One of the architectural rules in the AGENTS.md of incus-compose is: Constraints outside, freedom inside. A unit is predictable from the outside: what it receives, what it returns, and which effects may escape are fixed. Inside those constraints, it is free to reconnect, coordinate goroutines, or replace its machinery without involving its callers. An operation may send messages or write files because those are its purpose. The problem is an incidental effect becoming somebody else’s responsibility: ...

It started with an LLM agent documenting the boundaries for me instead of building them. It was about concurrency, and what came out of it was a comment: which call may come from which goroutine, what has to be locked first, what to watch out for. All correct. All friendly. All just text. A boundary that lives in a comment isn’t a boundary. It’s a request. It holds as long as the comment is read and remembered. I just don’t want to remember; static linters should. Safe at any time, by any reader. ...

A storage pool in Incus is a driver and a source. There are several drivers: zfs, btrfs, lvm, ceph, dir. dir is the most boring one, a directory. And a directory is allowed to be a tmpfs mount. mount -t tmpfs -o size=32g none /mnt/tmpfs incus storage create tmpfs dir source=/mnt/tmpfs From here on, every instance that starts on this pool lands in memory. Create incus launch images:debian/trixie runner --storage tmpfs Back up incus publish turns the instance into an image. If it’s still running, Incus demands --force. The aliases rotate the generations: ...

Six and a half months after the first announcement, 22 betas and 2 rcs later: incus-compose is 1.0.0. Three Rewrites ended on a line I want to pick back up. “go-orb: three years of work. No users. incus-compose: two months. Several.” That stayed true. People ran it, broke it, filed issues — and the core from The Core Should Know Nothing just kept absorbing what they threw at it. New resources, new edge cases, no changes to the core itself. ...

In Three Rewrites there was a sentence I glossed over: Hooks before and after every action — logging, dry-run, error context, all without touching the core. Half a sentence. But that’s exactly where the third attempt ended up. Today I want to unpack that one line. It’s going to be longer. What a hook is A hook is a function I slip in before or after an action. ensure, delete, start, stop — every action incus-compose runs on a resource can be intercepted. Before and after. ...

I hate spaghetti code. Warzone 2100, among other things, showed me why back in 2011. C code, globals everywhere. You change one variable and three things break that seem to have nothing to do with it. You read the code and can’t tell where a decision begins and where it ends. For three years — from 2022 to 2025 — I worked on go-orb. Alone. A framework for distributed systems, meant as the successor to go-micro. Config from anywhere, service discovery, RPC, streaming, pub/sub, kvstore, metrics. Every new idea became a feature, every feature a plugin. ...

Sometimes you walk through the world and it gets out of your way. People turn curt before a word has been spoken, some irritable. They sense something about you. And you understand them, because what radiates from you keeps them at a distance. At other times, doors open. People laugh with you, seek your closeness. You are simply there, light and open, and the world answers warmly. For a long time you took the one for luck and the other for misfortune. Then you realize: it is an echo. As you call into the forest, so it comes back. When it is dark inside you, you see differently, you enter the encounter differently, and the encounter answers you differently. The outside carries what lives on the inside. ...

I pray the same thing every day. It helps me get myself off my high horse. Please show me my mistakes. Forgive me for them. Thank you for your blessing, Lord. May your will be mine. May your commandment of love be mine. And I want to help you serve it in everyday life. That is habit becoming alignment. Every morning anew. Someone asked me: If his will stands above yours – do you doubt? No. I hope that he overwrites my ego. Piece by piece. ...

Once there was a man who was good. Blameless and upright, one who shunned evil. He was good the way a stone is still — from birth, without ever having chosen it. Then the dark forces came. They took from him first what was outside: his possessions and the people he loved. Then they reached inward, toward his body and his sleep. They wanted to know whether goodness would hold when the ground was pulled from under it. ...

I think of a fictional person. He is a pacifist — not because he read about it, but because he has experienced violence and rejects it. He comes from a country where men must be strong and are not permitted to show shame. He flees. He arrives here. He carries something with him. The conviction that peace is possible if someone starts it. He wanted to contribute here. Not as a gesture — because he knows what happens when no one does. He has seen where hate leads. He wanted to live the opposite. ...