moody on Nostr: My comment on the recent "Acme AI agent" thread on 9fans stating that I'm done was ...

My comment on the recent "Acme AI agent" thread on 9fans stating that I'm done was censored (for some reason, not even remotely heated) so instead I am posting some thoughts here.

I have over the past maybe 4 years or so attempted to rebuild the bridge somewhat between 9legacy folks and 9front. This was in-part driven by iwp9 happening and generally having a good time getting to meet folks outside of the immediate 9front sphere. Part of this was driven by the fact that having two semi-hostile groups is confusing for newcomers, part of this was in hopes to reduce duplicate work, part of it was looking to allow us to do more by working together. I was not here when this fissure between these two groups started, so I thought perhaps we could bury the hatchet and everyone would be better off.

Trying to do this is messy, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm no saint, if you go looking you'll find plenty of heated posts from me to 9fans. However, slowly bit by bit, I felt like things were slowly improving. Folks were airing grievances and for once it felt like there was some actual listening and improvements. One part of this was the 9front git force push to get rid of some jokes that haven't aged well, the final list of which was done in conjunction with the p9f for something everyone agrees with. The hopes of doing that was that with this clean up we could finally get some recognition on the main websites (p9f.org et all), however despite us doing the work of the force push nearly a year ago(which involved a risky and involved change to our update mechanism) there has been no change to any recognition.

As we'll see this becomes a recurring theme, expectations that 9front developers and maintainers should shoulder the lion-share of the work burden for doing something. Over the past couple of years we've gotten drive-by PRs made by some 9legacy folks, and when there is any sort of additional questions or requests for changes the response we get is almost one of insult. I want to be more charitable but it comes across as "how do you question MY change to your shitty fork". As soon as someone says anything the result is "well I'm just going to take my toys and go home then". The final boss of this was this vibe coded crapola PR sent to us for us to roll back a bunch of uses of our new interfaces in git (many of which were done to make the code more maintainable) to make it compile out of the box on 9legacy.

Not to mention that after being clearly stated that 9front does not accept computer generated software, no one was willing to answer the question of if they used it. No one wants to admit anything inconvenient. No one wants to communicate or solve problems together. They don't want to make 9front better, they want to use it for their own uses and make that our problem. So I'm sorry but I just don't to work with the p9f and their community if this is the result. Other 9front community members warned me this would be the outcome but I wanted to believe otherwise.

Its important to note that I dont have anything against any of these folks personally, I'd happily have a drink with anyone, at the end of the day we have something in common if we're still using Plan 9, but liking someone and working together are two different things. I also want to make a carve out for Richard Miller, who has carved his own path and continuously been working (mostly) in the open, large amount of respect for him keeping on.