unix philosophy

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Good SaaS Products Are Like UNIX Tools
2 months ago
- SaaS products should focus on doing one thing well, like UNIX tools, rather than adding too many features.
- Micro-SaaS is a niche-market SaaS run by one person or a small team, with narrow focus, minimal costs, and no outside funding.
- Keygen intentionally does not handle billing because it is not its niche; it focuses solely on licensing.
- Customers can compose Keygen with other SaaS tools (e.g., billing, analytics) via webhooks, similar to the UNIX pipe operator.
- Focusing on one thing leads to sustainability, better relationships with other companies, and avoids the need for constant feature parity.
- Webhooks are essential for enabling composability between different SaaS products.
Why I (still) love Linux
2 months ago
- The author, a BSD and illumos enthusiast, acknowledges their lasting appreciation for GNU/Linux, which introduced them to Unix systems in 1996 and provided a sense of freedom through commands and pipes.
- Linux has become ubiquitous, powering desktops, smartphones (Android), cars, and countless devices, achieving widespread success despite initial compatibility challenges and the ongoing 'Year of the Linux Desktop' debate.
- Corporate involvement in Linux has been beneficial for mass adoption and Open Source acceptance, but the author criticizes trends like unnecessary disruption, systemd's deviation from Unix principles, and 'vibe coding,' which prioritize change over stability and minimalism.
- The author argues that Linux development now often sacrifices stability and cross-compatibility, influenced by disposable electronics culture and corporate pressures, while the GPL can enable dominant players to steer the project, contrasting with BSD licenses that ensure community control.
- Despite criticisms, the author still loves Linux for its role as a pioneering Open-Source project, its vast distribution ecosystem (e.g., Alpine Linux, openSUSE), improved hardware support, and its 30-year impact on their career, education, and personal freedom.
Towards a Harness That Can Do Anything
2 months ago
- LLM harnesses should be intuitive, transparent, lean, and error-resilient to reduce cognitive load on bots.
- Key principles include determinism in goal pursuit, minimal core prompts, and avoiding context limit issues.
- Leverage LLMs' coding knowledge by using familiar environments like Unix/Linux systems for efficiency.
- Harnesses need auditability, logging, and self-healing to handle failures at both LLM and harness levels.
- Adopt Unix philosophy: modular tools, interoperability, and text streams as universal interfaces.
- Organize data using a filesystem hierarchy (e.g., FHS) to help agents navigate and manage external data easily.
- Introduce a 'Kernel' event bus to monitor file changes and trigger LLM responses for real-time handling.
- Ambiance prototype includes default users like root, pai, and librarian for system tasks and interaction.
- Harnesses built on existing model knowledge (files, logs) outperform those requiring new training.

unix philosophy

Good SaaS Products Are Like UNIX Tools

Why I (still) love Linux

Towards a Harness That Can Do Anything