markjgsmith

I thought this article about how South Korea is integrating different cultures into their society was a really interesting and well written piece.

Mutliculturalism is a bit of an ugly step child at the minute, it gets blamed for all sorts of things. I don‘t care for many *-isms, but I do know that integrating different cultures is really difficult, but I also know that it‘s important, because we need diversity. And the thing is, I think that the thing people hate about multiculturalism, isn‘t really about people from different backgrounds and cultures, that‘s just where the problem surfaces, where it gets exposed and put into the light.

The real problem is more fundamental, and probably exists even in places that don‘t have a lot of foreigners, because the real issues are more to do with human nature, and power and wealth. Those sorts of things.

And I'm not saying that countries should just have a complete open door policy, of course not, it‘s a balance, and that‘s one of the very difficult things to get right. It‘s a tremendously complicated massively distributed game of balancing the very fabric we are living on. That‘s no easy feat. But when we get it right, or even sort of right, it can be very wonderful for everyone.

Anyway, I find it very interesting to learn about how asian countries are handling these sorts of challenges. I don‘t think any of us have it all figured out. Some of the things we do work well, other things not so much. And each place is a bit different so things that work in one place don‘t necessarily work in another.

But I also think the better we get at integrating different cultures, the better we will be able to live with ourselves too. And that‘s why I really liked how the piece ends, because the whole way through there was something that felt a bit off, something missing about the full picture, and I think to a large extent the author nails it.

So I did end up modifying my devcontainer setup to accommodate the possibility of working with Gemini in agent mode. I have two configs now, one is a sort of admin mode, that I use myself, and have full access to the Github repo. The other is a paired down agent config, where you can only read from the repo. It's enough to get the latest code so theoretically an agent could start working locally on features, but it wouldn't be able to push to the remote. I also improved the setup so that you can only modify the devcontainer setup from outside the devcontainer. Gemini is very good at creating complicated situations where it could easily change some things without you realising.

I haven‘t taken much time to really try out agent mode because I have been finalising the frontend architecture for my React frontend, and actually I was learning a lot by pair programming with Gemini. As long as you can put up with it‘s infinite ego, and nod your head when it is telling you how you are frustrated all while it digs itself into a bigger and bigger hole, and be ready to pull the rip cord to make sure you don‘t fall in with it, it is phenomenal at writing documentation, summarising work done into very detailed commit messages, brainstorming ideas and development strategy, and at figuring out very complex Typescript blockages.

Looks like I'll have the migration of my new API‘s frontend to React sometime in the next few days. And I already have a small list of improvements to make.