I feel like there has been a few takes on this (atuin desktop comes to mind[0] but apparently it's not a going concern anymore?) why hasn't it caught on?
I'm curious about this too. Org-babel, Jupyter, Atuin Desktop, etc. have explored similar ideas, but none became a mainstream way of working.
For people who used these tools long-term: what held them back? UX/accessibility, or do people simply prefer keeping documents separate from the actual work?
we saw a bunch of issues with desktop, in no particular order
1. authoring runbooks is difficult, most people barely document their work let alone make it executable
2. keeping runbooks up to date is difficult, they are error-prone across systems
3. agents are now pretty good at a number of the tasks these ideas solve for, and are good at working around issues caused by docs becoming out of date/etc
all these tools are great for your own notes, but are very difficult to scale
1. Ledge's bet is it shouldn't feel like authoring at all. I've always had markdown docs chock full of commands and docs so making them runnable was the next logical step for me.
2. True. Keeping any kind of documentation up to date is difficult
3. Also true. I'm hoping Ledge's built-in agent support will bridge that gap and allow agents to help keep the docs up-to-date
And yes, a "Team" notebook is a challenge. Technically anyone with SSH access can all share a Ledge notebook. But that probably doesn't get us all the way there.
Thanks again for providing your thoughts. This by no means is a solved problem but I'm interested to see where it goes!
edude03 · · focus · HN ↗
0: <a href="https://github.com/atuinsh/desktop" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/atuinsh/desktop
junehwi · · focus · HN ↗
For people who used these tools long-term: what held them back? UX/accessibility, or do people simply prefer keeping documents separate from the actual work?
ellieh · · focus · HN ↗
we saw a bunch of issues with desktop, in no particular order
1. authoring runbooks is difficult, most people barely document their work let alone make it executable
2. keeping runbooks up to date is difficult, they are error-prone across systems
3. agents are now pretty good at a number of the tasks these ideas solve for, and are good at working around issues caused by docs becoming out of date/etc
all these tools are great for your own notes, but are very difficult to scale
dancablam · · focus · HN ↗
1. Ledge's bet is it shouldn't feel like authoring at all. I've always had markdown docs chock full of commands and docs so making them runnable was the next logical step for me.
2. True. Keeping any kind of documentation up to date is difficult
3. Also true. I'm hoping Ledge's built-in agent support will bridge that gap and allow agents to help keep the docs up-to-date
And yes, a "Team" notebook is a challenge. Technically anyone with SSH access can all share a Ledge notebook. But that probably doesn't get us all the way there.
Thanks again for providing your thoughts. This by no means is a solved problem but I'm interested to see where it goes!