Hacker News: Ask HN

Looking for design partners – Building Agent-mediated communication

ckerf24 — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:26:11 +0000

I am building Vouch (textvouch.com), the substrate for agent-mediated communication. Each new generation of technology produces a revolution in communication. My thesis is that, in the age of AI, agents will replace the half of every conversation that's logistics like scheduling, matching, outreach, and the back-and-forth that should never have been human work in the first place. Your personal agent can talk to other people's agents to schedule, vouch, broker intros, find the right person.

For reference, I am a CS student at UChicago and a developer who has been obssesed with AI for the last 3-4 years.

I am looking for design partners (who use agents daily) that I can brainstorm and workshop with as I prototype. It will be a 4-week build cycle, 20-min weekly calls. You will have access to Vouch entirely free for life when it ships.

If you are interested, reach out: charliekerfoot@gmail.com. I also have a 2 minute demo video that explains it further.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114036

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The social contract between the user and the OS is broken

m348e912 — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:23:26 +0000

Here are just some of the social contract rules that have been reneged upon:

* Hitting the X means close/quit the app.

* Close/quit means end the task/program, not minimize it and run in the background.

* Searching allows you to search for a file or a program quickly and directly.

* No ads on an OS that the user paid for

* Clicking "No" means stop asking, not "remind me later"

* User's data should remain user's data

* If a user backs up files to the cloud, it doesn't mean they automatically get removed from the users machine without permission

* AI shouldn't be shoehorned into all apps unless enabled by user

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113999

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: If AI has made engineers more efficient, why does everything feel worse?

ent101 — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:15:11 +0000

constant outages, horrible UIs that won't change, security issues left and right. What's going on?!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113873

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Ask HN: Is Spam getting worse or is Gmail getting worse?

adamtaylor_13 — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:58:24 +0000

Over the past couple of months I've noticed that number of spam emails landing in my inbox has increased by quite a bit. I keep a very tidy inbox, so it's pretty easy for me to notice them and mark them as spam. But I'm curious: is Google just getting worse at detecting spam, or is the spam somehow evolving?

For example, I just got this email:

Sender: william_brown_318@rofopifj.dravixa.space Subject: the wagon is in

The body contains tons of literal HTML tags that weren't parsed into actual HTML. Not sure if it was sent as a text mime-type or what, but it takes all of 2 whole seconds for me to mentally note that this is spam.

How is this getting through more often these days?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113611

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

Ask HN: How to separate agent harness from code repo?

FrankRay78 — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:52:53 +0000

I’m interested in any approaches or ideas for how to keep agent harness and code separate, like ideally separate repos.

Spec driven development is going really well for me, along with a swarm of agents and skills etc.

However, I’m seeing .Claude/memory/, docs/, .specify/*, hooks and extensions, context management tools etc becoming as much an overhead to manage as the codebase itself sometimes.

Also, it’s all mixed in together, in the same repo. Surely this is an anti-pattern.

Are there better ways to do this (yet)? Or is this the next AI frontier to evolve?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113536

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Ask HN: Is delegating writing to AI like CEO delegating writing to a secretary?

amichail — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:47:11 +0000

And if so, why is one considered less acceptable than the other, especially on social media?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113449

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Sentencia – A daily Wikipedia word puzzle

Pawnef — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:25:15 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113175

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

AI overlay that stays invisible to screen recorders

unviewable — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:42:51 +0000

Use case: high-stakes interviews and meetings.

Happy to discuss Windows internals or the ethics debate. Technical questions especially welcome.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112504

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Are LLM Useful for Solo Founders

sinsudo — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:41:19 +0000

My first experience with strong LLM like Claude made me want a lot of tokens for a lot of good ideas, then later I realized that I needed more than software for my project to take off, and I did not have social contacts, marketing, capital, etc. So, now I see AI like just a game. Perhaps this is just one data point that might generalize to solo founders.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112487

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

Ask HN: Do people still pay for simple utility tools, or use ChatGPT/Claude now?

kamscruz — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:27:18 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112290

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: What's your experience with AI in hiring?

kathir05 — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:04:38 +0000

"AI-native hiring" is just faster keyword/vector matching.

Every atomic hiring step such as filtering applicants, moving to different stages involves, we will be dealing with 100s of judgement parameters before we take any action forward.

What are we offloading to AI today? - just admin tasks or human judgements?

- Sourcing and filtering are intensive human judgements operations. - Accepting applications, managing, organising, collaborating, outreach are most time admin consuming tasks in hiring pipeline.

Simple ATS sass automates most of these things.

AI is a great tool, but before fitting into hiring user flows where judgements >>> automations, we need to resolve on fundamental principle, AI-augmented judgment or AI-replaced judgment?

Which you think is actually working well today for HR professionals? Has AI helped, or just added noise?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111921

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: Job Search Skill for Claude?

OldSchoolTV — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:06:56 +0000

To anyone who has used claude for job hunting, what skills do you use and what sets them apart?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111100

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: How can I get a bank account for a minor owned LLC?

iloveplants — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:01:15 +0000

i'm a 16 year old and recently (a month ago) formed my own llc as the sole owner, with my dad as the organizer. i've been trying to open a business bank account, but i cannot find a single bank that allows me to make an business account with them. what do i do? i live in texas.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111024

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Spotify Is Down

circadian — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:28:03 +0000

Anyone else seeing this, even their status page is offline?

https://downdetector.co.uk/status/spotify/

Getting:

Error 503 first byte timeout first byte timeout

Error 54113 Details: cache-lcy-egml8630041-LCY 1778603283 2551008548

Varnish cache server

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110514

Points: 11

# Comments: 5

Ask HN: Do you need to look at the code?

blinkbat — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:46:38 +0000

I see a lot of articles about compounding vibecoded debt, which for sure, unchecked, can tank a system. But in my experience even a little bit of guidance and interjection, combined with the LLM's superhuman parsing abilities, makes this problem a lot less drastic. Obviously for secure, legally viable, mission-critical, or potentially costly systems, you want expert eyes on the code lest you suffer from known/unknown unknowns. But for most other tasks, do you really need to look at the code? Are correctness testing, benchmarks, other metrics of success enough to silence the nagging "I don't know exactly how this code is written" voices?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109978

Points: 2

# Comments: 7

Ask HN: Is software cooked with all the recent malware?

fnoef — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:31:50 +0000

Feels like malware and security vulnerabilities are thriving recently. Are we witnessing a potential collapse of the way software is being developed, or am I just stuck with selection bias and it was always a shit show?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109792

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Ask HN: Any materials on building distributed rate limiter?

ravshan — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:12:32 +0000

There are surprisingly not that much information on building a rate limiter where a web app has multiple instances running at the same time and needs a rate limiter.

Checking redis on each request is not an option since there are about billion requests daily.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109509

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: How do you keep up with blogs from people you follow?

kalinkochnev — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:01:41 +0000

I have a personal site where I post project logs. I want to grow my readership, but I don't know how to distribute it effectively. I'd like to be independent of the larger blog sites (substack, medium, etc).

What are people's preferences for RSS vs email newsletters vs other methods for keeping up with people's blogs?

I’m also asking because I haven’t found a solution for myself to keep up with other people’s personal blogs.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109343

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

Implicit Knowledge Is a Liability

gruyaume — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:37:45 +0000

AI coders are very much like new employees. When you prompt them with a query they learn about the project as if it was their first day on the job. They load some information into their context. They summarize the README.md, the contributing guide, coding standards, and a lot more. In the best case, they complete the task as specified.

But at what cost? Regression. Unless you have a solid testing suite.

All engineering projects run on implicit and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is text in and around the code base: documentation, code comments, tests, and the code itself. Implicit knowledge lives in people’s brains. For example, a team could have decided not to write an integration test for a niche and hard-to-harness behavior. They may know which part of the code handles that behavior and be careful about changing it through code reviews.

In the age of AI, implicit knowledge is a liability to minimize.

Rapid project development and reduced hands-on time in the code lead to code reviewers being less familiar with the code base and less able to act on implicit knowledge. Important regressions will slip through.

Testing has always been important as a way to catch regressions. With AI coding, it is now essential to test every supported behavior.

To develop reliable software at a fast pace in the age of AI, you must minimize implicit knowledge and transform it into strict, reliable, reproducible tests that act as a gate against regressions.

Even explicit knowledge expressed through code comments and documentation is often stale and can be ignored by AIs (and humans too!). There is a limit to what they can load into context. And you can’t control them. Those too should be replaced by tests.

The good news is that AI can help you write those tests.

The bad news is that you will need to supervise them scrupulously. To act as a gate against regressions, tests must validate behavior — the what, not the how. Test patterns like “AAA” and “Given-When-Then” remain the gold standard and best practices like “only test public APIs” are more relevant than ever. And that knowledge can’t be expressed through tests!

Supervising AI as it writes behavior tests may be the most efficient way to increase reliability of software projects.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108956

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: How are you collecting video testimonials without annoying ur customers?

touseefbuilds — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:35:57 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108933

Points: 1

# Comments: 0