(For the unaware, OP above is the article author.)

As a long time user of Bitbake and Yocto, and watcher of Yoe Linux... I kind of have to respectfully disagree with the approach.

One look at the Python or Node packaging ecosystem, and you can see how difficult trying to integrate those in a 'sane' way in embedded, with repeatability and security in mind, nevertheless wrangling something like C/C++ dependencies and native packages in a qemu-cross (or binfmt emulation) environment.

I feel like Bitbake and the wider Yocto ecosystem has essentially 'solved' cross compiling. Sure there are the incredibly complex codebases like Chromium that require lots and lots of study and patience, or esoteric compilers, etc. but for most applications I feel that especially AI tooling can write up a good basic recipe for integration with Yocto.

The unfortunate thing about AI tooling is Kernighan's law (where debugging is twice as hard as writing it the first time.) Especially in Embedded Linux, where 99.99% of the product code is written by others, trying to figure out where the AI didn't quite get it right or missed something can break things unexpectedly and impossibly for the unaware developer to fix, even breaking at runtime. So the build environment has to be simple and predictable. I think Yocto/Bitbake already strikes a good balance here, with other nice things like offline builds, repeatable builds, sstate caching across machines, PRbuild servers... things useful for big teams, so consider those as well.

Although, if someone does a 'uv'-like rewrite of Bitbake into Rust with the same feature set but faster, I am all for it...

Maybe, having Yoe or some other centralized distro make specific opinionated choices and then provide an open sstate feed, working inside Bitbake, could get a lot of the speed and customizability gains back without a big rewrite effort.