[MortyWaves]

I agree completely with all you said however Claude solved a problem I had recently in a pretty surprising way.

So I’m not very experienced with Docker and can just about make a Docker Compose file.

I wanted to setup cron as a container in order to run something on a volume shared with another container.

I googled “docker compose cron” and must have found a dozen cron images. I set one up and it worked great on X86 and then failed on ARM because the image didn’t have an ARM build. This is a recurring theme with Docker and ARM but not relevant here I guess.

Anyway, after going through those dozen or so images all of which don’t work on ARM I gave up and sent the Compose file to Claude and asked it to suggest something.

It suggested simply use the alpine base image and add an entry to its crontab, and it works perfectly fine.

This may well be a skill issue but it had never occurred to me to me that cron is still available like that.

Three pages of Google results and not a single result anywhere suggesting I should just do it that way.

Of course this is also partly because Google search is mostly shit these days.

[noisy_boy]

Maybe you would have figured it out if you thought a bit more deeply about what you wanted to achieve.

You want to schedule things. What is the basic tool we use to schedule on Linux? Cron. Do you need to install it separately? No, it usually comes with most Linux images. What is your container, functionally speaking? A working Linux system. So you can run scripts on it. Lot of these scripts run binaries that come with Linux. Is there a cron binary available? Try using that.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 but breaking objectives down to their basic core can be helpful.

[sgarland]

With respect, the core issue here is you lacked a basic understanding of Linux, and this is precisely the problem that many people — including myself – have with LLMs. They are powerful and useful tools, but if you don’t understand the fundamentals of what you’re trying to accomplish, you’re not going to have any idea if you’re going about that task in the correct manner, let alone an optimal one.

[mukunda_johnson]

Honestly we are headed towards a disturbing height of inefficiency in software. Look at software today, 1000x less efficient than what we had in the 90s. Do businesses care? No, they focus on value. The average user is too stupid to care, even though all their RAM is being sucked up and their computer feels like shit.

The only thing that's keeping us from that hell is the "correct" part. The code is not going to be properly tested or consistent, making it impractical for anything substantial right now.