What people recommend, in their own words, with the receipt.
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian; now writing and building solo on agentic engineering.
4 things
Home ManagerSoftware
I like this split because it keeps system concerns and user concerns from getting mixed together.
Same post, on why he uses Home Manager to configure his user environment separately from system-level Nix/nix-darwin config.
blog.kunchenguid.com ↗·2026-04-05
Pi (coding agent harness)Software earendil-works
I use Pi heavily for any model that’s not Claude, because Anthropic banned 3rd party harnesses from using their subscription quota. There are some workarounds, but none is perfect - so for Claude I’m stuck with Claude Code. For any other LLM, I pretty much only use Pi at this point, barring some exceptions. I pick Pi because it’s provider-neutral, minimal, and deeply customizable.
Post 'Kun's Pi Agent Config' sharing his personal setup for the Pi coding-agent harness.
blog.kunchenguid.com ↗·2026-08-01
pi-web-accessSoftware
pi-web-access is a no-brainer because the stock Pi is so minimal that it doesn’t even have the ability to search and browse web content.
Same post, explaining the third-party Pi extensions he installs.
blog.kunchenguid.com ↗·2026-08-01
NixSoftware
Nix is a package manager and configuration system. The reason people like it is that it lets you describe an environment declaratively. Instead of manually installing packages and hoping you remember what you did six months later, you define the environment in code. For me, the value is simple: I want my machine setup written down in a form I can version, reapply, and evolve.
Post 'How I Built a Reproducible Mac Setup with Nix' explaining his declarative Mac setup stack.
blog.kunchenguid.com ↗·2026-04-05
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The small bar beside a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The bar shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Full and green is recent. It drains, and turns amber and then grey, as the post gets older.
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