| Blog System/5 | https://blogsystem5.substack.com/ |
| Homepage | https://jmmv.dev/ |
| EndBASIC | https://www.endbasic.dev/ |
Or the more tired āOne week with Claude Codeā-type article. Itās no secret that Iāve been grumpy about the new AI-based coding trend. Iāve been grumpy about the āpush from above to use AI or elseā. Iāve been grumpy about the eye-rolling hype I see on LinkedIn. Iāve been grumpy about being on the receiving end of vibe-coded PRs that over-engineer solutions to simple problems. Iāve been grumpy about the thought that we are about to see an amount of bloat like we have never imagined before. But, at the same time, Iāve been using LLMs to review my articles, to perform deep research, to generate cover pictures, and before last week, I had even dipped my toes into AI-based coding agents to help me with boring, repetitive tasks. And you know what? I see their promise of increased productivity, yet the amounts of slop Iāve witnessed make me skeptical and I have had little experience with coding agents myself to judge their promised usefulness. Soā¦ surprise! Last weekend I decided to start a Claude Code subscription and, after spending a week on it, I am uncomfortably excited to use it more. How has this happened? Letās take a look at how I ended here, the kinds of mini-projects I worked on throughout this past week, and the (semi-expected) downsides I encountered.
A little over a week ago, I hinted at writing an article on my journey to take a couple of web services out of Azure Functions and to self-host them on FreeBSD. Well, here it is! Enjoy.
https://jmmv.dev/2025/12/from-azure-functions-to-freebsd.html
Putting FreeBSDās āpower to serveā motto to the test. On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up to one of my web services being unavailable. All HTTP requests failed with a ā503 Service unavailableā error. I logged into the console, saw a simplistic āRuntime version: Errorā message, and was not able to diagnose the problem. I did not spend a lot of time trying to figure the issue out and I didnāt even want to contact the support black hole. Becauseā¦ there was something else hidden behind an innocent little yellow warning at the top of the dashboard: Migrate your app to Flex Consumption as Linux Consumption will reach EOL on September 30 2028 and will no longer be supported. I had known for a few weeks now, while trying to set up a new app, that all of my Azure Functions apps were on death row. The free plan I was using was going to be decommissioned and the alternatives I tried didnāt seem to support custom handlers written in Rust. I still had three years to deal with this, but hitting a showstopper error pushed me to take action. All of my web services are now hosted by the FreeBSD server in my garage with just a few tweaks to their codebase. This is their migration story.
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that Iāve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years andā¦ nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that things have cooled down, itās time to stir the pot and elaborate on those thoughts a bit more rationally. To summarize, the Twitter thread shows two videos: one of an old computer running Windows NT 3.51 and one of a new computer running Windows 11. In each video, I opened and closed a command prompt, File Explorer, Notepad, and Paint. You can clearly see how apps on the old computer open up instantly whereas apps on the new computer show significant lag as they load. I questioned how computers are actually getting better when trivial things like this have regressed. And boom, the likes and reshares started coming in. Obviously some people had issues with my claims, but there seems to be an overwhelming majority of people that agree we have a problem. To open up, Iāll stand my ground: latency in modern computer interfaces, with modern OSes and modern applications, is terrible and getting worse. This applies to smartphones as well. At the same time, while UIs were much more responsible on computers of the past, those computers were also awful in many ways: new systems have changed our lives substantially. So, what gives?
Components to build the EndBOX I and the assembled EndBOX I Micro. About a month ago, I officially unveiled the EndBOX: a retro-style micro-computer designed to run the EndBOX OS. And what is the EndBOX OS, you ask? Itās a small NetBSD system engineered to launch you into an EndBASIC interpreter as fast as possible. Today, Iām excited to announce the DIY guide to build your very own EndBOX and the first official disk images of the EndBOX OS!
Lobsters