> The agentic coding tools have got extremely good at converting business logic specifications into pretty well written APIs and services.

I haven’t experienced this at all. They can do okay with greenfield services (as the author mentioned). However it’s often not “extremely good”. It’s usually “passable” at best. It doesn’t save me any time either. I have to read and audit every line and change it anyway.

This could have been a plugin.

I liked the idea but it made it impossible to read the explanation of the experience.

I really hope sites continue their RSS feeds. It seems like less and less of them have them available or don’t care to keep them updated.

You can usually find a feed in google. Some people make feeds by crawling sites.

Yeah that’s true. I also built a couple feeds for some sites I use that have an API but no feed.

For me so far the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of CI/CD.

You can bring your own Woodpecker CI or Forgejo Actions runners. The cheapest solution is to just run them at home in a VM.

Codeberg is a community driven project, which provides CI for FOSS projects, and it's a bit unfair to expect them to provide free compute for random and/or private projects.

For what it's worth, I've had better experience with running self-hosted Forgejo Actions runners compared to self-hosted Github Actions runners.

For the record I don't think they have to support the same level as GitHub. It's just one of the biggest barriers for me and my projects is all.

What do you mean? https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/

It exists yes, but you need to request access to it (which is manually reviewed), comes with a bunch of restrictions and it’s a limited resource.

I have several projects I’d want to move over but thats enough of a barrier for me to lose interest. There’s also Forgejo Actions but I assume paying for your own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub.

> you need to request access

Codeberg has free Forgejo Actions instance that you can use without a request, but with limited resources[1]:

> own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub

You can rent a VPS for as cheap as $15/year or run it locally.

[1] https://codeberg.org/actions/meta

CI is an important feature of a project to give automated feedback to contributors.

However I would not trust external contributors' code on my server.

Game Informer is doing the same. I got the most recent copy and it was just a breath of fresh air. Articles written for their content, not to fill some quota or drive clicks. It was a month late (mostly stuff about SGF) but it didn’t matter. I got to read what these passionate writers thought of the games and demos there and that was a great read, even if it wasn’t “news”.

Really? I had a subscription to GI for a year or so because it came free with the GameCube I bought from Gamestop. I assumed it was just GS' in house ad rag. It's cool to know it still exists...

Oh wait what's that, I just went to wikipedia and I was correct in my assessment but also now it's independent? Shit I might just subscribe for the sake of it.

Entertainment is more timeless than ‘news’. You can keep the copies in stock for a month or more, which is great for kiosks. Additionally, entertainment can be fun for bored traveling people.

You might like Edge magazine. I've gotten a handful of copies over the years and have been consistently impressed by the quality.

Do you use their actions at all?

As expected we’re getting closer and closer to the Trough of Disillusionment. That’s not a bad thing, because it leads to the Plateau of Productivity.[1]

Anecdotally for myself I’m finding that LLMs are great when I can give it a hyper specific target like a function to write. This isn’t because it can’t write an entire script. It can. It’s because the more I let it run wild, it feels like my understanding of the code gets exponentially worse.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Growing disillusionment among programmers (whose productivity gains, by the way, represent the most successful use case for AI yet) is indeed not necessarily a bad thing.

What is concerning is that VCs seem to believe we are still in the exponential growth phase of the hype cycle. I believe the consensus among them (and the bigtech-adjacent shills) is that they are targeting a trillion-dollar market at minimum. Somehow.

Why is that concerning? The VCs job is to sell to the bigger fool. They are going to pump that narrative for years, so that they can make some exits. Regardless of underlying realism.

Where's the NFT plateau of productivity? Asbestos? Lead?

The Gartner model doesn't actually have anything to say about technology, it's just astrology for rich people.

All of these agentic IDEs could just be visual studio code plugins. They’re likely not because how do you secure VC funding for a plugin?

But Continue and a bunch of others literally did that.

The better question is why is there this horrible monoculture in SW startups around raising money through VCs? We need more regular businesses who build something useful and charge a fair price. Period.

Simply put, without VC funding, these services would cost hundreds of dollars per month, and nobody would pay those prices. Companies like Anthropic can offer $20 plans precisely because they have venture capital backing.

Consumers will always gravitate toward the more affordable option.

More importantly - how do you monetize a plugin?

There are lots of ecosystems where pro users pay for plugins to get extra features. See the ecommerce domain, jetbrains, even ms teams has plugins that are paid.

VSCode has some popular paid plugins like LSPs or some for git.

I dont see why it wouldnt be possible to monetize a VSCode plugin.

You.. require a subscription. These have existed long before LLM-assisted coding was a thing.

Honestly what a great application of LLMs. FFmpeg is a very powerful tool, and as with most powerful tools is very complicated to run correctly. Do the files get uploaded though? Or does it just grab the location on disk?

Nothing is uploaded, everything runs locally.

This appears to use ffmpeg.wasm

Therefore you lose any hardware acceleration I guess? I'd prefer to run an actual native ffmpeg on my machine, but of course then there's the security issue of copy-pasting a command line of "unknown" origin...