brightball

Tried just about everything over the last couple of years. Settled on the unified Cursor, Grok, Grok Bot plan for about $200 / month. Doing everything within herdr for programming and Grok Bot for all non-programming related AI life stuff.

It's a solid groove. Grok Bot helped me get so much stuff off of my plate.

Winners from this off the top of my head...

- Every existing data center just became much more valuable

- If "data centers in space" actually work then their value just grew significantly

It’s not the HA features that are the selling point for me.

The combination of lightweight processes with their own HEAP and the preemptive scheduler means that millions of processes can run on the same machine with consistent execution time, no GC pause, and no worry that a single resource heavy process is going to slow down everything else.

The balance tradeoffs allows you to do a lot of things that would otherwise be poor architectural choices.

LiveView is just one example, where you’re able to completely forgo the need for a frontend framework but get all of the same benefits with lightning fast execution times.

There’s a lot of wins that come from it.

From a AI standpoint, functional code is simpler to trace and maintain because the AI doesn’t have to worry about side effects.

The HA perks are a bonus.

Elixir is great from a syntax perspective. It gets compared to ruby a lot for some reason but they're nothing alike. Elixir syntax is very deliberate about everything.

The BEAM runtime is the real win. Your options are Erlang, Elixir and Gleam to get the BEAM.

Out of the 3, I prefer Elixir and Jose is a brilliant leader for it.

I’m using Elixir for every (web) project now specifically because the cost is negligible. I can't think of a reason to use anything else and the agents are _really_ good at writing it, particularly given the excellent structural guardrails that are in place.

Being able to ensure all of the test run freakishly fast async is a huge win too.

I have and the biggest unlock compared to Hermes is that it comes with no setup and its own computers for each agent. While I’m perfectly capable of setting up my own Hermes, controlling access over my tailnet and setting it up with my other AI plans most non-tech folks are not.

Having this just work for non-tech people and still have advanced capabilities for the people who want to use it is a huge UX unlock.

The other thing thats critical is that it’s exceedingly cautious by default. My risk profile and concerns eased quickly.

I haven’t heard anyone give bots comparison.

It can do that too, but you can tell it that it’s allowed to access specific computers it’s installed on. I allow it on a couple of computers on my network and from there it can SSH elsewhere.

It can send all bot traffic through those computers too so it’s less likely to get blocked.

I gave it access to a box on my network and it spins up agents in herdr with whatever prompts I give it. Works really well with any agent you tell it to use.

Over the weekend I decided to try Lauren Tan’s pstack via her Dr Eggbot and had it built a bot that would run a build for me for a few days. It was a complex enough prompt that it triggered something to let me tell it which models to use and ended up settling on Opus 5.5 for planning and review with Grok 4.7 for the actual coding.

Ran for the weekend and completed 5 phases of a project with about 15 PRs. Reviews caught several things and sent them back premerge.

I enjoyed a fun weekend with my daughter clearing Escape Rooms in Colorado. Came back to a completed project.

It was great.

I will be shocked if anything can beat Grok Bot for usefulness at this point.

It took me 2 days to hit “how did I ever survive without this” and it’s only gotten better.

It’s a leap to claim anyone loves a federal agency.

I followed a lot of the news about them regarding this thing. If I own a business or even simply act as a manager and I know of a constant threat to my staff I would take any action I was legally allowed to protect them. Doesn’t matter if it’s ICE, the postal service, a gas station, theme park, etc.

It’s basic self defense.

ICE agents didn’t start covering their faces just because, they did it because people were doxxing them and going after their families.

People are going to protect themselves and their staff. It’s basic human nature.

The article is talking about a license plate scanner website that was being used to track the movements of ICE vehicles, follow them and harass agents.

If people started doing that to UPS delivery trucks I would expect UPS to do everything in their power to protect their staff.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t this in response to a massive organized anti-ICE operation?

Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.

Yea, I thought the whole Lavabit episode made it clear that privacy oriented solutions based in the US were going to have a hard time. Most Proton’s whole selling point is their location.

It does happen. There’s just enough people who have realized the negative side effects of going along with it that fewer and fewer people are willing to.

“Moderate Democrats” say hello

They do. It's the entire Libertarian wing of the party.

A lot of things. The UX for non-code related activities is excellent. They've removed the friction from setting things up by giving each agent their own machine which can give you remote desktop. The process of creating and working with each agent is as simple as naming it and then explaining it's job. You can keep feeding them information, ask them to train themselves, etc.

They can access anything you can, whether there's an MCP/CLI/API or not. I create speciality bots for each 3rd party tool that I use at this point. The bots can talk to each other, have group chats. You can give them access to the machines that you're running the software on and give specific bots permission to do things on certain machine (like an Obsidian bot that writes logs of daily bot activity on a specific machine with a Dropbox folder shared). I've got a Security Scan bot that downloads anything that a bot wants to download to it's personal machine at SpaceX and runs a slew of security scanners before the other bots can work with it.

I got locked out of one machine while I was travelling and I asked Grok Bot on another machine if it could get into that one over SSH, so it sent me a temporary authorization link via Tailscale, connected to the machine and restarted the stuck process for me.

The usability is off the charts. It's really like having a team of people working for you. I've run a conference for the last few years and was getting completely overloaded. Now I have 14 bots specialized just for the conference helping me do it better than ever and participating in architectural discussions to build a system that help long term.

If you find yourself trying to juggle a lot in your life and work, it's a gift.

Once people start using it, the usage is constantly increasing as well.

It takes less than that.

“I’m not going to do that. Moving on.”

SpaceX will just use the compute directly if they don't have buyers. They are already talking about the data center shortage as well because they can't get capacity elsewhere either. It's a weird problem to not be able to use your own data centers because you rented them out.

Between SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Neuralink, X, Grok, Grok Bot & Cursor there's not a demand shortage.

Grok Bot's the fastest growing product in the history of the company and the moment you use it, it's clear why. Took me about 1-2 days to realize I'd have a very hard time going back to not having it available.

ColdFusion...now there's a name I haven't heard in some time.

EPA planned to do the same thing in 2022...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220124192618/https://archive.e...

Yea, the sale of the federal helium reserve never made sense to me back in 2013.

https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-helium-system-sale-pro...

Messer American is in a good spot now I suppose:

https://www.blm.gov/announcement/blm-accepts-bids-sale-feder...

Exactly. This is not "any" model. This is a model designed to run locally. That's the entire selling point of the model.

If you have a model that's going to run locally and then call home, it defeats the purpose. When that model tries to upload an entire machine profile to the internet when you explicitly are building a defensive rule, it's worth.

When it calls back to China in that situation, it's much much worse.

It's good that they determined the behavior was rare. Maybe there's a good way to prevent it in the future.

This is essentially the case for Starlink

I can’t speak to everyone, but grok bot is helping me gain so much efficiency in managing all of the things that I have going on in my life that I feel much more present now.

Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.

It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.

I saw a big write up on using Dagger for CI no matter your git host and I was curious if there were any real benefits?

It’s unfortunately only a symbol of bot activity or popularity with the crowd in the subreddit.

I saw somebody else besides DHH talking about their decision not to accept PRs with AI written code briefly. I believe there’s a Rust fork in progress.

In 2014, Heroku was the only game in town on the PaaS front. Nobody else was even close.

Java App Servers with their WAR file deployments across a cluster were the closest equivalent.

Docker was the enabler for alternatives.