Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 62 posts

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

#51

Post by ASalazarMX »

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

Reading all these opinionated comments about CLI vs GUI, I feel out of place as just a humble TUI fan.

- CLIs are powerful but hard, basically an exercise in mnemonics.

- GUIs are much friendlier, and can be faster than CLIs for certain use cases. While complex and bloated, they have their use cases to shine.

- TUIs are basically less expressive GUIs, since they're limited to text, but you must go out of your way to make them bloated and slow; they usually are very snappy.

All have their best and worst scenarios, no need to argue which is better. Use what fits best with your workflow, no size fits all.

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

#52

Post by actionfromafar »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #47
jaaron wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes! An honest to God, real, opinionated distribution of Emacs, with only curated packages with rules and regression testing actually enforced by the package managers. That would be neat.

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

#53

Post by benchloftbrunch »

Looks like an early stage, immature project, but it's a neat concept.

It seems Windows Defender flags the zip download as a trojan. Likely false positive since scans on the unzipped exe (Defender and virustotal) come back clean.

I'd suggest providing a way to disable the builtin schemas in case someone wants to use it for more tech things as opposed to business things.

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

#55

Post by Protostome »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #14
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

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 think the willingness to use CLIs often goes hand in hand with having a bit of a hacker mentality.

To me, it’s obvious that if a certain command feels cumbersome (e.g., (1)), you can just create an alias, script, or panel to make it behave exactly how you want. In contrast, a GUI usually forces you to use the functionality as it was envisioned by the product team that designed it.

Ultimately, GUIs target the average user, providing a good experience on average across all users.

With terminal apps, if you are patient and willing to learn how to customize your shell, you can make an excellent environment which would offer a huge boost of productivity

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

#56

Post by everforward »

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…

I’d be happy with SQL access, which I think gets to roughly the same place.

I’ve done something like what you’re talking about before for a CMDB, though it was one way YAML -> DB sync. Many to many relationships were a pain to view, there’s not a great way to put them in YAML that makes them easy to read. Can’t embed them because then you have multiple copies and which one is the real one. References suck because you can’t see the relationship and the related objects at once.

The real killer is permissions, though. Your sync tool basically has to have admin privileges, which means permissions have to be checked at merge time, and then you’re rebuilding the entire permissions flow as a git hook.

SQL with RLS is capable of implementing permissions in a way that works for both API access and direct SQL access. I get the feeling few companies do it, but they could.

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

#57

Post by cweagans »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #47
jaaron wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IRC -> Slack was basically a less capable electron based GUI on top of what IRC offered.

Imagine a less capable electron based GUI on top of what emacs offers and I bet you'd get reasonably close to vscode.

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

#58

Post by dcsan »

Very cool like a text based crm. Like how obsidian keeps all your docs in local .MD files. Perfect for building agent automations without delving into lots of integrations. This does make it harder to collaborate though

Reminds me also a bit of

https://github.com/MrLesk/Backlog.md

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

#59

Post by swoorup »

ithkuil wrote: post #29

I'm curious to see if the advent of LLM assistants will result in a resurgence of "headless" systems

It will. But humans have eyes, observability, metrics will still need graphs or eye-candy for most people. Though the means of communication might be heavily be based on text.

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

#60

Post by yencabulator »

Parsing your data format completely via tree-sitter is an interesting choice. Usually tree-sitter is "the second parser" only (for syntax highlighting etc), and the t-s version of a grammar isn't 100% comprehensive.

https://github.com/42futures/firm/blob/31fc084b7c7855bef9694...

I do wonder how much value all this work adds compared to having e.g. JSONC files with schemas. (Or HCL-syntax-for-JSON to visually match this work and then JSON schemas.)

Post reply on HN