Something like https://graphite.com/ to create stacked PRs that are reviewable probably would have helped. Can be replicated with local LLMs or remote AI providers with locally configured agentic workflows. Never used graphite personally, but I’ve seen some open source maintainers use it to split up large PRs.

Like, from Yellow Dog Linux? Was my first Linux distro as a kid (grew up with an Apple computer). Red Hat based so checks out. TIL.

neovim user (inside zellij) and same. More of a full blown IDE than an editor.

Also for the keybind memory impaired like myself:

• https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim
• native which-key in emacs

Totally agree with your overall point.

That said, I have to come to the defense of my terminal UI (TUI) comrades with some anecdotal experience.

I’ve got all the same tools in Neovim as my VSCode/Cursor colleagues, with a deeper understanding of how it all works under the hood.

They have no idea what an LSP is. They just know the marketing buzzword “IntelliSense.” As we build out our AI toolchains, it doesn’t even occur to them that an agent can talk to an LSP to improve code generation because all they know are VSCode extensions. I had to pick and evaluate my MCP servers from day one as opposed to just accepting the defaults, and the quality of my results shows it. The same can be done in GUI editors, but since you’re never forced to configure these things yourself, the exposure is just lower. I’ve had to run numerous trainings explaining that MCPs are traditionally meant to be run locally, because folks haven’t built the mental model that comes with wiring it all up yourself.

Again, totally agree with your overall point. This is more of a PSA for any aspiring engineers: TUIs are still alive and well.

There is a praise/validation kink for that.

Firefox Nightly + arkenfox userjs + uBlock Origin + Bitwarden as my daily driver.

Been a couple years since I checked up on arkenfox still being good. I get flagged as a bot all the time and constantly get popups about WebGL (GPU fingerprinting) so I assume its working as intended for my threat model.

Tails when I really care.

Mullvad VPN as my regular VPN with ProtonVPN for torrents.

GrapheneOS / NixOS as my OS.

Proton Visionary for most cloud services except passwords and I don’t really use Proton Drive. I do use ProtonPass for unique emails to every provider.

Kagi for searches / AI.

Etesync for contacts because Proton didn’t sync with the OS last I checked.

Backblaze B2 for cloud storage with my own encryption via rclone (Round Sync on GrapheneOS)

Keypass for a few things like my XMR wallets and master passwords I don’t even trust in Bitwarden.

https://jmp.chat/ for my mobile provider.

Pihole with encrypted DNS to Quad9.

https://onlykey.io/ for the second half of my sensitive passwords (Bitwarden, LUKS, Keypass, OS login). First half memorized.

Its a lot. I burned myself out a couple years ago keeping up with optimizing privacy and this setup has served me well for 2 years without really changing anything. The cloud services are grey areas in terms of privacy but the few ads that leak through uBlock have zero relevance to anything about me.