Hacker News: alexgleason

New comment by alexgleason in "Armada: Encrypted, Open-Source, Discord Alternative (Built on Nostr)"

alexgleason — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:54:42 +0000

Look at the underlying Concord Protocol: https://concordprotocol.org/ There is definitely engineering. This part by hand.

New comment by alexgleason in "Iframe.diy – "iframe server" static site"

alexgleason — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:00:17 +0000

This is a web trick that lets you safely embed arbitrary html. It involves serving the same static site from all subdomains *.example.com and communicating with the host over postMessage. This allows the host to render previews using root-relative paths (vite builds) so it could function as a local devserver for an IDE. It could also be used to embed mini-apps submitted by users in chats and social feeds.

Iframe.diy – "iframe server" static site

alexgleason — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:00:17 +0000

Article URL: https://iframe.diy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49353336

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by alexgleason in "Show HN: Sheila, an AI agent that replaced our accounting flow"

alexgleason — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:13:35 +0000

Hey HN! Alex here. I built an AI agent that handles all the accounting at my company -- contractor invoices, payments in fiat and Bitcoin, bookkeeping, expense tracking, 1099s. It's called Sheila and it's open source (AGPL).

The short version: I tried building complex multi-step automation in code first. It was fragile. What actually worked was building 50+ granular scripts that each do one thing (check a balance, send a payment, append a row to a spreadsheet, read an email), then writing a 600-line AGENTS.md file that describes the workflows in plain English. The AI agent reads the instructions and chains the scripts together.

The key insight for me was that the human feedback loop is what makes agents actually work. I sit in the terminal watching Sheila process invoices. She drafts emails and prepares payments, I see what she's doing before it goes out. Hundreds of iterations between me and the AI is what made this reliable -- not some autonomous agent platform where you click "deploy" and hope for the best.

I think the industry has this backwards right now. Everyone is building agent platforms top-down. But you can't design a useful agent abstraction layer without first understanding what a useful agent looks like, and you can't understand that without building one from scratch, script by script.

Source: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/sheila

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the Bitcoin payment flow, or why I think most agent frameworks are solving the wrong problem.

New comment by alexgleason in "Free Output – AI output copyright status checker"

alexgleason — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 20:46:11 +0000

This means they would potentially cancel your account if you violated it, but not that they would claim ownership over the work.

Threads is blocking servers on the Fediverse. Here's how we unblocked ourselves.

alexgleason — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 14:59:04 +0000

Article URL: https://soapbox.pub/blog/threads-server-blocking/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38763094

Points: 49

# Comments: 61

Alternative web browser is horrible, and I like it

alexgleason — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 01:56:04 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.alexgleason.me/your-alternative-browser-is-horrible-and-i-like-it/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32174884

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Show HN: I made a Cloudflare Worker that injects OpenGraph data into a React SPA

alexgleason — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 02:04:44 +0000

The worker requests the public API in the background, intercepts requests to React pages and injects OpenGraph tags into them.

Before you tell me to use Next.js, I know. But I think Cloudflare Workers are really cool!