Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve finally lured a junior programmer down into my basement. He came for the promise of a few bucks and a little fun, and while he was poking around in my source code cellar, I quietly threw the deadbolt and locked him in.
He’s been there for a week and still hasn’t noticed. And you wanna know the best part?
We’re actually getting shit done.
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Every solo developer knows the lament. There’s a mountain of important work that needs to get done by someone — command parsers, test scaffolding, CSV loaders, interactive prompts — but does it really have to be you? You’re all about developing the cool algorithms; finding the tricky solutions that other people said could never be found; not shoveling the heap of sadwork that all needs to be done before anything can ship. That’s what junior programmers are for!
An eager junior would love this kind of stuff. Real code, in a real project, with real users… A great way to get experience and contribute to something more exciting than a student project, and without any responsibility if the product fails. But in a one-man shop, the most junior guy in the place always seems to be wearing the same underwear as you.
So I’d given up the dream about some magical someone who could learn the codebase, follows the conventions, and be totally happy with the little things that no longer fascinate me, so I can go play with the bigger-kid toys. It was never gonna happen.
And then this week, it did.
For a while, I’d been experimenting with AI assisting me via the browser. It worked, but it was a laborious process, dragging things back and forth between my coding window and the conversation window. We’d make progress for a while, but inevitably get derailed when the AI lost the plot and started generating code to an older standard. Two steps forward, one step back.
But I finally decided to try it with a proper coding assistant - inside my coding console - and… Wow! What a change. No cutting and pasting, no context drift…
In the just one week, I’ve got the entire command set working. Plus solid documentation and a suite of 500 regression tests that give me deeper confidence every time I change a line or add something new and nothing old breaks.
Plim is now going through a real-world test against live data. My data. Real transactions pulled from my own bank accounts. Real spending categories. Real month-end carries. The kind of test that finds gaps that artificial data never exposes.
I’ve been doing my personal budgeting in web tools for years. Renting the service by the month so I can give all my data to faceless companies and trust them to keep it safe. But with plim, it’s all right on my desk where it belongs. Private. In plain text. Forever. For free.
But does it work? That is indeed the crucial question. Stay tuned. The bucket is in the water right now.
And in a few days we’ll see what we’ve caught.
I recently spent a pile of time trying to decide how plim should track debts: both the money you owe to others and the money they owe you. That covers everything from your mortgage to the $30 you loaned Dave at karaoke last Tuesday.
But a solution that covers all of them caught me by surprise — and made plim simpler in the process.
A concise recap of Plim’s bucket budgeting metaphor, with a description of each critical concept and data file in the system.
