Give Agents One Way To Do Things

something new i've been trying, half as an experiment, half as a statement of minimalism is to reduce complexity/choice in my computing environments. to put it another way, i want there to be one unambigious way to do things on a computer, and then i want to give agents instructions about that one way.

a pretty simple example here is for stuff like version management. asdf and mise are both... well, they're not my favorite solution to a problem (i suppose nix flakes are my favorite solution to it) but they are a necessary evil. instead of having a dozen different ways to handle it (nvm, whatever) -- i just use mise everywhere and remove other toolchains. everything goes into the mise hole.

the nice thing about this is that normally such a decision would be setting myself up for pain and agony; anything i wanted to build that expected system ruby or python or go or whatever would choke and try to install stuff, but now i can just tell my agent to figure it out while holding the constraint of One Way To Do Things. does this mean that i'm probably gonna find something Weird down the line, yes. do i care? probably not. i care more about the consistency benefits, because if there's one thing i can say about working with agents is that they loooooooove when there's one way to do things.

the nicer part of this is probably that by being extremely consistent with these choices it means more of my setup is portable. i can throw stuff on some disposable compute like a fly.io sprite and assume that stuff just works.

anyway, like i said, it's an experiment more than anything else. i would assume that the actual lesson here is that it doesn't matter if there's just one way to do things because the agents will do whatever they want with bash and gnu builtins. oh well.