Vibe, MiniSign, AgeCrypt, Chown, Ext4, Contabo, Vacuum

1. Automated looping with LLM aka Agentic Workflow and that’s exactly how things like Vibe and Goose work. I’ve been taking them for a spin for a few months now. What never ceases to surprise me is the kind of problems they get stuck on versus which things are a breeze. It’s a classic example of how everyone has their own strengths.

2. For instance, Devstral-2 (running on Vibe) got totally bogged down porting ASCII fonts, even though it did everything else right. After probably 50 fix iterations... Which, thankfully, it at least handled itself... It basically said: "Can't we just agree this is close enough and it doesn't really matter?"

3. There wasn’t anything technically miraculous about the task, but that’s where it stumbled hard. I even tried several different prompts to get it across the finish line, but nope. So what was the catch? Well, other areas of the software and logic worked according to spec, but the ASCII font renderer it wrote didn't.

4. Just for the sake of some programming language entertainment, I wrote one set of instructions and told it to build this software in Python first, and then port it to PowerShell, Go, Rust, and Java. It did everything automagically, but the pyfiglet fonts really fell short.

5. What amused me the most was the first-generation version where it tried to replicate pyfiglet in typical LLM style. Meaning, it created its own font mapper that mapped 1 -> 1, 2 -> 2 ... 7 -> 7, 8 -> 7, 9 -> 9. That’s when I actually burst out laughing. I just had to say, "How about you just take the pyfiglet output directly and use that?"

6. Of course, the reasons why porting the font was so hard could be in the stack. You never know if some part of the code is executing a .strip() or trim() command, causing some of the necessary data to disappear before processing even begins.

7. The key observation here is that the pain points and problems can be completely different from what you’re normally used to. - It really comes down to what is difficult for whom.

8. Updated Minisign (0.12) and AgeCrypt (1.3.1 with PQC) tools, both had exploits. And what's best? Latest age supports post-quantum cryptography (PQC) using ML-KEM-768 and those new keys are wonderfully much longer. Ah, almost two kilobytes. (1959 bytes ~ 2 KiB) - Yes, I said almost. But that's much longer than the old keys, exactly at 62 chars.

9. Uh oh, I had completely forgotten that chown resets the setuid and setgid flags. Well, I had a fun time fixing those for a few key scripts. - Dang. - Luckily btrfs snapshots turned out to be highly beneficial, I just restored permissions only from the snapshot to directory without changing content or reverting back to older versions of the scripts or data. - GG

10. ext4 fast commit (@ lwn.net) - I somehow had missed it completely. I knew that the ext4 didn't support file specific fsync, but I didn't know it was being fixed. Nor that it is fixed, yet requires separate activation. I got back to this question when wondering why those sparse preallocated files corrupt with btrfs but not with ext4. Well, this is a good thing to have. Yet I assume most of users never activate that. It's huge success for stuff like sqlite3 which calls fsync all the time when updating database. - And it seems that Ubuntu doesn't have the fast commit option enabled in the standard kernel, duh. So, it can't be used with ext4 to test btrfs like per file commit (fsync) behavior (easily).

11. Contabo - Truly wonderful work indeed. They do leave on the server cloud-init file, which contains networking information, administrator name, password, all in plain text, user readable and they also write motd file to c:\etc\motd which is kind of hilarious. Permissions 0644 of course, so everyone can read it. GG - My setup script fixes all that obviously, but ... - The greetings go to support@contabo.com.

12. Electrolux vacuum cleaner has repeated powering on issues. Its controller is total junk. Well, funniest part is that the motor of the vacuum is totally fine, with the fact that you just skip the controller completely and just feed the power. - Modern times. They have added cool unnecessary electronics and logic, which only causes trouble, when the device works way better completely without that stuff. 

2026-09-20