The Manual Arrives Late

 Here is how I use AI coding agent to learn new things, from substack.

I did it ... with the help of OpenCode

I have been using Nushell for quite a number of years. It provides a unified CLI interface on various Linux distros and Windows. The learning materials for Nushell is surprisingly scarce. There is an HTML book on their web site but I would like to read either a paper book or a PDF on my ebook reader. I suspect at certain point they probably will publish the book (and I will definitely get a copy!) but before that, I have to get my hands dirty and compile the PDF file out of the markdown files from their GitHub repo. 

I have tried a few times in the past but there were alway some minor problems and I just did not have the time nor the patience to iron out all the tiny little problems. Today it suddently came to my mind that maybe this is exactly the kind of task for AI. So I fired up my OpenCode terminal, chose the free DeepSeek Flash model, and ask it to compile a PDF book using Quarto. In about an hour's trial and error (without my intervention at all), it produced a nicely formated PDF book of 329 pages!

I am amazed!

Get all Go modules up-to-date

 This is the secret weapon that I have been looking for. In the Rust ecosystem, there is the cargo commands. 

The final piece of the puzzle: Margins.jl

 With the arrival of margins.jl, the Julia ecosystem for data analysis is finally complete. 

Manjaro Immutable

 This is huge. Over the years, the only complaint I have got against Manjaro is that sometime the updates can break the system. It does not happen often but when it does, it is very annoying. I assume this will eliminate the breakage problem once and for all! 

Using yazi on Windows

 Yazi is my favorite file manager on Linux. On Windows, however, I have been having trouble with file previewing and file opening. Today I asked Google Gemini about this and the answer was:

---

3. Important Windows Requirement: file

Yazi uses the file command to determine if a file is "text" or "image." Windows doesn't have this by default.

• Recommendation: Install Git for Windows. It includes a file.exe utility.

• Tell Yazi where it is by adding this to your Nushell env.nu (open with config env):

  Code snippet

  $env.YAZI_FILE_ONE = 'C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\file.exe'

---

This actually solved the problem.

Agents.jl vs. Vanaha.jl

 Some very informative discussions here.

Introduction to Julia for R users

 Useful information for R users here.

This is another one.

NLRX tricks

 I just realized that it is possible to combine `runtime` and `stopcond` options to accommodate the situation that most NetLogo simulation runs can reach equilibrium but some cannot. In my case, I used the following code:

runtime = 300,

stopcond = "all? turtles [happy?]",

With amazing results.