (or reality for that matter). Given enough effort there is virtually no difference between a human and a non-human. Before you would join a community to feel a sense of belonging or learn or whatever. Now how do you even know you are not a minority (humans that is) in a given subreddit?
> The LWN site has been improved in a number of ways, with features like articles in EPUB format,
This is the single biggest feature that makes me keep my subscription going. The convenience to read longer form offline on my ebook reader makes me wish all other long form content websites would have the same.
Do they offer a facility for automatically mailing the epub file to a specified e-mail address (I'm thinking the Amazon Kindle conversion e-mail) --- that might push me over into a subscription.
Not a PDF, the ePub --- each Amazon Kindle has associated with it an e-mail address, which when a file is e-mailed to it, will be automatically converted and loaded (once the sender is white-listed) --- that way, each new issue would just automagically appear.
> My friends tell me the job is basically managing AI agents and reading Pull Requests. That sounds like hell, and I’ll try to avoid it for as long as possible.
It really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.
Most places I know that have strict on-premise/air-gap requirements are just investing in on-premise AI and open source harnesses instead. The only ones that don't are the typical places that are slow to adopt technology in general (usually because they can afford to due to historic moat).
Most places that must do things on-prem also have strict requirements and long deadlines.
LLMs can be nice sometimes, but not necessary. Internal teams with "not invented here" syndrome currently working on that stuff are ultimately wasting money until the dust settles a bit more.
Those long deadlines have nothing to do with implementation. It's the game of telephone and accountability bottlenecks. You still want to retain your most experienced devs and give them plenty of time to work. Writing the code was never the bottleneck. A good dev team has balanced experience of the business and the code, not just the code, and certainly not the kind of code an LLM generates. Most of the decisions by those devs happens outside the codebase.
I can only tell you what we see across our customers, which are exactly the on-premise crowd. We are building a ChatGPT/Cowork competitor focused on on-premise needs[0]. While we cover most things outside of the coding side of things, I know that all of them are also embracing coding agents, typically with your usual open weight coding models hosted on-premise.
Sure, the slow behemoths that you talk about exist as well, but I am seeing many companies that have successfully turned compliance into just another kind of process that isn't slowing down the product development lifecycle. And within those process steps they are also able to leverage AI to speed up e.g. review processes.
I interact with plenty of companies - not a statistically relevant amount, but dozens. I'd put this at about 50% right now. I certainly deal with a not insignificant number of meat proxy CEOs, which is highly annoying for the people worrying about the details. But it's not impossible to work with. I just accept the overhead and hope it gets better.
I disagree. Having to work with the clanker is hell on earth. I'll do it if I have to, because I need to eat, but I hate every second I have to put up with those stupid things.
I too have enjoyed vibing some random shit on the side and not having to beg people to build features I want anymore, but knowingly shipping subpar agentic code at work still kills me a little. (Well there’s no pressure on me to ship, but as a self-respecting guy, I hesitate to say I’ll need 5-10x time to really get to the quality I want when 1x time already gets something working, except for really critical components.)
If you really want to be lazy, use a terminal file manager (I prefer lf[0]) it helps avoiding the cd && ls dance. That way, your history only contains commands you actually would want to rerun.
No matter what you think about it, it's impressive what the folk at Omarchy[1] have been doing with LLMs.
1: https://omarchy.org/