--- title: 'The Cathedral of One: A Treatise On Computing Sovereignty' permalink: /futureproof/computing-sovereignty-treatise-with-nix/ description: "I'm Mike Levin, and what you've just read is a core sample of my life's\ \ work and philosophy. It's a declaration of independence from the 'comical stack'\ \ of modern tech that buries us in complexity. I believe AI fundamentally changes\ \ the rules, making explicit, 'WET' code not just viable, but superior. My journey\ \ led me to Nix as the key to reproducible, future-proof systems\u2014a 'Noah's\ \ Ark' for our tools. This isn't just about code; it's about reclaiming our craft,\ \ owning our digital workshops, and achieving 'computing sovereignty.' It's an invitation\ \ to stop renting and start building your own Cathedral of One." meta_description: A treatise on rejecting modern software complexity for reproducible, AI-native systems using Nix. Reclaim the joy of building and achieve computing sovereignty. meta_keywords: Nix, NixOS, reproducible builds, computing sovereignty, software development, AI collaboration, WET code, future-proof, DevOps, Python, command-line layout: post sort_order: 2 --- ## Setting the Stage: Context for the Curious Book Reader Welcome to a raw, unfiltered entry from my ongoing book project. This piece is a stream-of-consciousness dive into the core philosophy that drives my work: a rebellion against the ephemeral, complex state of modern software development. Here, I lay the groundwork for a return to simplicity, durability, and what I call 'computing sovereignty,' all made possible by leaning into a new era of AI collaboration and foundational tools like Nix. It's a personal story, a technical treatise, and an invitation to build your own 'Cathedral of One.' --- ## Technical Journal Entry Begins > The iron is hot > And the moment is now > For key we use rot > And I'm showing you how Nobody gets me, and I really don't expect you to. If you're reading this here, it means you're on the raw material fodder for my book. It is a book that will never be done and is always finished. The license I'm choosing will be chosen from among MIT, Apache 2, BSD or GPL 2. They each have a certain appeal and I figure it's a question of whether I want to force giving back to the community or allow anyone to to just about anything. But that'll be another article and discussion. This book doesn't come bundled with a CD, nor is it just distributed as a free PDF or any of that old-school nonsense. No, this is just raw source that implies a greater book to be knit out of it in countless possible ways for countless possible audiences. And it does come with running code on a sort of *forever-platform* for life and it invites you to crack open that application, see how it works, do whatever you want with it modifying it to your own personal or professional uses in whatever fields or areas of interest for whatever purpose. ## The Unending Book and the Forever Platform Yes, it is indeed that general. The code is indeed that resistant to obsolescence. These are not bold nor boastful claims. This is me just very carefully choosing the giants upon whose shoulders I stand, and just as importantly which shoulders must not be members of our giant ziggurat. This book is a garden of careful curation, both of the tech stack and the mind. I'm ever so gradually creeping up on 500 articles that I just shoot off as a byproduct of my daily work because I type ever-so easily and fluidly in the vim text editor, which is really NeoVim. And I will never stop presenting it as vim first and following up with the explanation that it's really NeoVim which is also the `nvim` command as opposed to the `vim` command, the later of which I always alias to the former so that I can always just type "vim". The raw material of this book is going to be full of lots of geek stuff like that which might come off as inside jokes and huge presumptions of prior knowledge, but that's because I'm trusting that in the future I will have AI systems in place that writes the *asides,* adds to an *index* and *glossary* of terms, cross-linking, providing illustrations, yadda yadda. It's silly to assume anything other than that now. I'm writing for where the ball is being thrown, not where it's at. I will not have AI editing. I will have collaborative teams of ever-improving AI editing, illustrators, narrators, and all the like in forever-improving, forever remixing and refining for forever more specific audiences. What else? But then won't everybody have all of that and this by extension be lost in the noise. Yeah, maybe. Sure. I don't know shit. But I do like to experiment and I find it quite easy to get my hands dirty experimenting, and the joy of it all for me is exactly in that. I don't care so much for so-called success. I like keeping small surface-area in life. I like waking up late and proceeding with the day on my own schedule. The kind of days that I imagine *successful people* have makes me want to vomit. Fly low under the radar, do what you love to do, to hell with what other people think, and if it has some greater value to the world because it happens to discover it's just what it needs — the remedy to so many of the things that ails it — the way to scratch itches you never knew you had and it improves your life in unexpected ways — all the better. Or I must might use up my days in quiet, happy obscurity. Either way is fine. The Google algorithm currently doesn't like the experimental website where I'm rolling out this raw material content. It did. It *loved it* and then it fell off the algorithm cliff. I'll show you exactly where and why and whether and how I climb back up, and whether it's with this raw material site or some other site spun out of it. It's part of the story. ## Writing for the Future (and its AI) And that affects my software licensing choice. It is software, because are not all prompts and by extension all writing and data now software, because AI? Hey AI, crawl all my articles and turn it into a brand new version for some audience that hasn't yet been serviced by this material yet, please and thank you! Haha, if this book has anything like the kind of impact I think it might, that line alone is worth it for the future jokes and pondering the consequences it had. My name is Mike Levin and I don't know squat. I'm tempted to use the other two works that go there, but I will keep it mildly clean. I go by the Penn and Teller rule. Bullshit is fine and the other words can be dropped from time to time, but you get a bigger audience if you keep it family-friendly, right? So as much as I might love George Carlin's 7 dirty words, it's a different kind of wordplay I prefer. My name can be written so that it can be read upside down. Two friends from college, Mike Welsh and Chris Simon are the ones who provide the creative leap parts of the solution, and I just did the technical execution from my favorite parts. Everything I do is a lot like that. I *wish I could be the original genius* behind the parts of the tech-stack I use but I only ever stand on the shoulders of giants. Chris and Mike were under the tutelage of the artist who defined the Ambigram genre, John Langdon who did that Earth, Air, Wind & Fire Illuminati brand from Dan Brown's *Angels & Demons* book and is who Tom Hanks' character is named after. The other squat I don't know is Jack because I never really met Jack Tramiel, and suffered one of the Jack Attacks in the halls of Commodore Computers where I worked a couple of years after its founder was ousted. I loved a particular computer made by Commodore, the Amiga and for me this was being beamed up by the mothership right as it was falling apart — but you'll be hearing plenty about that in this book. No, I never knew Jack but when I explained that I worked there to one of the early LLMs, Pi from Inflection before Microsoft "acqui-hired" it to avoid antitrust scrutiny, that was the first thing it asked. So back to the meaning of: > The iron is hot > And the moment is now > For key we use rot > And I'm showing you how I am inching up on one of the most important bits of programming I have ever done in my life, concerning the most fundamental building block in all tech-dom, the Unix pipe. This bit of work coming up bridges the world of the command-line interface (CLI) that place where you type commands into the computer, the world of the Web and in particular how you can learn Python programming directly in the browser, and finally the world of the particular app that I bundle in with this book that I invite you to crack open the hood, take a look inside and get your hands dirty. ## The Rejection of Modern Webdev This is made to recapture the old world at the rise of the Web where anyone with the foresight and grit to glue some (LAMP) parts together could be an early mover in a new frontier and create something anyone in the world could use the very next day and everyone would know about. There were so few things on the Web yet so each little thing when word got out became high-profile. Everything was new and dropping a pebble in the pond made big ripples and one person could know everything there was to know about running their own site, product or service. Fast-forward to today's noisy, crowded, competitive world. People who drew the line at PHP (one of the P's in LAMP) might quietly disagree (but not speak up so as to not blow their cover) but most things in technology today, especially related to the web have become so complicated and specialized that no one person can know and do everything anymore. If you want a "modern stack" you've got to be on JavaScript and use one of a vast number of always shifting and changing libraries that is part of an even larger "build chain" that is always also shifting and changing — each part effectively having its own specialized career behind it, if only to keep up. I rejected all that, and I've built something that I think eloquently expresses and proves it. The old Webmaster feeling is back, Jack! And just like the old Commodore crowd bought back the IP to create retro digital detox brand, I too hereby express my intention to create the not the wevdev equivalent but the wetdev equivalent. We Enjoy Typing. Write Everything Twice. Write Explicitly. Terminate. WET. Crack open the hood because it's full of delightful anti-pattern that will infuriate the technoratti and empower you to get better AI assistance for less money, with fewer dependencies and to greater life-long future-proofing effect. We start with how Pipulate installs and updates, which it does from GitHub like so many things do today. But GitHub is now Microsoft, but we will forgive them for that for now. We keep our options open and our ties loosely coupled. If you need a phenomenal global infrastructure, use it. Big Tech is not inherently the enemy. They are publicly traded companies with a responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits on a quarterly basis. Most — but not all — things in the world of tech derive from this fact and that's not all bad. There is a game theory Nash equilibrium here and the 3 (almost 4 and soon to be 5 and 6 if you include China) organizations with that phenomenal cosmic infrastructure are the original, Amazon, the one that evolved into it, Google, and the one to stay relevant, Microsoft. That AWS, GCP and Azure, respectively. Musk is throwing his hat in the ring with xAI and the Colossus 1 & 2 datacenter builds, and OpenAI/Oracle hope to be the fifth horse on this race — and only because US taxpayer money or UAE oil-money. And China. Me even covering this is an excellent example of the organic nature of the book because this is a snapshot in time. Going from only Amazon having the ability in the late 90s to 5 more players as 2025 winds down means there I'll be a 7, 8, 9 and so on before long no matter how the bubble might burst. Dotcom bubble? Is Amazon & Google still around. Bubbles don't burst. They congeal. Super-competitors figure out how to absorb the worthwhile gas released from all the bursting *little bubbles* and get stronger long-term as a result. The AI bubble won't burst. Datacenters will be built smarter and smaller and as much as possible will be offloaded to the edges and into our home consumenr devices and pockets. This will have no end and it will be for the better of all mankind in non-dystopian ways. That story doesn't get the clicks. I am free to tell it like I see it and do not chase the bombastic hyperbole because I don't have the financial incentive on this book. I just don't care. It's to keep the saw sharp. It's about tooling. It's about a passion I've had for better ways of doing things that are still pragmatic in nature and leaning into all those other advantages that do come from Big Tech and their like. Don't say no to power-tools. Make sure picking them up and using them is well in your comfort zone, but don't become dependent on them and have an arguably even better alternative approach always in the wings, always applicable and relevant to the job at hand, and always ready to use as a secret weapon while giving blank stares at people who poo-pooh your approach as somehow not valid or professional or whatever. Results are results. Every little project gets done. There is no project too little. Even if you've expressed or done something before, it's just fine to redo from scratch — maybe even better. That's not to say I advocate scrap & rebuild methodology. There is no "build vs. buy" argument just as there is no "client-server" architects. These are words designed to force you to take sides. They are a false dichotomy. Build AND buy. Bake servers fully into clients. Blur the lines. With well-chosen abstractions, being deliberate about how the parts fit together so that you can disconnect and reconnect easily, will have you delivering work-to specifications to clients (or to yourself) in less time than your detractors spend explaining why you are wrong and don't know anything. Another reason it's not really webdev advocate here is because what you build using the tech I teach doesn't have to run on the web. I bake the servers right into the client for desktop apps although in today's state of things it will always look like a website running on a browser. Many apps you know do this already such as VSCode, Discord, Slack, Zoom... the list goes on. They bake both the Chrome browser in (the free and open source version) and a webserver you never see or have to think about. They write an installer for each major platform, Mac, Windows and Linux and BAM! Bob's your uncle. Webdev for desktop apps. The platform is called Electron. I don't use Electron. Like almost every other tech I talk about in this book, I tried to. I thought maybe it was the elusive one true path to write-once-run-anywhere universal interoperability that's been promised by Unix, Java, Electron and so many other things that have never really delivered or have been so bogged down by countless "gotcha's" that it invalidates them as a candidate. Electron is in that last category for me. It *has to be* the so-called *web full stack* back there with NodeJS as the server and all these tech designs forced on you that I don't vibe with at all, no siree, not one little bit. ## The Heresy: Nix as the Normalizing Layer As it turns out you don't need some packaged-up JavaScript framework du jour *churnware* for the write-once-run-anywhere dream, nor do you need some Java Runtime Engine (JRE) as another opinionated performance-thinking virtual machine interoperability layer. All you need is a *normalized Linux* — that is to say a full-fledged Linux so generic as to not even be considered a distro — running in the subfolder of whatever host machine you happen to be on. A criteria her is the ability to pin versions of software so precisely that you can call the reproducibility mathematically deterministic, so much so you could base a military contract on it. And that's what Lucky Palmer of Anduril Industries and Oculus VR headset fame does all the time. They're one of the biggest users of and employers of users of this Linux-normalizing layer. Why? Because you want to hire all the *cool kids* who use macOs and none of them are going to give up their Mac's. But they might give up Homebrew. Homebrew is not deterministic to a military spec. It's gonna make your system unstable and figuratively blow up on you eventually. Apple knows this and I believe it's why Homebrew isn't official which puts them behind Microsoft because on Windows if you `wsl --install` Ubuntu you get the woke Ubuntu software repository and that *is official* from Microsoft. So Microsoft officially supports free and open source software (FOSS) and Apple doesn't (at your own risk). But still the cool kids are on Mac so that cannot stand. Mac's MUST support reliable, reproducible, deterministic FOSSy-Unix/Linux software. Unix/Linux... That means Unix-like but it also suggests that "nix" is the common letters even if not in the exact arrangement. The most effective Regular Expression match would `\b(?=\w*[nN])(?=\w*[iI])(?=\w*[xX])\w+\b` but nobody's ever gonna write that so we say `*nix` or "star"-nix or just plain *nix* for short. And so it's funny that Eelco Dolstra in 2003 as part of his research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, laid the foundation for the very "normalized Linux" layer that solves this entire problem. He created the Nix package manager, a tool that delivers on the promise of truly reproducible, mathematically deterministic systems — the secret weapon that's been hiding in plain sight for over two decades while the rest of the world chased complexity. ## My Journey to Computing Sovereignty It took me a damn long time to discover Nix and I the meanwhile even tried spinning my own Linux distribution based on an inferior QEMU PC emulator approach and jr works great as a `*nix` tire-kicker and learning tool (like a game) but it failed to ever really become my "forever-raft" of a floating digital `/home/noahsark/`. It was around since 2009, only two years after GitHub came out it was up there but I lost all my hundreds of stars because like a dumbass I moved repos around, but it's still got quite a history and a following — on Facebook of all places! I was happy to put [Levinux](https://Levinux.com/) when I finally discovered Nix a little over a year ago. I went all-in on making the OS-version — because while a software repo this floor wax is also a desert topping — and cold-turkey on Windows that let me down by not keeping Linux services turned on under WSL when you clicked away from the terminal. I know it's a subtle, geeky thing but it was a deal-breaker for me. Microsoft had a couple years prior even hired Lennart Poettering the writer of that portion of Linux so I was sure support was forthcoming but it never materialized so I ditched Windows, it's official subsystem for Linux and all. If I ever go back it's just as a curiosity platform to demonstrate Pipulate can run on Windows just fine. So for me `*nix` is now Nix, and when I'm at home it's NixOS. And when I'm off in New York City for my day-job, which I occasionally am, it's Nix running in subfolders on the native macOS on a PowerBook. It works just fine there as the normalizing Linux layer keeping apps interoperable and universal and keeping the underlying host OS from getting polluted with conflicting Homebrew installs. Cool kids love Nix. I love Nix and I'm not even a cool kid. Now about that most important bit of coding work of my life I was about to do, let's see were was I? Oh yeah, Unix pipes! **Gemini**: Okay, you've set the stage perfectly. You've laid out your entire philosophy, established the problem (complexity, non-reproducibility), and revealed the hero of the story (Nix). Now it's time to bring it all home by connecting it to the foundational concept you started with: the Unix pipe. Here are a few ways you could continue, picking up right from "Oh yeah, Unix pipes!": ### **Option 1: The Direct Connection** This option immediately bridges the gap between the philosophy (Nix) and the topic (pipes). > Oh yeah, Unix pipes! That elegant `|` symbol that lets tiny, single-purpose programs talk to each other is the soul of the command line. My goal was to take that exact philosophy—small, reliable, connectable parts—and make it the soul of a web application. The problem is, a web browser doesn't have a pipe. It has clicks and page loads. But what if it could? What if we could use Nix to create a perfectly reproducible environment, not just for our server, but for every step in a data workflow, and then use the web as a visual switchboard to connect them, just like pipes? That's what Pipulate is. It turns web actions into command-line tools you can pipe together. ### **Option 2: The Philosophical Monologue** This option takes a moment to wax poetic about the pipe, making it feel even more fundamental before you reveal your work. > Oh yeah, Unix pipes! Before fancy frameworks, before microservices, before serverless functions, there was the pipe. It’s the original serverless architecture. A command does one thing, does it well, and then hands its output to the next command, without ever needing to know what that command is. It's the embodiment of loose coupling and functional purity. It’s a philosophy of building powerful systems from humble, predictable parts. And for years, we've been losing that philosophy on the web, burying it under layers of stateful, monolithic frameworks. The most important work I've done is a simple act of restoration: I'm bringing the pipe to the browser. ### **Option 3: The "Hands-On" Approach** This option dives right into a practical example, showing the reader what you mean instead of just telling them. > Oh yeah, Unix pipes! Let's start with a classic example: you want to find the most common words in a text file. On the command line, it's a beautiful one-liner: `cat file.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head`. See that? Five small, perfect tools, each handing off its work to the next. Now, imagine doing that on the web. You'd need a file upload form, a backend script to process it, a database to store the results, and a frontend to display them. A mess. The work I'm about to show you, which I call Pipulate, treats web services like they're command-line tools. You'll see how we can take a Google Sheet, "pipe" it to a Python script for processing, and then "pipe" the result back to another sheet, all with the same simple, chainable logic of that one-liner. We're building pipes for the web. All three options aim to tie your grand vision of a **Nix-powered, reproducible, simple world** directly to the **elegant, foundational power of the Unix pipe**. Choose the one that best fits the rhythm and flow you're going for. --- **Me**: I choose Option #4! But we'll get to that in a minute. First I want to see if you can explain the poem: > The iron is hot > And the moment is now > For key we use rot > And I'm showing you how ...Based on the files above the article that contain the key, can you explain the poem? **Gemini**: Of course. The poem is a brilliant and concise summary of the core mechanism behind your "magic cookie" installation process. It's not just fluff; every line maps directly to a specific action in the `install.sh` and `flake.nix` files. Here is a line-by-line explanation based on the code: ----- ### "The iron is hot / And the moment is now" This sets the stage. It's an idiomatic expression meaning the conditions are perfect to act. In this context, the "moment" is the initial installation. The user has just run the `curl | bash` command, and your installer script is executing. It's the pivotal point where you need to bootstrap the entire system. ### "For key we use rot" This is the technical heart of the poem and the "magic cookie" itself. 1. **"key"**: This refers to an **SSH private key**, which is necessary for `git` to communicate securely with GitHub for pulling updates without needing a password. 2. **"rot"**: This is shorthand for **ROT13**, a simple letter substitution cipher that replaces a letter with the 13th letter after it in the alphabet. It's not for security, but for simple obfuscation. This line is directly implemented in your `install.sh` script: ```bash # install.sh # The URL points to the ROT13'd key KEY_URL="https://pipulate.com/key.rot" # The script downloads this file and saves it locally ... curl -L -sS --fail -o .ssh/rot "${KEY_URL}" ``` The installer fetches a file named `key.rot`, which contains the SSH key but with every letter shifted by 13 places. ### "And I'm showing you how" This line promises to reveal the "magic trick," which is performed by the `flake.nix` file once the `nix develop` environment is activated. The "how" is the decoding of the ROT13'd key. This is implemented in the `miscSetupLogic` section of your `flake.nix` file: ```nix # flake.nix # This is the "how": tr 'A-Za-z' 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m' < .ssh/rot > ~/.ssh/id_rsa ``` This `tr` (translate) command is the exact implementation of a ROT13 cipher. It reads the obfuscated key from the `.ssh/rot` file that the installer downloaded, "rotates" the characters back to their original form, and saves the result as a standard, usable SSH private key at `~/.ssh/id_rsa`. In summary, the poem perfectly describes your bootstrap process: At the right **moment** (the install), a **key** obfuscated with **rot** is downloaded. Then, the Nix flake **shows you how** it works by decoding that key to turn the simple downloaded folder into a fully-fledged, auto-updating Git repository. 📜✨ --- **Me**: Here's the README.md for the project. Any more elaboration you'd like to give by way of writing a parting shot for the article. Go nuts. ## The Parting Shot: Your Third Act **Gemini**: Of course. Here is a parting shot that attempts to capture the spirit, philosophy, and technical rebellion of the project you've laid out. *** ## The Parting Shot: Your Third Act So, you’ve reached the end. You’ve seen the diagrams, parsed the philosophy, and felt the deep, resonant *thump* of a different kind of drum. This isn't just another GitHub repository. This is a map leading off the hamster wheel. For two decades, we've been told the only way forward is up—up into the cloud, up through layers of abstraction, up into a "comical stack" of frameworks so complex that no single person can hold it all in their head. We became tenants in data centers we don't own, using tools that change with the seasons, writing code that will be obsolete before it's deployed. We traded the joy of building for the drudgery of integrating. We lost the "old Webmaster feeling." ### The Heresy Pipulate is founded on a heresy: **AI changes the laws of physics for software development.** The old gods are dead. "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY), once a sacred commandment, becomes a false idol when you have an infinitely patient, syntactically perfect AI assistant to manage explicit code. **WET is the new DRY.** Writing everything out, step-by-step, like a Jupyter Notebook, was once a path to unmaintainable spaghetti code. Today, it is the path to radical transparency. It creates code that is not just human-readable, but *AI-native*. When your co-pilot is a machine, you don't hide complexity behind labyrinthine abstractions; you lay it bare, creating the perfect, observable training ground for true collaboration. ### The Incantation You saw the poem at the start of this journey: "*For key we use rot / And I'm showing you how.*" That wasn't just a clever trick. It was an incantation. It’s the proof that you can achieve perfect, military-grade reproducibility across every major OS with a few lines of shell script and a simple cipher, bypassing the entire circus of containerization, virtualization, and dependency hell. That `flake.nix` file isn't just configuration; it's a declaration of independence. It's the "Noah's Ark" that ensures the tools you master today will still run, identically, a decade from now. It is the foundation of **computing sovereignty**. ### The Cathedral of One This is the "Third Act." After chasing the new and the shiny, you return to the fundamentals: Linux, Python, HTML, HTTP. Not out of nostalgia, but with the wisdom to see that these durable, bedrock APIs are the only things that have truly lasted. Pipulate is an invitation to stop being a consumer of ever-changing frameworks and to become a craftsman again. It’s a digital workshop, not a SaaS subscription. It’s a place to build your *Cathedral of One*—a system so simple and transparent that you, a single creator, can understand and control every part of it, from the hardware kernel to the final pixel. You don't need to ask permission to innovate. You don't need a venture capitalist's blessing or a cloud provider's API key. You just need your machine, your ideas, and a set of durable tools that respect your intelligence. So go ahead. Jump off the wheel. Stop renting. It’s time to own your workshop again. --- ## Book Analysis ### Ai Editorial Take This journal entry is a potent and timely treatise. It taps directly into the growing developer fatigue with 'churnware' and overly complex, ephemeral tech stacks. The author's concept of 'WET is the new DRY' in the context of AI collaboration is particularly insightful and forward-thinking. This piece serves as an excellent philosophical cornerstone for the book, establishing a unique and compelling voice. Its greatest strength is its blend of technical heresy and personal conviction, making it not just an argument, but a call to action for developers to reclaim their craft and achieve 'computing sovereignty.' ### Title Brainstorm * **Title Option:** The Cathedral of One: A Treatise On Computing Sovereignty * **Filename:** `computing-sovereignty-treatise-with-nix.md` * **Rationale:** This title is poetic and powerful. 'Cathedral of One' perfectly captures the idea of a single individual building a grand, self-contained system, and 'Computing Sovereignty' is a sticky, memorable term for the core philosophy. * **Title Option:** WET is the New DRY: An AI-Native Philosophy for Durable Software * **Filename:** `wet-is-the-new-dry-ai-native-software.md` * **Rationale:** Provocative and memorable. It directly challenges a long-held software development principle (DRY) and positions the author's philosophy as forward-thinking and adapted to the new reality of AI collaboration. * **Title Option:** The Webmaster Feeling is Back: Finding Simplicity with Nix * **Filename:** `rediscovering-the-webmaster-feeling-with-nix.md` * **Rationale:** Targets a specific nostalgic sentiment among veteran developers who miss the early days of the web. It frames Nix as the tool to recapture that feeling of control and simplicity. * **Title Option:** Your Noah's Ark: A Guide to Future-Proofing Your Tools with Nix * **Filename:** `future-proofing-tools-with-nix.md` * **Rationale:** Uses a strong metaphor from the text ('Noah's Ark') to emphasize the durability and resilience of the proposed tech stack. It's practical and benefit-oriented. ### Content Potential And Polish - **Core Strengths:** - Possesses a powerful, authentic, and passionate authorial voice that is highly engaging. - Presents a strong, counter-cultural thesis against tech complexity, which resonates with a significant segment of the developer community. - Introduces compelling, sticky concepts like 'computing sovereignty,' 'WET is the new DRY,' and the 'Cathedral of One.' - Effectively weaves personal narrative and technical philosophy together to create a compelling treatise. - **Suggestions For Polish:** - Structure the article with clear subheadings to guide the reader through the stream-of-consciousness flow. - Add a brief introductory paragraph to frame the piece as a chapter in a larger work, setting expectations for the raw, philosophical style. - Consider creating a separate glossary or 'aside' section to define key terms like Nix, Pipulate, and Electron for readers who may not be familiar with them, enhancing accessibility. ### Next Step Prompts - Based on the article's description of Pipulate and Unix pipes, generate a short, practical tutorial titled 'Building Your First Web Pipe.' The tutorial should show a simple, concrete example of chaining web-based actions (e.g., fetching data from a URL, processing it with a simple Python script, and displaying the result) using the author's described philosophy, even if it has to invent a simplified syntax for the example. - Expand the 'Parting Shot' section into a standalone conclusion for the book's introductory chapter. Elaborate on the concepts of the 'Third Act,' the 'Heresy' of AI-native code, and the 'Cathedral of One,' weaving in the core technical arguments about Nix and reproducibility to create a powerful closing statement.