Speaking as a Brit, our national trait is generally too understate things. So even saying what you mean, directly, comes off as a bit immodest and hyping it up in sales pitches sounds shady.
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
Speaking as a Brit, I couldn’t disagree more. I have no trouble understanding a wide variety of Europeans in a corporate environment, but sometimes struggle to even understand the basics of what Americans are trying to communicate, let alone the nuances of their position.
It’s like ‘American corporate’ is a totally different language that I don’t speak. The words sound the same, but that’s about it.
This is true for a lot of Americans too. God help me if I have to sit and listen to my CEO talk about anything and have to explain it to someone afterwards. It's just Buzzword Buzzword Agentic Buzzword Great Buzzword Exciting Buzzword Future Buzzword Growth Buzzword Great Great Great Exciting Exciting Exciting Buzzword.
There was a quote somewhere about Mercurial having a mental model small enough you can fit in your head - and that was the big win for me.
It was also fast and had very clean, easy to contribute to code. I remember submitting a patch and getting a bit of Python education from Matt, which was very useful.
Git is fine but it's inconsistent enough in the interface department, even after all this time, that I still get regularly frustrated. On the other hand, you can't just break a workflow that already exists and I very much appreciate it scales to work far beyond mine.
I do like that the git people are doing the difficult work of improving the UI over time - it's hard to change the engines while the plane is flying!
git's mental model is very, very small, if you care to learn it. Then all the commands and their "inconsistencies" start to make sense - they operate on the model almost without any magic, and not on whatever is user's intent (it can vary a lot)
I've recently been thinking how AI agents could affect this.
If you're lucky enough to be able to code significant amounts with a modern agent (someone's paying, your task is amenable to it, etc) then you may experience development shifting (further) from "type in the code" to "express the concepts". Maybe you still write some code - but not as much.
What does this look like for debugging / understanding? There's a potential outcome of "AI just solves all the bugs" but I think it's reasonable to imagine that AI will be a (preferably helpful!) partner to a human developer who needs to debug.
My best guess is:
* The entities you manage are "investigations" (mapping onto agents)
* You interact primarily through some kind of rich chat (includes sensibly formatted code, data, etc)
* The primary artefact(s) of this workflow are not code but something more like "clues" / "evidence".
Managing all the theories and snippets of evidence is already core to debugging the old fashioned way. I think having agents in the loop gives us an opportunity to make that explicit part of the process (and then be able to assign agents to follow up gaps in the evidence, or investigate them yourself or get someone else to...).
This resonates a lot.
Framing debugging as an investigation — with hypotheses, evidence and gaps — feels much closer to how I experience real debugging, especially on complex systems.
What I’m still unsure about is how much of that investigative process tooling should make explicit, without overwhelming the developer or turning it into a full case-management workflow.
Very excited to see this come out - though coding agents are impressive their UIs are a bit of a mixed bag.
Textual offers incredibly impressive terminal experiences so I'm very much looking forward to this.
I wonder how much agentic magic it'll be able to include though - Claude Code often seems like a lot of its intelligence comes from the scaffolding, not just the LLM. I'm excited to see!
Hope you like it. It is still Claude Code doing the work. Toad talks to the agent, and is the agent that works with the LLM. So the results should be identical to the native CLI.
I have written a coding agent which I plan to open up soon. By far the biggest time sink has been in the TUI - I've just implemented ACP and I really hope that I can use toad as a front end.
I love the Patagonian Welsh. BBC Wales, which often has great comedy, has a sitcom based around the original emigration to Patagonia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060cd20
The whole thing feels very much like a Star Trek plot to me with a culture leaving on a ship to an unknown world to preserve their way of life - which later the crew would happen upon in some episode.
In Cambridge we've got a clock called the Chronophage which is intended to be a sinister "eater of time" - the designer has done a good job of making it feel uncomfortable to look at. There's some detail here: https://www.corpus.cam.ac.uk/articles/secrets-corpus-clock
My memories of what I've heard over time:
* The grasshopper escapement actually is the demonic insect that sits on the top, "walking" around the serrated ring.
* Although it's backlit electronically it's actually a fully mechanical design - including all of the weird things it does.
* The Chronophage itself blinks its eyes unnervingly.
* It sometimes pauses or ticks slightly backwards, then runs faster to catch up again.
* On certain special dates it does extra weird stuff.
* The "chime" is a metal chain dropping into a box.
There were three made in the series, this was the first one. I've always found it slightly unappealing aesthetically but also compelling - there's no arguing with the fact that there's always a crowd of fascinated observers looking at it.
Until recently there was one in the wall of a bar in Douglas here on the Isle of Man. Apparently, the inventor of the thing lives here. Another is in his home.
However that bar, the rather rough 1886, is now the Island's first Wetherspoons... :-/
Yeah, Daniels was selling watches for low 7 figures so VAT or other forms of purchase tax would have been a significant chunk of change. And income tax of course.
"Daniels claimed that there was little money to be made in watchmaking, but his lifestyle suggested otherwise. In 1982 he moved, for tax reasons, to the Isle of Man, where he bought a substantial Georgian house complete with tradesmen’s entrance and sweeping drive."
I saw the one in Houston and it's quite fascinating. Not particularly unsettling unless you find bugs unappealing. Enjoyed the engineering for the device. Very cool and it looks cool too.
At first sight, it looks like some modern art piece but then you see the plaque that it's not an electronic clock (it has LEDs which made me think it was) and then it's cool!
How do you build a completely analog "random" system? Building a regular one is easy, building one that might seem random because of how many regular ones are tied together ... but true sources of entropy?
I would imagine that analogue randomness is easier than doing it in a deterministic digital system. Surely there are all sorts of creative methods. Dice or coins in a box? A ball falling through a galton board? Sampling a double-pendulum? Floating particles in a heated liquid?
> How do I make a mechanical thing happen at a random time with a lava lamp?
Use a heat lamp interrupted by the lava globules to activate a wax motor. If you get the angles right you can probably do this with the same light that runs the lamp itself, or you can put another lamp at a 90° angle (but will have to adjust the main lamp to keep the total heat at the level you want).
Or do similar with muscle wire; more temperature needed to trigger the actuator, but you can get them much smaller so the total heat can be smaller, if you run e.g. a collimated infrared laser as your heater across the lamp.
Acorn was doing stuff in Cambridge UK until more recently than I'd realised - it effectively incubated a load of talent that went on to find other companies. Famously ARM span out of it but many others also went on to do cool things - my current company was founded by Acorn people.
This demo was so cool. There were lots of alternative OSes out there back then that felt very impressive.
Linux at the time was cool too but less polished than now. Lots of people were on the Win 9x series, which wasn't amazing - and Mac OS X was not yet fully baked.
These other OSes (QNX, BeOS) felt polished, amazingly fast - and slightly alien. The main sad thing from my perspective was that I couldn't get them online (my machine had a winmodem and nobody had open source drivers for those for ages).
Yeah, I'm still sad that my NeXTcube quit booting up and then I never got OpenStep running on Intel hardware.
BeOS was a hoot, but I was essentially bodily ejected from a demo/user's group meeting when I asked how the slides were printed (at that time it didn't have printer drivers).
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
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