My software printing press is picking up steam! Mounting my git credentials has made the press much more useful; the “idea-to-code” pipeline has become much smoother.

As I expected, mounting git credentials was not particularly difficult - you place a Github-connected SSH key in a certain place and configure the git client appropriately. As I was doing that I realized that it’s not just a matter of creating commits and pushing them. I expanded my approach so that now I’ve installed and configured the gh tool. Now I can input Github issues and output Github pull requests! That’s much closer to what I want: a seamless ideas-to-code pipeline.

For the time being I’m not thinking too much about agentic code review - I’m doing all of that by hand. And I’m also not too worried about architecting the ideas before we get to code - I do that within the confines of the issue before I fire up the press. For a single-author, single-repo use case that I’ve got now, this workflow is perfectly sufficient - but of course it’ll certainly get more robust as we move forward. Handing off the issues from architect to implementer to reviewer is going to be a really interesting challenge, I’m quite excited for it!

Naturally, this whole thing is an ouroboros - everything is nowadays - and I’ve used the software printing press to write code for… the software printing press. That was quite a delight. A lot of the code for installing and configuring gh, fetching issue text, creating PRs, etc., was written by the software printing press itself. It’s turtles all the way down!

The first PR I “printed” was in my laws-of-software repository. I’ve been meaning to add The Bitter Lesson as one of the laws for a little while now, as indicated in issue 8 in the repository. So to test the new “issue-to-PR” pipeline, fired off an API call to the software press and - hey presto! - before you know it I had the PR in hand. That PR is just a few lines of Markdown, but there’s a lot of potential here!

The next big milestone is an event-driven interface. I want my press to listen to Github events and automatically pick up issues as they are marked “ready for implementation.” That’ll open up a pretty exciting affordance: the ability to code on-the-run, using my phone’s Github app as the trigger mechanism. Look out Codex Cloud, my software press is on your tail!