Yeah I think this is changing, fast.

100% agree on "clone X and tell me how it works". I'd also add: "clone X and see how it does Y; use that as design reference for building feature Z" if licenses permit.

On modifying software... I forked codex in ~Dec and had my own lightweight "plan mode" and a few other things. It was fun and satisfying, but it ended up being a bit of a pain to keep updated. The models were less good then, and maybe I should have learned some rust first. But it was close. For a less fast-moving codebase it'd have worked, and that was 8mo ago.

On the other hand as someone building in devtools for the first time, I struggle with how to think about this. We're building a cloud agent + sandbox platform, https://boxes.dev - same problem space as the author's product exe.dev. We could open source our client or the whole stack (we've been thinking about it), but we're adding stuff so quickly that anyone customizing would have a hard time with updates. There's also a lot on the hosted side that users couldn't modify unless they self-host.

But I like this vision of a world where software is some fluid thing, and everyone is writing personal mods and building off of others' - basically OSS with forks but where every user (or their agent at least) is engaged with the code.

How are you handling the actual provisioning of the agent boxes/VMs? Are you using a specific provider/cloud, or multi-provider? Are there any providers/clouds you've found are better/worse for your use cases?

Asking because I am working on an open/standard protocol/layer for provisioning cloud resources across different providers. One of the ideas is to provide a marketplace of providers/resources via one unified/standard API, which I would allow automatic selection and provisioning of VMs (and other resources) based on price/value/feature/reputation requirements/priorities.

> On modifying software [..] It was fun and satisfying, but it ended up being a bit of a pain to keep updated.

I don't mean this as a criticism in any way - but the need to keep your changes current is a strong motivation for getting those changes incorporated upstream.