2025 Review

Show Notes

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In this episode, we reflect on 2025:

1. Intro and theme

   • Cliff and Khem look back on 2025, focusing on how AI, Zephyr/Yocto, and tooling changed daily engineering work.

2. AI as co-developer

   • Khem shifts from hand-written scripts to delegating tasks to AI as a co‑developer, not an autonomous agent.
   • Cliff adopts terminal-first AI tools (Cloud Code, etc.) for Bash, Ansible, Dockerfiles, and content workflows (newsletter/blog, diagrams).

3. Doc Driven Development workflow

   • Cloud Code plugin: Doc Driven Development, part of Cliff’s Claude plugins: tmpdir-claude-code-marketplace.
   • Workflow: write docs → AI generates plan → review → AI generates code, treating AI like a compiler whose inputs (docs/plans) are versioned.

4. Zephyr and AI-friendly context

   • Work with Zephyr (and West) keeps BSPs and app code in Git repos, making it easy for AI tools to see full build context and outperform GUI‑centric MCU tools with hidden code.
   • Zephyr is expected to become the default RTOS as capable MCUs remain inexpensive.

5. Yoe, Yocto, Jetson, and OTA

   • Jetson Nano and AGX Orin have been added to the Yoe Distribution as reference platforms with swupdate-based OTA and a rootfs+data partitioning strategy aimed at real products, not demos.
   • A rolling-release Yocto model plus meta-tegra’s upstream‑first approach keeps changes small and manageable.
   • Staying close to upstream and ensuring BSP changes land there first is called out as key to long-term maintainability of embedded products.

6. Kas and project structure

   • The Yoe Distro is migrating from shell-based project definitions to Kas for more structured, composable project descriptions and easier reuse/inheritance.

7. Editor and shell stack

   • Helix editor: helix.
   • Yazi file manager: yazi or org: yazi-rs.
   • Lazygit: lazygit.
   • Zellij terminal workspace: zellij.
   • Cliff standardizes on Helix plus Yazi, Lazygit, and Zellij for a fast terminal environment; Khem aliases vi to Helix after finding it better for huge files than Vim-with-plugins.
   • Khem experiments with Nushell’s table-centric pipelines, seeing potential with AI but noting syntax incompatibility with traditional shells.

8. Custom tools: BRun and HFID

   • BRun (Cliff’s project): brun.
   • BRun provides a YAML-defined, local workflow runner (GitHub Actions–like) for native Yocto builds, with chained tasks and smart notifications (emails, Notify.sh, tail logs on failure).
   • HFID is provided as a hosted service (not open source); concept and usage are described at HFID and in posts linked from BEC Systems.

9. Desktops, Omarchy, distros, and servers

   • Khem runs Hyprland tiling on Arch for low-memory build machines while still using KDE elsewhere; Arch makes switching easy at login.
   • Omarchy, DHH’s Arch+Hyprland Arch based distro for developers, is highlighted as a polished, opinionated entry point for new Linux users: omarchy.org.
   • Omarchy is great for people who want a ready-made Arch+Hyprland setup, while vanilla Hyperland is a better fit for experienced users who already have strong preferences.
   • Arch on servers works well when combined with Ansible-based configuration and non-golden-machine practices so systems can be rebuilt quickly if needed.

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