I’d love to simply map all the relationships between stock, assets, tools like invoicing, APIs all in a place like this.
But I have to agree I think CLI alone would result in it being usable by only me.
EDIT: just wanted to add I’m interested in where this project goes.
The project is structured as libraries such that you could build an editor separately, but it's not something that has taken priority for me (as the only user, so far).
To be clear, I'm trialing this out in my own small business. Whether it's ergonomic enough to add value and whether it's scalable, I don't know yet. So far, so good, though.
While mine is functional, yours looks A LOT more refined, so I think I will play around with it and see if I can't adapt it to my needs.
I try to work in the terminal as much as I can since that's where I'm most comfortable, but when it comes to business software like CRMs, HRMs or ERPs, especially geared toward smaller shops, the selection for terminal-based options is severely lacking.
But ... why invent a new file format? Why not just make in JSON, so it is easier to integrate in other toolchains (e.g. having a python script add customers based on external APIs without having to write your own output generator)?
But each of formats seemed nice at first.
So I understand that sometimes it’s easier to invent a new format. But compatibility with other formats can definitely be a problem lately.
My question is: how does the proposed system handle multiple editors working on the same text file?
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.
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 conflicts and push.
So I can do work processes on the console, and still collaborate with people who want the native web UI.
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 be potentially powerful.
- Schemas and relationships live in models.py, actual data is persisted in Sqlite - I can dump to JSON or XML with Django utils for LLMs - Query engine can simplify reuse Django syntax, like `Firm.objects.get(owner_name__like="john", date__gt=2015)`, fetch related names, aggregate subqueries - Format as tables
Protostome•2h ago
I live in the terminal, but most people in my company, including developers rather stay away from it
sunshine-o•2h ago
My guess is that the console is a much better and natural UI because it goes in one direction and is less confusing and productive for humans.
In the end we seems to move back to it through the chatbot paradigm, because it is in the end a console...
danielrothmann•2h ago
quietbritishjim•1h ago
(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 analogy: imagine if your toaster had buttons just labelled "1", "2", "3" and you had to refer to the manual for which meant toast, defrost, extra browning.)
(2) Command lines lack the visual persistence of the data you're operating on (like a list of files in a directory, or project/people data like in this program). If you rename a file and you then re-run ls and now everything appears in a slightly different place on the screen (because the previous listing had shifted up when you ran "mv") it's visually jarring in a way that just operating directly on the data isn't. Not-silly analogy: it's like how no-one today would dream of operating on a text file using a pure line editor like ed. (Even command-based editors like vim persist the file data in the main visual area.)
Command lines are much better than GUIs/TUIs for some applications, for example when called from a script, or where you might need to compose a complex command and then tweak and re-run it (in fairness, that might apply to OP's project). But I think techies sometimes get a bit carried away. GUIs are sometimes a legitimately better choice.
0xEF•32m ago
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 user. Interestingly, this might actually be true on paper in most cases, but the practical reality is that the user needs to do things the user's way, not the way the the developer wants them to.
If we could find ways to smooth those two glaring issues, I posit that we'd see a lot of problems with productivity and workflow melt away. Caveat; I'm not a software developer, so I'm sure anyone who is thinks I'm speaking out of school right now. Fact is, I've worked in a few different industries over 40 years, and one of the biggest thorns always seems to boil down to the software not being quite right for the team/application, so workarounds have to be invented, adding layers of complexity on what is already a decidedly fragile system.