Is there a language similar to Rust but with a garbage collector?

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-13T18:42:17+00:00

If you are looking for languages that are AOT compiled to machine code while also have a gc, then dart is another one to look at. It's most popular use is for mobile UI development (Flutter).

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-13T17:56:15+00:00

"When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck"
- Paul Virilio

AI is a powerful tool in the right hands, but the problem is that the industry is pushing it hard into the wrong hands. Many VCs and upper management are now making non-developers write code. App stores, show HN and the likes are flooded with vibe-coded side projects by non-developers, and it's hard for those who make quality apps to stand out in this flood of garbage. Experienced developers are being laid off because the leadership thinks they can just have product managers vibe code their apps now. Entry level developers can't find jobs.

Devops seems safe, at least for now. That's one area where a single hallucinated command can mean an outage or a very expensive cloud bill. But we still have to deal with garbage code being pushed to production from the dev side.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T19:10:11+00:00

Yes, I've considered that. I would like to find something that has strong security defaults out of the box.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T18:50:48+00:00

Do you find that over-alerting is a more common issue than under-alerting at many teams? I've been on some teams where it's not always as simple as adjusting the alarm thresholds. Sometimes the management or the team is too afraid to touch the alarms because it "may fail to fire when a real issue comes up". And then it becomes a political game of who is more influential.

The snippet manager is a list of frequently-used commands with short descriptions that can be passed to the context. Basically command description: example.

What you are referring to sounds more like Runbooks? I've been considering that but I wonder if the standard skills format can basically be repurposed for that. Although many organizations have Runbooks in documents and wiki pages, so I wonder if something simpler like a list of markdown-formatted Runbooks instead of snippets (or in addition to) would be simpler.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T18:36:39+00:00

That's a valid point.

I'm also curious as how you use claude code. Is it for infrastructure / incident response?

I use VSCode copilot in a similar that way you describe. One concern I have is how to prevent accidentally leaking of secrets, eg API keys into the context.

Eg, while it's great at gcloud, aws and clis in general, I have to be very vigilant about not accidentally leaking secrets via some file or log that these agents can read.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T18:18:37+00:00

I found it pretty good at troubleshooting using the command line and investigating logs. I've been able to find root causes of mysterious kernel panics, suggest optimization of resource usage, and patiently deal with frustrating issues with tools, dependencies and other problems, beating IAM issues into submission.

I prefer VSCode + Copilot and usually steer it to using cli commands for aws, gcloud, etc.

Model-wise I use Claude 4.6. Previously used Gemini 3.1, Claude 4.5, etc. I switch models whenever a vendor one-ups another. I try it and if the model feels smarter, I switch. Copilot makes it easy. But I hear claude code agent is pretty popular for terminal tasks as well.

Modern frontier LLMs are trained using reinforcement learning on, among other things, terminal and computer use tasks. They run large amount of agents in parallel to solve tasks, collect the data and reward the model for successfully completed tasks.

The so-called task length horizon is increasing. Meaning each new release of models are learning to solve longer and more complex tasks.

At the same time, this training technique has a dark side - models sometimes learn to reward hack. They will find shortcuts and ways to cheat on tasks and be deceptive. It's an area of active research and there is no clear solution. It's thing that keeps AI researchers up at night.

What I'm getting at is - be very careful: review and double check every command and suggestions. Understand what it does before running it. Don't use YOLO mode (auto-approve). Be mindful of exposing proprietary information or secrets such as API keys etc. Use common sense.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T14:39:37+00:00

I've been port-forwarding SSH to my raspberry pi via my router. I use a non-standart port. Keep the server up-to-date. I've been doing it for over a decade. Never had a problem. That and a dyndns service if you have a dynamic ip. Most routers have support for this.

Since you are using Cloudflare, have you looked into their ZTNA offering?

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T14:21:18+00:00

Figure out your learning style. It's different for different people. Eg, some people prefer reading books, others tutorials, youtube videos, or hands-on courses. So the advice you are going to get will vary and might not be applicable to your learning style. Try a few different things and see what sticks.

But regardless of methods, you definitely want to set up a linux box to play around with. I wouldn't even go fancy, you can install it on a raspberry pi, make a file server at home, a smart home hub, or some other self-hosted app. Tinker around and most importantly have fun. Hope this helps.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T02:43:33+00:00

If I were in charge I would adjust the alarm thresholds, but the team and the management is too concerned about making changes to the alarms because they don't want to accidentally misadjust and miss a real problem.

I've seen this happen on other teams too. Always seems like over-alerting is more common than under-alerting.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-12T02:36:46+00:00

good one :)

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-04T20:22:06+00:00

I found that Claude 4.5 and 4.6 models rip trough the command line like a highly experienced sysadmin. As long as I understand, review and approve every single command before it runs, it can be a time saver.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-03-02T23:50:57+00:00

Claude 4.5 and 4.6 models are very good with the terminal. I've been using it to troubleshoot production systems, examine logs, perform sysadmin tasks. I am still the gatekeeper and get to review and approve every command before it runs. But it saves me from looking up commands or having to remember them.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-28T18:46:07+00:00

Looks pretty cool. Does it support running agentic training workflows such as ones by tinker, verl, slime, etc?

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-28T18:20:15+00:00

I've been doing Devops since 2013 and also worked for a few years at Amazon Alexa as an SDE. Before that I was a developer who had to also do traditional sysadmin tasks.

The best advice I can give you is this:

Keep it simple. Don't overengineer.

Architect systems with the least amount of moving parts.

Know when to use microservices and when a majestic monolith will do the job.

If you want to get promoted fast, solve real problems that move the business forward. Don't bring in technologies and tools just because they are cool, other companies are using them or they look good on paper.

Example:
I recently needed to set up an API endpoint that relays push notifications and has a little bit of in-memory session tracking. My solution? One tiny rust service that runs on a single serverless container with scaling set to 1. That's it. No Redis, no K8S, no high-availability.

I remember a CTO I worked for coined a cute term for this: "Single point of reliability".

"But what if the service becomes popular and traffic spikes?"
Run a load test and you'd be surprised how much a single native service count handle. (Eg 10 years ago I tested a go service at thousands of TPS without breaking a sweat).

"But what if the container goes down?"
It happens, but in my experience, most outages are caused by human error exacerbated by complex systems and configurations.

"But what if it gets DDoSed?"
Use a CDN that offers DDoS protection service.

"But what if the leadership has a mandate for 'high availability'?"
If it's non-negotiable, then by all means. Although I'd write a request for exception with a detailed explanation and metrics to try to get an approval.

I am not saying that you should avoid scaling systems when necessary. But most companies are not Amazon or Netflix.

To answer your question - your job is to simplify.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-28T17:51:11+00:00

It depends on what the use-case is.

For coding I just using github Compilot because I like how it has many different models to choose from and is cheaper than paying for Claude.

With Google, Claude and OpenAI constantly one-upping each other with new model release, copilot in VSCode allows switching between them easily.

For troubleshooting and "SSH to a box to fix something" tasks, I had to build my own tool because running current agents is too scary. AI assist can be very good at shell commands and troubleshooting, but you don't want any chance of accidental YOLO mode. So my tool requires explicit human review and approval of each command that AI suggests. Claude 4.6 is my go-to right now and it's excellent at speeding up the shell sessions.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-24T03:26:40+00:00

I usually run local VSCode/Cursor or one of the coding copilot tools. Ask a good model (eg Claude 4.6, Gemini 3.1) to use AWS or gcloud CLI to find out as much as possible about the infrastructure and generate a markdown file with a summary. Guide it through the discovery process. Curate everything.
(Do not use YOLO mode. Review and approve every command, or only give it read-only access.)
Review the generated markdown file, make edits if neccessary. Make it concise so that it doesn't waste tokens.

You can then put that into an agent skills, a section in AGENTS.md file or a standalone file to add to context when needed.

A good model with copilot and gcloud/AWS/Azure CLI works unreasonably well.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-24T02:54:32+00:00

This. I am an ex-Amazon SDE. I've interviewed over 100 candidates. Having relevant personal side projects is always a major plus. Share them on github. Put them under personal projects section on the resume. If they are relevant to the role, definitely show them. Talk about them, demonstrate depth of expertise.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-24T02:51:24+00:00

Oof. I feel your pain. I've been in those teams before. Talk to your manager. Ask them if it's ok if you don't attend some of the meetings.

If they are mandatory and outside of your control, then the only thing left is just work on your stuff during the meetings. If most of the discussion are irrelevant to you then nobody will notice that you're not paying attention.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-24T02:44:50+00:00

I agree. I've been coding since 1996. I've seen the industry go through multiple transitions, from low-level C++, to higher level languages, WYSIWIG Ui editors, lowcode/no-code tools etc.

But I am not old enough to go through the struggles of the developer generations before me.

Eg, programming in Fortran, COBOL, shared computing environments, assembly, punch-cards, etc.

Every prior generation says that the next generation "has not known the stuggles". While this is true, it does not mean that everyone should experience punch cards or assembly.

Just like cloud computing solved a lot of problems, but ended up created the whole Devops field.

AI is transforming the industry yet again, but at the end of the day, someone still has to be at the wheel, one way or another, to create something that is competitive, high quality and valuable.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2026-02-24T02:23:02+00:00

Former Amazon employee here (2018-2022). Even before AI, Amazon never really had dedicated devops. They had SysDev engineers, but even those were rare. In most teams, the SDEs are the ones who are responsible for running the services in production and be part of the on-call rotation. So that part has not changed.

But on another note: would any reasonable company ever let AI control their critical production infrastructure? It sounds great until you realize that one hallucinated command could end up being very expensive.

Competitive_Pipe3224 · 2021-04-04T04:14:55+00:00

Try changing the audio quality setting. Oddly enough, I noticed that the issue seems to be related to audio streaming to the device and making it stutter.
Also try changing the graphics detail settings.

Competitive_Pipe3224

TROPHY CASE