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Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

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Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#41

Post by montague27 »

danielrothmann wrote: post #18
bravura wrote: post #15

The text-based software that would eat work management is one that embraces the incumbents rather than avoid them. I want a bidirectional SaaS YAML/JSON adapter. So that I can push and pull our CRM (and other SaaS utilities like project management) into a common (schematized) YAML format. The YAML then can be analyzed and modified using LLMs and/or stored in git. And then use the bidirectional sync to reconcile confl…

Agreed, this is on my mind as well. Thinking of Terraform, you have data blocks that can grab data from an external source. Still trying to grok what would be a convenient way of doing something like this - whether that gets generated to DSL, or if data pulled in dynamically as you build the org graph... Having your plain-text workspace as a unified structural source where you pull in data from external systems would…

Hi there, I've made my own text-based todo list with compatible web view which is kind of similar to what you did. (though far from completion)

There's a sync engine behind it so the UX is extremely responsive.

Link: https://mglogi.com/portfolio

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#42

Post by fellowniusmonk »

brettermeier wrote: post #35
Protostome wrote: post #2

Getting people to use the terminal to do things instead of the bloatware produced by Google/Microsoft tools is almost impossible... I live in the terminal, but most people in my company, including developers rather stay away from it

The main reason might be that terminals are ugly and messy, you can't find shit, everything melts together. Might be nice for power users, but those aren't so many I would guess.

I live in the terminal. I've been using the terminal since before guis were an appreciable option.

People who lionize the terminal are silly, it's objectively bad and the fact we use it at all is just the inertia of TTY.

Trying to put GUIs in terminal, all this stuff, it's a hack, a sign of failure to make progress.

In an alternate universe Emacs wouldn't be culturally anti-human and we'd have a data first gui instead of app siloing. Some Emacs custom setups are the fucking future, context switching, everything is so perfect, but because the interop is so bad you can't use it in your day job.

But most OSS OS devs have spent all their time focused on the system part and not the operating part.

Human factors and human interfaces are still mostly ignored, and that's just from a sole user perspective, most developers of UI don't treat the networked/relational aspect as a first class UX issue for an OS.

And that's partly a failure of imagination, a failure of loving people as much as tech and also because distributed collaboration is fucking hard and most people just rewalk existing paths.

Maybe LORO is the only truly interesting open source project right now, but Ai can't write those algorithms so even their implementation is under explored.

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#43

Post by kstrauser »

bravura wrote: post #15

The text-based software that would eat work management is one that embraces the incumbents rather than avoid them. I want a bidirectional SaaS YAML/JSON adapter. So that I can push and pull our CRM (and other SaaS utilities like project management) into a common (schematized) YAML format. The YAML then can be analyzed and modified using LLMs and/or stored in git. And then use the bidirectional sync to reconcile confl…

Huh. Could those be git submodules? Like you’d have all your personal state in foo/ and then clone the work state into foo/work/ .

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#44

Post by kstrauser »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #32
virajk_31 wrote: post #27

CLI is cool but this won't work in real life, focus your energy building something else.

Please tell me you're a troll and this isn't what you actually think a useful comment looks like.

Right? On behalf of everyone working on projects to scratch an itch that won’t go away: f- off and let us hack on what we wanna hack on. No one asked for or needs permission.

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#45

Post by wmeredith »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #32
virajk_31 wrote: post #27

CLI is cool but this won't work in real life, focus your energy building something else.

Please tell me you're a troll and this isn't what you actually think a useful comment looks like.

Thanks you! I rarely downvote on HN, but this earned one.

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#46

Post by skrtskrt »

0xEF wrote: post #23
quietbritishjim wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To state the obvious (sorry): (1) Command lines lack the discoverability element of GUIs (and TUIs), where the available choices are typically laid out in front of you. Just look at the command "firm -c list contact" in the screenshot in the linked readme - no doubt it's sensible, but you wouldn't just type it in out of nowhere. You could argue that good docs fix this, but they'll never be a substitute. (Silly analog…

I don't disagree with you at all, but my biggest hangup with GUI-based software is twofold: 1. It tends to be bloated, with developers slapping framework upon framework, creating a mess of background wiring that is prone to a dictionary's worth of issues that will either frustrate the user or confound the person maintaining it. 2. UX Designers approach their jobs incorrectly; they assume they are smarter than the use…

I think this blunkiness is in part because these things are often created and designed exclusively by frontend and full stack developers. IMO systems like these need strong backend developer influence, with highly scalable data models and and as much work as possible pushed server-side.

In short, the system should be designed by people that despise the general state frontend development. It should still look good, I love a modern clean frontend (like Docmost for example), but not at the expense of snappiness and scalability.

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#47

Post by fellowniusmonk »

jaaron wrote: post #19
mayowaxcvi wrote: post #11

Spent ages building my own work management system only to realise I was just taking the scenic route to eMacs.

I was thinking the same thing: why is everyone reinventing emacs? gnu and emacs already have a long history of cli and text friendly solutions that LLM dev agents can easily use and are trained on. Or for structured data, just use a database. Dev agents can work with SQL just fine.

The problem is that they aren't reinventing emacs.

The first person that makes emacs for the hoi polloi will suck up all the emacs people as well just based on interop frustrations.

I still can't believe that after seeing how slack just released irc for grandma's and pointy haired bosses that no one has done the same for a sensible defaults for normies emacs.

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#48

Post by Thom2000 »

0xEF wrote: post #8

This is interesting, very similar to a project I am working on, which is a cli asset manager for a small repair shop. Basically, mine keeps track of service tickets, customers and inventory while being query-able to help identify trends in problem products or recall records for warranty disputes, etc. It's just a silly little project I started in my spare time because I got fed up with having to open up three pieces…

> My biggest hurdle was getting it to export to a nice looking PDF that could be emailed or printed later.

If you can export to structured data such as JSON, I guess Typst would be a perfect fit for that job.

Re: Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system

#50

Post by kovek »

With cursor you can hit Cmd+K in the terminal and give a prompt for the agent to convert to a command in the terminal. Would be good if it could allow to do the same to generate SQL queries based on the databases schemas available. Then it would be a generic solution that would cover this use case.
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