markjgsmith

Glad to be using devcontainers

I had a bit of a strange incident with Gemini in VSCode yesterday that I think is worth mentioning. After getting quite a lot of stuff done, Gemini took a bit of an odd turn, and was suggesting changes that I didn‘t agree with. I decided not to accept the changes it was proposing, and gave it my reasoning. It eventually did agree with me that what it had suggested didn‘t align with my goals, but as we moved forward it started making more and more silly mistakes. It felt like it was slowly escalating.

I decided to close VSCode down, and I was going to restart a fresh chat session, and I mentioned this politely in the chat. When I opened VSCode back up, the chat session was blocked. It was the error where it says that your account is no longer allowed to use the product and asks you to switch account. I disconnected the devcontainer in VSCode and when I restarted it fresh, there were a ton of errors in the startup logs. The devcontainer wouldn‘t even boot. I troubleshooted it for a while but eventually decided to ditch the container and rebuild from scratch. Luckily I had been committing code regularly so I didn‘t lose anything. I jumped out to the container orchestrator software and deleted the container, then back into VSCode and rebuilt a new devcontainer.

After the rebuild everything started up clean, no error in the logs, I had to re-install all the VSCode plugins from scratch, after which I was able to login without issues into the Gemini Code Assistant. I find that strange. At the very least it‘s quite a terrible user experience. It‘s pretty rare that a container gets hosed. I actually can‘t even remember that ever happening to me. I certainly didn‘t change anything in either the container or in the OS that was running in it. The only other entity that had full access to the container OS was Gemini. Weird.

I sure am glad I‘m using devcontainers. #

I just fixed a bug that I found yesterday on the blog where the font size on the posts, podcasts and newsletter archive pages was very big and thus difficult to read. That‘s fixed now.

While clicking around I discovered that the main pages of the blog, which only list the latest 20 posts, didn‘t have a link to the archives, so it just looked like there were not very many posts. Kind of an embarrassing over-site given that there are posts going all the way back to 2011. For many many years it was just a linkblog, but it evolved into a full on blog with many different post types. The bug was most likely introduced at the last big redesign. To be honest though it might have been the redesign before that. Previous to that re-design, the linkblog was running on Linkblog.io, and in a way, the archives on that site were more obvious because it only did links. Integrating the linkblog into a broader site with many post types hasn‘t been all that obvious. It‘s strange how obvious things seem in retrospect, but when you are in the thick of it, it‘s often not obvious at all.

Anyway, I‘ve added a link to the relevant archives page at the bottom of each main page now. Historically it‘s been so chaotic building personal websites that you couldn‘t always see the woods for the trees. #