Hacker News: afro88

New comment by afro88 in "Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)"

afro88 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:05:37 +0000

> Only an encrypted blind relay to allow for shared editing. The relay doesn't see any of the data.

Would love to know more about how this works then? Is it more or less encrypted P2P?

New comment by afro88 in "Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)"

afro88 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 19:34:42 +0000

Is this a quote from a book? Beautifully written

New comment by afro88 in "Codex Resets"

afro88 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:25:20 +0000

When did that happen with Codex? I thought that was a Claude Code thing

New comment by afro88 in "Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper"

afro88 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:03:40 +0000

It's not about figuring out if it's LLM written though. The style is hard to read and annoying. With the kind of sentences GP was talking about it's actually harder to get the substance.

New comment by afro88 in "New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]"

afro88 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:40:23 +0000

Curious whether you were just bare asking it questions, or whether you provided it with lessons one by one with instruction that the lesson is the baseline truth etc

New comment by afro88 in "Better Models: Worse Tools"

afro88 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 05:53:44 +0000

This has been the case since the early days. Aider had a bunch of code to be very forgiving with formatting of tool calls (file editing in particular at first). It's just the nature of the beast. It surprises me that Pi doesn't have a lot of this kind of stuff built in too

New comment by afro88 in "The short leash AI coding method for beating Fable"

afro88 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:36:10 +0000

Maybe I'm too optimistic, but given appropriate skills and references (not just for writing but also reviewing) and intelligent use of subagents for isolated reviews and checks, you can lengthen the leash a bit.

But you still need to properly review plans and PRs to keep a good mental model of the codebase. This effectively limits the number of tasks being done in parallel to maybe 2-3. Though you'll be mentally exhausted and probably start to make mistakes or take shortcuts in reviews yourself.

New comment by afro88 in "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"

afro88 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:22:40 +0000

We selected PRs (real ones we merged over the 6 months prior) and have an "LLM as judge" score how close the AI generated code is to the PR. Same as how other benchmarks do it, but it's with tasks we actually do and code we have decided is actually up to scratch for us

New comment by afro88 in "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"

afro88 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:48:18 +0000

Similar result on our kotlin coding benchmark at work. It measures how close agents can get to a small mergable PR (according to my team). 20 tasks of varying difficulty, with 5 attempts each, LLM as judge to evaluate accuracy (same outcome and quality but allowing for acceptable variances).

Fable 5 sits ahead of Opus 4.7, but behind Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.8, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5.

Fable isn't a good coding workhorse. That doesn't mean it's not good for actually complex problems and long horizon tasks (big POCs, complex research and such). But I only have vibes and Anthropics own benchmarks and marketing to guide me there.

New comment by afro88 in "AI is slowing down"

afro88 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:18:20 +0000

I'd love to read about the predictions that have been wrong (genuinely)

New comment by afro88 in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

afro88 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:56:30 +0000

I wonder if there's a way to include data that's so unique you can prove it was trained on and sue later

New comment by afro88 in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

afro88 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:51:42 +0000

> The dynamic of agent codes human reviews does seem like the only sane one for the foreseeable future. Even Anthropic themselves still fall back to this.

Do they? I saw some crazy stat from the guy who built claude code that he was pushing hundreds of PRs a day. There's no way you can human review that much code. It's probably closer to heavily AI assisted review and planning.

New comment by afro88 in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

afro88 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:39:02 +0000

This is a branching point. One dev would find someone else and convince them to approve it. Another would redo the task (code is cheap now, right?) in a PR stack that can actually be reviewed, cleaned up etc.

I hope they were the latter.

New comment by afro88 in "I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it"

afro88 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:18:01 +0000

That's an example of why it would be useful for someone to actually do it. A random commenter on HN is one thing. A direct comparison on a brand new app that isn't part of any training is another

New comment by afro88 in "Show HN: Paseo – Beautiful open-source coding agent interface"

afro88 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:57:48 +0000

It's very addictive when you're working on something cool and the agents are iterating nicely. Instead of browsing reddit / HN / instagram etc during downtime, I find it much more fun to build something.

New comment by afro88 in "Orchestrating AI code review at scale"

afro88 — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:12:10 +0000

> When we first started experimenting with AI code review, we took the path that most other people probably take: we tried out a few different AI code review tools and found that a lot of these tools worked pretty well, and a lot of them even offered a good amount of customisation and configurability! Unfortunately, though, the one recurring theme that kept coming up was that they just didn’t offer enough flexibility and customisation for an organisation the size of Cloudflare.

Most people I know had the experience that signal to noise was way off, regardless of scale. So it was a burden rather than a help. Code review by AI ended up being a skill before creating the PR so the dev owning the PR addressed everything before the team got bogged down with it in review

New comment by afro88 in "Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code"

afro88 — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:14:58 +0000

It's the later. You can view it and see fine grained progress, but you can't interact with it. I hope that's coming next, because it would be useful to steer later phases or even agents

New comment by afro88 in "Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code"

afro88 — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:11:45 +0000

I tried this out yesterday - lucky enough to have access through EAP at work. The workflows that are generated are quite good - smart parallelisation and phasing. End results for larger chunks of work are also much better, which I attribute to more of the work having clean context windows (Opus 4.7 is unusable past 200k conversation length, and each subagent ends up using less than that IME). They also seem to have a validation phase hint in the workflow generator which also helps a lot. Speed is a bonus.

You can achieve a similar result manually prompting to use subagents, yes. But the TUI for in flight dynamic workflows is really nice - great visibility into exactly what's happening.

Honesty, for anything larger than a 1 shot PR, it's worth firing off a workflow for better automatic context management alone (more work done in the first 20% sweet spot)

New comment by afro88 in "Can we have the day off?"

afro88 — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:57:25 +0000

Is the end goal to not work? Are we supposed to not enjoy what we work on? Do we not believe in what the company we work for is trying to achieve?

New comment by afro88 in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

afro88 — Wed, 27 May 2026 06:30:54 +0000

My elderly mother ended up with a Dropbox subscription because someone sent her a file on Dropbox, that she could technically access for free, but she got dark patterned into creating an account and subscribing. To a yearly plan no less