Episode 868 transcript

FLOSS-868 Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 868. Recorded Tuesday, April the 21st. Remove the Noodles. Hey folks, it's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about Free Libre and open source software. I am your host, Jonathan Bennet. And today we're gonna talk about programming. We're gonna talk about, is it fair to call it vibe coding? See, that's become a prerogative. Pejorative, excuse me, and I don't know that it's entirely accurate. Hopefully not accurate for what people are doing in open source projects, right? Anyway, the tooling is getting better. The tooling is getting better around this. And one of the fun things is that there's a lot of open source tooling around this, and that is what we're talking about today. I'm chatting with Johannes Millan about parallel code. And something he calls super productivity. Let's go ahead and bring him on and we'll dive into it. Johannes, welcome to the show. Johannes: Yeah, hi Jonathan. Thank you very much for having me. Jonathan: I am it's good to finally have you, this has been scheduled for a month and a half now. Quite a while. Yeah. And yeah, it's good. It's good to have you here. And so your project is parallel code? Johannes: Exactly. Yeah. I've two big projects. I say one Super Productivity, which is an source product project I've been working on for I think, nine years now. And just recently I think two months ago I started to work on parallel code yeah, which is by comparing much smaller. But yeah, also at the moment I'm dividing my time equally for both projects. And so Jonathan: These are two very different projects, aren't they? Johannes: Yes, they are. Jonathan: Let's talk about first the older one which is, because there are some people that are gonna go AI and just check out. So we'll talk about the not AI stuff first and then yeah. And then we'll dive into the LLM coding and maybe how those two go together more than you'd think. So what is super productivity? Johannes: Yeah, so productivity is an open source to do Time Tracker app which I started many years ago because I'm working as a freelance programmer for, yeah, I dunno, 15 years now or something like that. And and for some project there was required to do jra time tracking. And yeah, as as most programmers I don't like to do repeatable stuff. And so I thought, oh, there must be a smarter way to use this, and this is how it all started. And yeah, I don't know, some somehow I stuck with it. It's like sometimes became a little bit of an obsession of mine and yeah, it was, even though there was no, never making money with it or something like that was never yeah, a focus of it. Yeah, somehow. I dunno. I use it myself every day. That's probably a big part. And yeah, I really enjoy tinkering with my tools, like to yeah to make my day a little easier for myself. And so that's probably the reason why I couldn't just drop it and yeah, I don't know. And then in, in the last year, that's probably worth mentioning it grew quite a lot. I think maybe also a little bit there also many new people on the project who contribute stuff who yeah, do testing, write back reports, and it's. It's really interesting how this changed. And but for the most part of the seven years, I think or for the nine years yeah, it has been mostly a solar project. Not totally, there were always seven people, but yeah, Jonathan: yeah. I've not met many open source developers that wouldn't say. They like to tinker with tools. That sort of seems to be something that's true of all of us. That's why we're here. We like tinkering with the tools. Johannes: Yeah. Jonathan: Okay, so this is a setup for you to answer this question because it's gonna sound a little mean, and I don't mean it that way, but it's just a time tracker. How hard can it be? Surely that was like, you programmed it in a day and it was done, right? Johannes: Yeah it's a good question because I think the first prototype back then was much worse tools and without AI and everything, it was done, I think in maybe a week or something like that. And I dunno, I can't really say what happened, but there is there, the complexity grew. I think one part of it is the integrations like that it's connected to, yeah. To other tools. GitHub, like Jira GitLab and many more. That's one part of the complexity. And the other part is li