I think we’re in the early days of this, but for extremely verifiable domains like porting from A to B or simulators with an objective oracle, I think it’s just a matter of putting the scaffolding to enable anyone and their Claude to contribute fruitfully.
I’m hoping we can do a similar thing with shared search for vulns, though it’s a bit harder. But if eg repos give an AGENTS.md with instructions on the bar for a good reproducer, then you could start to see more helpful federation patterns (instead of drive-by CVEs which are a net drain on contributors).
Different OSS project management skills required, but I am optimistic that we can do better at onboarding non-experts to federate work via their Claude subs. Almost like Folding at Home.
1. https://github.com/vercel-labs/emulate
for modelling and testing a CI software i was working on, i had to extend their github emulator in several places for example. but it was great to already have a working base.
I’ve definitely reached for these local cloud tools from time to time, but in a well-architected piece of software, you aren’t getting that much value from them. Either you don’t have a hard cloud dependency, or you want a high fidelity test of a specific cloud dependency.
Reached the same conclusion. Plus it's a fair amount of effort to set them up and maintain.
("floci" means "pubes")
I think having such emulator being lightweight and quick to run becomes more important in AI coding/worktree-based workflows where it's important to pre-setup the worktree with dependencies and dependent services on local ports.
I think if I was doing evals on the way an agent interacts with a service (e.g. Slack) the digital twin could make sense, but for rapid iteration or testing, it might not be what you want.
I’m interested in something that would allow me to over time migrante away from a GCP project that uses many services today - e.g., Datastore, FileStorage etc.
For us, floci-oci for object storage looks interesting. For everything else we have our own stack.
The Latin word is "flocci", which means hairs of wool, and it was also used to denote an insignificant thing.
English normally preserves the double consonants of Latin, and in this case it has already done this in the English words derived from "floccus", e.g. "to flocculate" and "flocculent".
In clouds, it was used due to the resemblance of those clouds with curly sheep wool.
Even the original Latin word would be a poor choice, because, as I have said above, it was also used to designate something that is insignificant, and such a meaning is undesirable for a company, product or service.
Many users, (myself included), had need to test cloud stuff locally, but had no tool to do so. Localstack exists, but it started rug pulling the free tier and they didn’t support all the features.
Meanwhile, Floci makes it easy to write your own cloud compatible test suite, then implement the feature to match. I was able to get a good enough coverage on a few features created in a weekend on the $20 tier of Claude to make it useful to me, then others picked up the work to round it out.
It’s really cool to see it grow.