Profiling[1] your own repository and tweaking as necessary (possibly
disabling auto-status refresh) will likely yield significant
performance improvements.
I use magit with a very large repository (100k files, millions of
commits) it's still not lightning fast like it is with smaller
repositories, I'm still finding it an improvement over the CLI.
My config notes this saves me ~13 seconds in git-status
For me: Will this task take 30 seconds or 3 minutes.
With good planning I've been able to step away and come back. Sometimes it decides to prompt me within 5 seconds for permissions. Sometimes it runs for 15 minutes.
The output is still small and I can review it. I can switch tasks, however if it's my primary effort for the day I don't like stepping away for an hour to do something else.
I'm still writing code. I'm doing it to solve a problem, there's more to writing code than than typing. Recently AI massively simplified "getting started", and all of the tips here are applicable to working well on a team.
My recent experience: I'm porting an app to Mac. It's been in my backlog for ~2 years. With Claude I had a functional prototype in under a day getting the major behavior implemented. I spent the next two weeks refactoring the original app to share as much logic as possible. The first two days was lots of fun. The refactoring was also something I wanted to flush out unit tests, still enjoyable.
The worst part was debugging really bugs introduced to my code from 5 years ago. My functions had naming issues describing the behavior wrong, confusing Claude, that I needed to re-understand to add new features.
Parts of coding are frustrating. Using AI is frustrating for different reasons.
The most frustrating part was rebasing with git to create a sensible history (which I've had to do without AI in the past), reviewing the sheer volume of changes (14k lines) and then deciding "do I want my name on this" which involved cleaning up all the linter warnings I'd self imposed on myself.
Years ago (2015?) I bought a DS416j. Paid maybe $400 at the time. It was the simplest plug-n-play NAS could I could find. I didn't even know it had a GUI! (I was being very lazy with my searching). Two 2tb HDDs. Eventually I started running home assistant (no docker). 2023 I was getting annoyed with performance. Two 2tb SSDs added (4 slots) which helped. 2025 I've moved home assistant to a dedicated $70 thin client.
As a dedicated personal backup for my family it's been perfect. The latest vendor lock in has me reconsidering how I'll upgrade when the time comes. Until this post I was considering a $1000 unit and transferring my SSD drives before buying more storage.
Sounds like it's time to build a proper storage+computer rack.
Isn't a large part of ethanol it's use as a fuel additive that it boosts octane and is relatively cheap? Compared to leaded gasoline it seems very "green".