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A Vision of Software as Gardening in the Agentic Age

The classical mindset treated software as architecture: plan precisely, construct carefully, enforce correctness locally, and trust composition to scale that correctness up. This worked when systems were small and failure modes were simple. But past a certain size, precision becomes brittle. Correctness leaks away as components interact in unpredictable, adversarial, or simply chaotic ways. Large-scale correctness only ever appears in highly constrained domains (safety-critical systems, avionics, compilers) or in heroic multi-decade efforts that normal teams can’t replicate.

Agentic systems push this further. When behaviour is emergent, adaptive, or probabilistic, the fantasy of clean modular correctness collapses entirely. What replaces it is a biological metaphor: gardening.

A garden is cultivated, not constructed. It is system-level stewardship rather than piecewise perfection. Instead of pursuing immaculate order, you accept that mess is inherent a

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workspace

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2022-01-12T16:40:00.754Z [INFO]  Terraform version: 1.1.3
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [INFO]  Go runtime version: go1.17.2
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [INFO]  CLI args: []string{"/opt/homebrew/Cellar/tfenv/2.2.2/versions/1.1.3/terraform", "apply"}
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [DEBUG] Attempting to open CLI config file: /Users/andy.gimblett/.terraformrc
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [DEBUG] File doesn't exist, but doesn't need to. Ignoring.
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [DEBUG] ignoring non-existing provider search directory terraform.d/plugins
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [DEBUG] ignoring non-existing provider search directory /Users/andy.gimblett/.terraform.d/plugins
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [DEBUG] ignoring non-existing provider search directory /Users/andy.gimblett/Library/Application Support/io.terraform/plugins
2022-01-12T16:40:00.755Z [DEBUG] ignoring non-existing provider search directory /Library/Application Support/io.terraform/plugins
2022-01-12T16:40:00.756Z [INFO]  CLI command args: []string{"apply"}

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Notes on creating a Dash docset for openpyxl

• Dash is a documentation reader for MacOS
• openpyxl is a python library for working with XLSX files

openpyxl has pretty good docs prepared using sphinx, though they can be hard to navigate.

Using Dash makes that easier for me, so here's how to create a Dash docset for openpyxl, using the doc2dash tool; by default this will install it directly into Dash, but see doc2dash's documentation for more options.

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#!/usr/bin/env bash

# See https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/714

getxbarpid () {
    ps -Ac -o pid=,comm= | grep xbar | column -t | cut -d ' ' -f 1
}

xbarpid="$(getxbarpid)"
if [ -z "$xbarpid" ] ; then

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def attrs_flexible_repr(cls):
    
    """
    An [attrs](http://www.attrs.org/) extension giving attributes more
    flexibility about how they appear in the autogenerated `__repr__`.
    
    Out of the box, attrs gives your class a pretty decent `__repr__` method;
    you can disable this at the class level to define your own, or you can
    keep it but exclude attributes by setting their `repr` field to False.
    

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Importing CSV into Excel as text

Importing a CSV into Excel is annoying, because by default it will try to interpret the columns, and it often/usually gets it wrong. You can control what format is used for each column when you import a CSV file, but it's fiddly, and for many purposes we'd just like to load a CSV and have every column to be read in as uninterpreted text, without having to faff with the import wizard.

Good news: we can do that with a macro. Here it is:

Sub importCSV()

    Dim column_types() As Variant

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#!/bin/bash

# git-summary - summarise git repos at some path
#
# Adapted from https://gist.github.com/lmj0011/1a8dd1e376234ac7bf0fba2748ecdd0f
#
# Andy Gimblett, March 2017


usage() {

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Python Path

Motivation

A whistle-stop tour of the techniques for getting your Python code into a place where the interpreter can get to work on it followed by the implications for code structure and usability.