It might be good to pick up my proprietary project again. I had originally imagined a tool that could detect calls to vendor-specific routines and to specific copyrighted code (Numerical Recipes) and suggest open alternatives (netlib). It might help to detect imported copies of netlib that aren't obvious or disclosed and flag them for isolation and updating. I expected a lot of that to be tedious manual work, finding legacy vendor libraries, mapping them to modern equivalents. That might be a place genai would be useful ("Please find all the obsolescent and restricted code in my source tree") but there's no need for probabilistic methods here, especially anything shipped to a customer. Someone with less objection to chatbots would probably do it anyway if they thought they could make a few bucks sluicing it out.
There's probably no money in it anyway so keeping the project private is pointless. Then again, I don't want to be an open source maintainer. That just sounds hellish (again presuming anyone cared enough to deluge me with issues and PRs.) Then Todd Corporate would send me a request to do his software QA for free since he used my "product" and he somehow believed I was part of his "supply chain". At that point I might as well keep the code private and tell Todd to have his Procurement people call my Billing department so we can set all that up under a support contract.
And at that point it's not recreation, it's work, commerce, a side hustle. I've "run" my own "business" and I just don't have the attention span or motivation or acumen to do that again (hell, I didn't have it the first time...)
So I don't know. I'd like to get TACT3 running and modernized and extended for what I need it for (entertainment and independent design review) and automating some of the diagnostics and refactorings seems generally useful (the Photran plug-in for Eclipse was good but I could never sort out how to actually get to the code to modify it). But if I'm building parsing and text orocessing code, I'm likely to use Python and that probably wouldn't end well.
So I'm back to videogames. I can't find anything on Steam ("Please find me interesting niche games released over the last decade based on the games in my library" "Madden NFL 26 seems popular among people you probably wouldn't talk to if you had a choice!")
Meh. There is no boat, there is no float, only Zuul...
