Hacker News: Myrmornis

New comment by Myrmornis in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

Myrmornis — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:03:30 +0000

> The problem was the view didn't work after something else had been done.

In that situation you have two choices:

1. Tell claude to iterate until the tests for the new view and the old views are all passing.

2. git reset --hard back to the previous commit at which all tests are passing and tell claude to try again, making sure not to break any tests.

It's essential to use tests when vibecoding anything non trivial. Almost certainly in a TDD style.

New comment by Myrmornis in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

Myrmornis — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:11:47 +0000

> I typed :rs pods to switch back to the pods view. Nothing rendered. The table was empty... > now something was fundamentally broken and I couldn't just prompt my way out of it.

Hey I don't want to over simplify, I'm sure it was complicated, but did the author have functional tests for these broken views? As long as there are functional tests passing on the previous commit I'd have thought that claude could look at the end situation and work out how to get the desired feature without breaking the other stuff.

TUIs aren't an exception, it's still essential to have a way to end-to-end test each view.

New comment by Myrmornis in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

Myrmornis — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:41:57 +0000

On the one hand I'm not sure Dawkins has read/thought enough about how LLMs actually work. I'm getting the impression he doesn't fully appreciate or is somehow forgetting that it's a text completion algorithm with a vast number of parameters and that even if the patterns of learned parameter tunings are not really comprehendible, the architecture was very deliberately designed.

But on the other hand his thoughts at the end are interesting. Summary:

Maybe our "consciousness" is like an LLM's intelligence. But if not, then it raises the question of why do we even have this "extra" consciousness, since it appears that something like a humanoid LLM would be decent at surviving. His suggestions: maybe our extra thing is an evolutionary accident (and maybe there _are_ successful organisms out there with the LLM-style non-conscious intelligence), or maybe as evolved organisms it's necessary that we really feel things like pain, so that evolutionary mechanisms like pain (and desire for food, sex etc) had strong adaptive benefits.

New comment by Myrmornis in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

Myrmornis — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:25:04 +0000

I don't think you read carefully what he said. At the end he gave three quite interesting thoughts about what might be true assuming LLMs are less conscious than we are (i.e. assuming our consciousness is not a purely algorithmic phenomenon as we obviously know LLMs are).

New comment by Myrmornis in "Show HN: A Karpathy-style LLM wiki your agents maintain (Markdown and Git)"

Myrmornis — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:07:11 +0000

Your notes look really interesting, thanks. I'm curious --from the prose style it's clear they were written by an LLM. For design notes like this do you sort of have a mental TODO to go back and write them up in your own words to make sure they really capture your own opinions?

New comment by Myrmornis in "Towards trust in Emacs"

Myrmornis — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:58:09 +0000

The article is still missing the most important point about a "trust system" -- you have to explain what it is and convince me that I even care about the problem you're trying to solve. It's my machine, what is a "trusted" or "untrusted" file? If people just force security "solutions" on me without asking me whether I understand or agree with their problem diagnosis then I will immediately disable the protection if I can or blanket accept all prompts without thinking.

This is good, but it doesn't go far enough:

> ... the problem with security measures that cause too much friction is that users tend to disable them in order to get on with their work. To fulfill its security purposes, a good trust system needs to stay out of your way.

New comment by Myrmornis in "Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor"

Myrmornis — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:40:49 +0000

Take a look at https://d2lang.com/examples/dagre/ and https://d2lang.com/tour/intro/

The language is richer and all diagram types are implemented consistently in the same language in a way that can be composed, as opposed to being a collection of unrelated DSLs.

The improved visual appearance is clear from inspecting example diagrams, I believe.

New comment by Myrmornis in "Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor"

Myrmornis — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:21:12 +0000

https://d2lang.com/ is a nicer language than Mermaid with much nicer visual appearance. It would be great if it became more widely supported.

New comment by Myrmornis in "The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances"

Myrmornis — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:38:36 +0000

I read the first couple of posts in the series. The essay is full of criticism of LLMs, and in a couple of places the author distances himself, as if he himself isn't using them ("some people I respect tell me that...").

It's certainly worth discussing the fact that the entire industry is starting to outsource large amounts of our thinking and writing work to non-sentient statistical algorithms, but this discussion needs to honestly confront the extent to which they are successfully completing useful tasks today.

New comment by Myrmornis in "Show HN: Git bayesect – Bayesian Git bisection for non-deterministic bugs"

Myrmornis — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:25:25 +0000

This is really cool! Is there an alternative way of thinking about it involving a hidden markov model, looking for a change in value of an unknown latent P(fail)? Or does your approach end up being similar to whatever the appropriate Bayesian approach to the HMM would be?

New comment by Myrmornis in "Artificial Cleverness: The system that knows everything and understands nothing"

Myrmornis — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:16:27 +0000

Doubtless the current LLMs aren't the last word. But this author sounds like they would get more out of the current LLMs if they put their energies into that rather than into criticism.

New comment by Myrmornis in "Make macOS consistently bad unironically"

Myrmornis — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:52:16 +0000

The rounded corners are nothing compared to the notch camera making part of the top of my applications invisible.

New comment by Myrmornis in "Hyperlinks in terminal emulators"

Myrmornis — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:16:58 +0000

Alacritty shows a preview at the bottom by default (sounds similar to ghostty). Looked to me like WezTerm doesn't though.

New comment by Myrmornis in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

Myrmornis — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:23:20 +0000

This is interesting but don't you worry that you're competing with entire companies (e.g. Anthropic) and thus it's a losing battle? Since you're re-implementing a bunch of stuff they either do in their harness or have decided it was better not to do?

New comment by Myrmornis in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

Myrmornis — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:30:47 +0000

Yes, they do, but the premise in my comment (and this discussion) is that a TUI is being written today.

New comment by Myrmornis in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

Myrmornis — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:55:25 +0000

TUIs built today should be usable by AI agents. I'm not sure exactly what it looks like but I'm imagining that every UI view has an associated CLI command that can yield precisely that view. Maybe like formally structured breadcrumbs, or maybe like Emacs "keyboard macros".

New comment by Myrmornis in "Why does AI tell you to use Terminal so much?"

Myrmornis — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:11:08 +0000

Ah right, sorry, you were making a much more interesting point than my reply! I read "UI development" and jumped to the conclusion that the point was just about inference-time modify-test cycles. Yes, agreed, if they trained on images, or even better (?) on (code, image) or (code-delta, image-delta) pairs, they would surely be better at UI development.

New comment by Myrmornis in "Why does AI tell you to use Terminal so much?"

Myrmornis — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:47:39 +0000

Getting them to take screenshots with playwright/puppeteer and look at them as part of their development iteration cycle works well.

New comment by Myrmornis in "Ghostmd: Ghostty but for Markdown Notes"

Myrmornis — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 01:14:52 +0000

> Markdown is already beautiful. We don't render it. We don't preview it. You read it raw, the way it was meant to be.

I don't want to be inflammatory or shallowly dismissive of other people's opinions. But I find this puritanical view surprising when we're talking about presenting markdown for reading by humans.

Take markdown links for example. In a terminal those should surely be rendered as OSC8 hyperlinks where supported: that gives actual link functionality, as well as being much more readable.

Or take markdown code blocks; to me it seems clear that they should be rendered with syntax highlighting, probably in a box or against a slightly different background color to set them off from the rest of the document. Triple backticks are for machines, not humans, surely? I don't think they're beautiful.

I don't know the history / lore of what is common mark vs non-standard addons etc. But github supports things like

tags; clearly it's no good just rendering that in plain text. A browser renders it well; not sure how to in a terminal.

Similarly tables should surely at least have padding added so that each column has constant width as you look down the rows, but promising to output it raw wouldn't do that since markdown itself has no such requirement. Which gets at my overall point: markdown is a format for capturing richer document data while writing; this should be rendered for humans to read.

New comment by Myrmornis in "When does MCP make sense vs CLI?"

Myrmornis — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 02:24:08 +0000

Yes. But are you letting your agent make the decision of when and how to call that CLI? And presumably you're invoking it via the Bash tool. In which case your agent is free to write ad-hoc bash orchestration around your CLI calls. And perhaps you don't just have one such CLI but rather N for N different services.

And so we've arrived at the world of ad-hoc on-the-fly bash scripting that teams writing backend agentic applications in more "traditional"/conservative companies are not going to want.

Don't get me wrong, it's great for claude-code-type local computer automation use cases -- I do the same as you there.