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We are rebuilding Monica

monicahq.com

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Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#21

Post by trashb »

alibrarydweller wrote: post #13

I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people. I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interac…

How did you spin up the self-hosted instance?

Seems the self-hosting documentation is a bit... lacking. Both "self-hosting" buttons on the main page send me to "#".

It seems interesting, even though I'm more of the roll your own school of thought here because there could be some very sensitive data in this system.

https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#22

Post by ameliaquining »

bitwize wrote: post #15
joewils wrote: post #8

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.

LLMs have meaningfully decreased the cost of rewrites, such that many rewrites that wouldn't previously have made sense now do. They are still significantly costly and often a bad idea.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#23

Post by bananamogul »

trashb wrote: post #21
alibrarydweller wrote: post #13

I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people. I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interac…

How did you spin up the self-hosted instance? Seems the self-hosting documentation is a bit... lacking. Both "self-hosting" buttons on the main page send me to "#". It seems interesting, even though I'm more of the roll your own school of thought here because there could be some very sensitive data in this system. https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation

Here you go: https://docs.monicahq.com/developers/setup-local-development

That's linked from their GitHub: https://github.com/monicahq/monica

PikaPods also offers Monica hosting in your own container.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#24

Post by Calavar »

bitwize wrote: post #15
joewils wrote: post #8

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.

An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#25

Post by mathisfun123 »

cheschire wrote: post #7

I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.” I’ve become so cynical this year.

> I’ve become so cynical this year.

sorry don't understand the relationship here...?

> cynical: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives; based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#27

Post by tonymet »

cheschire wrote: post #7

I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.” I’ve become so cynical this year.

Cynicism is an attitude, and a choice. And comments like these are so cliche. AI is an amazing tool, and you have a volunteer helping to create the next best edition of a charity project.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#28

Post by paimapi »

Calavar wrote: post #24
bitwize wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.

An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.

the thing companies seem to be finding out is that quality is much more important when you're shipping 3-5x more per sprint and incident rates are multiplying at an even higher factor. allocating even less time to code review and testing is the norm, however, and it feels like the modern Agile SDLC is breaking a bit under this new mode

there's good skills to write test suites but each codebase needs its own bespoke implementation paired with so much institutional knowledge. but companies keep laying off those knowledge holders and QA to boot

it's almost like shareholders > leadership > middle managers see 'enshittification' as aspirational and are doing their best to implement a systems-level strategy in pursuit of it

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#29

Post by FireBeyond »

tikimcfee wrote: post #4

After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about." That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together. I may start using it, even if that's a h…

But then I also remember looking at Monica previously and deciding against it. And in reading this article, the author mentions that this will be v3 and one of the headline features will be:

> This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them.

Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#30

Post by jvanderbot »

I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development.

For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs.

If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all the strangeness of CRM w/ battle tested backend or something...

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