first, i’m biased. i’m a home row kind of guy. i live in the terminal.

Which of the preferences you mentioned discounts this project?

i’ll be direct: light weight dependencies. i understand why you’d use Electron to build a UI, but does an API tester need a UI as a first class feature? i think something like hurl shows it’s not necessary. i get that maybe it’s an accessibility problem (juniors and Java devs being afraid of the command line etc), but UIs are not composable. i could run hurl (or curl for that matter) via bash or nushell or Elisp or Rust or Powershell or JavaScript or GitHub Actions or as a k8s postDeploy… and, not to draw the ire of Lemmy armchair zealots, they’re not easily usable by agents. an 8B model on my Macbook could figure out hurl, no MCP or crazy preprompting required.

plus: user adoption. this is the self hosted community, so maybe not everyone here has the same concern, but i can’t just commit a bunch of exotic files to my shared repositories. Bruno was a tough adoption, even though it seems obvious to version control this stuff and it was the only real option at the time. now i’m tired of Bruno cuz it goes out of date cuz it’s not easily scriptable with our internal auth services because it runs everything in its bespoke UI. if they haven’t made a button for it, you can’t do it. that’s the problem with UI dev tools.

no shade, i understand some people would be totally lost if their IDE didn’t have a big green run button.

i’ve been looking for a silver bullet in this space. hurl[1] seems promising as well. i feel like Bruno has always been jank, and going 1.0 didn’t help. at work i’ve stuck to vibe coding my API test code with a stack of TOML configs, that way i get to reuse/test my client code as well.

what i want is something version controllable with lightweight dependencies that i can automate easily. i’m afraid that discounts this project. not going to ask my team to download Yet Another Electron API client UI. i’m hesitant to introduce hurl, which can at least be scripted.

1: https://hurl.dev/

lots of good reasons to spin up containers for development is my point, especially for an embedded system with exotic system dependencies (compared to Node.js, for example).

Home Assistant is a “simple app” that i have to open ports for.

does that mean they have a good reason? maybe not.

really? i mean, people have done it for friggin vanilla ass Node.js servers. Android projects can have weird dependencies that a container might help solve (NDK etc).

i’m not saying that it’s my preferred way to build, but that wasn’t the question.

generally yeah. the problem is that the barrier to entry used to be higher so fewer people knew how to write code to integrate with the project before coding agents. now anyone who can install Claude Code has a seat at that table

i personally have pushed back on every “infinite scrolling” feature request from product designers. first, you think you need it; you don’t. second, you think it’s just so nifty! it isn’t. oh is your content is dynamically generated? what was wrong with Reddit’s pager that launched that site into popularity?

it’s unnecessary complexity that hides information from the user, makes API calls (which are, spoilers, paginated) more complicated, can cause the obvious memory/resource consumption issues, and just generally disempowers the user. which i guess on a social media app is the point. but totally counter to the goals of a fleet management system lol

honestly, where NixOS shines for me is in my homelab. i don’t always have time to fully document what i’m doing, but my NixOS config is code-as-documentation for when work burns all of my memories away and has a git log and conflict management so i can manage multiple systems that share common config.

and once you find out you can have services run on systemd with syntax like services.jellyfin.enabled = true you’ll never want to go back to containers, although it has ways to manage those as well.

it’s overall a great OS for tinkering and deploying small services across small networks. not sure how it scales, but for my use case it’s damn near perfect