Mike Kasberg

I’ve been managing my dotfiles with Chezmoi for nearly five years now, and I love it! Chezmoi fundamentally changed my approach to dotfiles with templating, making it easy to keep my dotfiles working on multiple machines and even multiple operating systems. And Chezmoi’s integration with password managers made it easy to keep important identity files like id_rsa synced and backed up while remaining secure. Overall I’ve been really happy with my dotfiles setup, but in the last couple months I started noticing some pain points. Every time I synced my dotfiles, I got prompted for my Bitwarden password. For a long time this didn’t bother me, but I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at having to authenticate to my password manager, and sometimes even re-authenticate with 2-factor authentication, when I knew my secrets hadn’t changed. I realized I was actually avoiding updating my dotfiles because I didn’t want to deal with the password manager – which is exactly the opposite of what I want. So I finally decided to do something about it.

I got pretty excited when Bolt.new announced the World’s Largest Hackathon. I saw not only an opportunity to build something cool, but also – and perhaps more importantly – an opportunity to gain experience building something with AI tools. A hackathon’s the perfect place to explore the capabilities of AI tools because it let me lean in to vibe coding experience. I used the AI for many more kinds of tasks that I normally would, and I let it take control of things much more than I normally would. As a result, I think I was able to discover and push the limits of AI in my own workflow much faster than I otherwise would have, so it was an excellent learning experience!