Feedback loop

A general purpose tool to set up good feedback loops and share them with your team.

Features

Run feedback loops

Use the feedback command to set up a feedback loop for your work.

For example, if you are working on a nix build, you might use this feedback loop:

feedback -- nix-build --no-out-link

Declarative feedback loops

You can declare feedback loops in the feedback.yaml configuration file to share them with your team. For example, this gives you a ci.nix-based feedback loop:

loops:
  ci: nix-build ci.nix --no-out-link

Then you can just run this command, and not have to remember the full incantation:

feedback ci

To see the full reference of options of the configuration file, run feedback --help.

CI Integration

When sharing feedback loops with team members, it is important that no one breaks another's workflow. You can use feedback-test to test out the feedback loops in a one-shot manner, so you can check that they still work on CI. See feedback-test --help for more details.

Comparison with other tools

	feedback	steeloverseer	watchexec	entr
Indication of command starting	✔️	✔️	C	C
Indication of time	✔️	C	C	C
Clear screen between feedback	✔️	C	C	✔️
Gitignore-aware	🚧	✖️	✔️	✖
Named feedback loops	✔️	✖️	✖	✖
Configurable feedback loops	✔️	✔️	✖	✖
Cancelling previous runs that aren't done yet	✔️	✔️	✔️	✖
Long-form flags for every option	✔️	✔️	✔️	✖
CI integration	✔️	C	C	C

• ✔️: Supported
• C: Possible but you have to write some code yourself
• 🚧 — Under development
• ✖️: Not supported
• ?: I don't know.

Someday/maybe ideas

• I want to have a good idea of the current state of things:
  • Is it blocking on CPU, on memory, on network?
• Manually activate a run
• Manually cancel and re-activate a run
• Low latency between change and rerun.
• Cancelling failed feedback loops from before.
• Ideally pipes still work in the loop, so we can do feedback "nix-build | cachix push mycache".