Yeah but my idea was more about mobiles handing out quests or answering simple questions maybe about what they do. the dungeon gpt thing was a bit more organic.
I miss MUDs. My old MUD went through a rename, a fork, and what have you --- but it's limping on, though with few playing it. The cost of hosting these things are so cheap today that you can just let it sit and mind its own business.
Back in the 90s you needed a permanent internet connection (rare!) and fast enough to handle all the usually uncompressed text, so it had to be a - shocker - T1 or better. Then you needed a server.
My old MUD has a discord; turns out a lot of the people I knew 25 years ago were there and remembered the my nick if not a little about myself back then. That was a fun nostalgia trip.
MUDs will eventually see a resurgence, I think. Mobiles with little language models to give flavour text and quests, plus a little tool calling language behind it to make it happen? I can see it working; in fact, I might just myself...
So you don't like using programming languages as config languages, so you:
1. Use a declarative-style format for config, which is fine, I guess;
2. ... and when that inevitably fails, you... use a programming language?
Some people -- not all, but some -- may prefer to skip the first step and go straight for the second option. Particularly if it's a complex thing indeed like a build system and not, y'know, configuring your blog.
I'm sitting here on my phone and I sent a screenshot of the text to gemini that said it was a decoy message. Then it told me the two overlapping messages. So... Yeah. Doesn't work.
Who would trust the classifiers, though? I would not.
A team of professionals will trust a gateway they built themselves -- by an AI, most likely, as that is boring work -- that works for their organisation and whatever weird quirks and house styles they have. In a year or two when things are a bit more stabilised that'll be dozens of subagents each testing a little thing each in isolation plus a bevvy of software that looks for antipatterns in addition to running tests and linters and what have you. It'll be tested against the ground truth specification and not the boring crap in the middle.
At no point will anybody's session matter. Results count; nothing more.
I find the value of someone steering an AI session to be practically nil for nearly everything. Nobody wonders out loud how a senior developer arrives at the result he does without an AI; they care that his deliverable is high quality and meets whatever standard/requirement exists.
So I'm not sure why people going "chop, chop" and "nah make it more red and bigger" is a useful signal of much of anything.
No, the future is a complex "gate" that checks, weighs and measures everything before it gets committed --- a local (or remote) "CI" but... more granular and far more specific and turned to the needs of the project you work on.
Because SAX parsing is a thing, and the visitor pattern makes it easy to elide searches in sub-trees if an attribute does not match.
So if name == "foobar" then read; else ignore. For a 500 GiB XML file that makes a difference.
As for your other point about an "AST" (it's actually just a DOM.) That's the the benefit? And you're in for a surprise when you learn that reaching into a deeply-nested JSON structure deserialised into whatever memory format most appropriate for your pet language is also an abstract data type that you act on with getters/accessors/what-have-yous that is in all but name a DOM.
And we do have tools to deal with it: XSLT for transformation. For querying? XPath.
XML is unfairly maligned. Yes, people bought into it too much 26 years ago, but then you would too if you had to maintain someone else's massive packed struct dumped into a file and documented in a poorly-maintained word document --- or worse, a brace of dumb IETF RFCs that contradict eachother.
I am glad that younger generations are looking at it with fresh eyes. XML is a useful format; it has its place in your toolbox. Ignore the haters.
But people do 3d print frames for drones and gliders. It's undoubtedly worse than carbon fibre, I guess, but I found it interesting enough to share that you can buy especially lightweight filaments designed for aeronautic stuff.
These things exist to eliminate the risk of ever serving stale information from a materialised view. I.e., their benefit is political/reputational as much as they are technical in the sense that they save you effort like remembering to invalidate a MV after an ingest operation.
Stale MV is a thing you only ever burn your fingers on once. Like how "It's not DNS" is a common meme in networking.
I mean I don't disagree with you, but they did just add a graph database feature, which is about as orthogonal to relational database design as you can get.
The graph database feature looks interesting, but I wonder...
SELECT customer_name FROM GRAPH_TABLE (myshop MATCH (c IS customers)-[IS customer_orders]->(o IS orders WHERE o.ordered_when = current_date) COLUMNS (c.name AS customer_name));
That is _awful_ syntax; it is reminiscent of neo4j, which is surely not a tool anyone serious should copy from outright in 2026.
And of course the final thing I am left wondering is if it's fast. Row-level security is such a useful feature and yet only a fool would contemplate building anything serious with Postgres', as the planner goes haywire and does per-row-matching, nuking performance.
You know you're doing a great job, OP, when the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique your em-dashes; greek-latin root word mix-ups despite the common vernacular having moved on from that; and lack of title brevity.
Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know Bambu and a few others sell specialised versions that supposedly weigh less than normal.
I run www.masteringemacs.org and www.inspiredpython.com
mickey (at) semantical.co.uk
http://github.com/mickeynp/