brethap VS hof

In 2017 I spent a while messing around and creating a system to code and control my computer via voice. I was experiencing RSI pain at the time, and thought I should be proactive and have a strategy where I could still work and use my computer in case it kept getting worse and it became an impedance to create such a tool. I tried every voice to text I could find, and unfortunately for me the only acceptable one in terms of quality was Dragon Naturally Speaking, which was commercial and Windows only (I use Linux). I decided to build a virtual machine running Windows XP which ran the voice -> text translation, and then run a local server on the Linux side which would receive packets of text from the virtual machine. It was then a matter of parsing the string for language primitives, as you'd need a custom alphabet of keywords to do certain actions like type any given key combination, and inventing your own primitives for this reduces ambiguity (voice detection is only so accurate and the use case here means it's going to be less accurate than usual since you are not speaking in expected english, plus you want everything to be single syllable).

The process of building a dictionary of primitives and shorts was very much akin to what court reporters / Stenographers do to type fast, and was also probably related to my RSI given that I started my career out as a Stenographer. Something I regret in retrospect.

In terms of voice coding, things really have gotten so much better since then where we now have amazing free and open source options for text to speech, and we've also seen a proliferation of apps used to code via voice. I'm partial to Talon, though I don't do any voice coding today. https://talonvoice.com/. Github also just announced a voice to code copilot type thing, and at this point given the advances we're seeing in AI I'm sure I'll be okay if my RSI gets bad. This video was one of the things I watched and helped me in building the system, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

I'm also building a video game, and plan on building many more. I'm writing it in a monorepo where I have a common shared foundation, and then apps using and building on that foundation. I believe in dogfooding my code, and have built a bunch of things with it towards that end

The thing I'm happiest with and use the most is a small and simple music player. I never could find a replacement Foobar2000, so I wrote my own. It runs nearly 24/7 on my PC's.

I've also built a breathing app after discovering that breathing exercises were like magic in terms of improving mood and reducing blood pressure. The one I built was modeled after https://github.com/jithware/brethap, and I mainly built it because it was trivial to do and Firefox kept putting the web tab to sleep. If you have high blood pressure, I 100% recommend exploring different breathing exercises.

I've also built two different GUI wrappers around image generators. The first app was built around VQGan+Clip back before Stable Diffusion, and it supported swapping the backends to change generators. I built it as a web app with Svelte, and it let me explore the images and auto-generate based on a theme or with a given sentence structure where parts of the sentence could be sampled from a pool. The second one was much the same, but it was built with my monorepo, it was built around Stable Diffusion, and I added an image-to-image component. The usefulness of this project is near 0 as there are better open source versions out there.

I also built a static website generator in Ruby for my personal website. I've since soured on Ruby though, and my website is no longer online. There are other things but I'll leave it there because this is already too long.

Brethap (version 1.0.1): Control your breathing during meditation.

Many business analysts use SQL, have for a long time. They are probably not your target audience. With the problem being JAVA specific, you'd likely want to start there

This sounds similar to the goals of my hof tool (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof), lift type definitions out of code so they can be defined in one place, then generate the code for all the places. Is that sounding like what you are after?

Having built something similar, the biggest challenge for users is that they have to use a bespoke language, like WASP here. I suspect that it is also your biggest challenge as well.

Mine is built on CUE, which at least has the potential to become a more widely used language. CUE hasn't reached sufficient maturity for broader adoption yet, so I continue to face this same problem.

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

Here's a big one I needed to get ChatGPT to do something more sophisticated with a JSON object response (predates functions and all that)

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

It no longer worked after a model update some time ago, haven't tried recently.

I found codellama to be much better for this and require fewer instructions, an anecdotal validation for smaller, focussed models

I was surprised out how you can define arbitrary grammars using arbitrary formulation and it would follow it. Of course you have to redo the prompt every time there is an update... such a pain

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

CUE is indeed a beautiful language, will get those mind juices flowing for sure!

There is more work to be done on the codec implementation, but if you just want to split yaml/json across files, CUE is a great option

You might also like my project, built on CUE: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof We have a TUI where you can explore and work with CUE, JSON, Yaml

You can pretty much make up any pseudo grammar like this one, which is a reduced JSON object that is close to CUE: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

No need to be formal or use a standard format

Yea, in particular for this project, they have created a bespoke templating system.

You can get the same thing with Go text/templates by adding chat function(s) as custom a helper: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/lib/templates...

100% one of the best things about building a TUI is not having the pain of modern web development. I do think there is a way to have a CLI & TUI come from the same code, so you can get the best of both, or pick the best for the task at hand.

experiments in progress here: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_dev/lib/tui

CUE is another interesting language to use from within Go, and is rather natural, given CUE is implemented in Go, but you can also do way more cool things with CUE via the Go API.

We're using CUE to validate and transform data, as input to code gen, the basis for a DAG task engine, and more

https://cuelang.org | https://pkg.go.dev/cuelang.org/[email protected]/cue | https://cuetorials.com/go-api (learn about CUE)

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof (where we are doing these things)

here is one of our early examples: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...