I am full of both excitement and exhilaration. On a dull and average Saturday where I was folding laundry, washing dishes, grocery shopping, and generally tidying up the Studio, some things I have had in my head for years are starting to come to fruition. All just because, in the middle of doing all those mundane tasks, I frequently responded to a response from an AI which was responding to my prompt, following a system of processes in order to accomplish some ridiculous things.
For one, my ten-year-old MacBook Pro which is running EndeavourOS no longer has KDE hogging all of its resources; instead, a very customized version of Hyprland draws my desktop. And on that desktop, I have some applications which run in the terminal that tie into a database which is automatically synchronized to my own server on the web, which synchronizes back to the Studio computer.
I am not a developer.
I did not spend the last 15 years since I studied Computer Science in university practicing software development. My professional life has been in the entertainment industry, working in the shadows making complicated processes work for Stars and Artists to have their bright and shiny moment in the limelight. There are some thought processes and problem-solving skills which apply to the cognitive work of coming up with a program, but the obstacle has always been the knowledge of how code gets written. Now that barrier has been kicked down, and it will be fair to say that anyone who realizes that machines can write code will not soon forget that fact.
The program I have is not amazing, it doesn't have flashy bells and whistles, but it does do the thing I ask it to. And with the conversation and memory processes built into the system for development, plus some tweaks of my own, now I have something that I think is a good start.
What are you talking about?
So I started two years ago with text files (.txt), and then, when ChatGPT started to spit out markdown files, I adopted that and moved them into Notion. (I had used Bear Notes in the past; it was nice but awkward.) Then Notion turned out to be expensive. So I climbed the steep knowledge hill of Obsidian. But after seven months of heavy file creation, editing, writing, and extensive interlinking, I broke it. Well, not broke it, but it got to be way too hard to drive it. It was no longer useful.
Since mid-December, I have been trying to get all my 55K notes into a database to make it easier to search, edit en masse, and basically do scale-level computational transformations. Two weeks ago, that happened. And this week, I froze all the Obsidian vaults and committed them, then took them off the local hard drive. But now I needed a way to do that work in the database, and there were no off-the-shelf applications which would do what I wanted it to do, so I built my own Notion/Obsidian but using my own database and technology stack in Rust.
There will be more to write about later, but today I just wanted to celebrate feeling so excited.
