devtools.fm

The episode delivers a solid stream of practitioner-level insights - parallel linting via diff-based integration, OCI as a tool distribution mechanism, lock files bypassing GitHub API rate limits - but is diluted by stretches of business-model musing and conversational meandering that add little value per minute.

“with ob, I have a hidden state file that I use with a bunch of checksums that can super quickly validate if it needs to install. Um, that's how I can get it sub 10 milliseconds”

“HK has like deep integration with these linters. And so if it runs rough, for example, it'll run it with dash dash diff. And so it doesn't have ruff make the changes on disk, it just asks rough what the changes are that need to be made”

There are a handful of genuinely contrarian or non-obvious takes - declaring Husky-style hook managers effectively dead, treating lock-file compatibility as a Switzerland principle, and framing Mise as an overlay rather than a system - but much of the episode is straightforward feature explanation rather than first-principles argumentation.

“as of like the new version of git that just came out a couple of weeks ago, you can have global hooks, uh, which means you don't need to do that thing where you need to like add a git slash hook pre commit. That's like really a lot of what these tools did. You just have it in a global and it'll just work in every project”

“every package manager out there has its own um, lock file. And I always thought that was ridiculous. Like should just be compatible. So. Oh, out of the box. It's just compatible with all of them. It's Switzerland”

Jeff Dickey is a genuine practitioner who built the Heroku CLI, worked CLI infra at Facebook, Amazon, and Figma, and created Mise - a widely-adopted tool - making his commentary grounded in real, scaled experience rather than punditry; the niche domain caps the score slightly.

“my first job was, was writing the Heroku CLI. That was almost 13 years ago now. Um, and ever since then I just really have loved making dev tools and clis...after that I've gone to do that at ah, Facebook, at ah, Amazon most recently Figma”

“I get 1,000 GitHub notifications a week”

The episode is peppered with concrete data points - GitHub rate limits, a 95% GitHub sourcing stat, sub-10ms validation, macOS/Linux sandbox specifics - but the business model discussion stays vague and several future-feature claims are unanchored by timelines or evidence.

“I was actually collecting a decent amount of people giving me money on GitHub sponsors before, you know like four or five hundred a month”

“On macOS it uses seat belt. On Linux it uses landlock”

The hosts ask decent technical follow-ups - probing on workspaces, PNPM differentiation, the jail model - but never push back on any claim, let contested comparisons pass unchallenged, and close with predictable 'what's next' softballs rather than stress-testing the guest's reasoning.

“PMPM is really trying to push a performance envelope too. That's one of their big things. And I'm curious, beyond some of the other things that you talked about, like lock file compatibility, what was the big thing when you think about PNPM that separates as like, this just isn't enough”

“So there's a lot of features that like I've come to rely on in a package manager. Probably the biggest one being workspaces. Does uh, OBS support workspaces and kind of like those more nitty gritty detailed features”