Hacker News: andrewchilds

Show HN: Local, agent-friendly double-entry bookkeeping and tax prep

andrewchilds — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:30:48 +0000

Hi HN. I built this to help me keep my books in order and get my personal + small business tax returns for this year filed. I had been using an older piece of accounting software I wrote maybe 10 years ago that I never open-sourced; I realized that agents can actually help quite a bit with accounting tasks, so I built this new version. It's a local-only app that uses Bun and Postgres. No telemetry aside from what you choose to send to an agent. It makes backups, you can undo/redo, and you can export/import using JSON. Federal, state and corp tax categories are built-in so you can link accounts to specific schedules and lines. It handles imports from a lot of different sources quite well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844178

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by andrewchilds in "Claude Opus 4.7"

andrewchilds — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:17:22 +0000

I'm still very happily using Claude Code + Opus 4.5, and am distressed by the idea of losing access to that specific model in a few months. In my experience, 4.5 is very much worth $100/month, whereas 4.6 is basically worthless. I'm honestly not even interested in trying out 4.7. The unfortunate reality of these black boxes is that what makes a particular model shine is very hard to understand and replicate, so you end up with an unpredictable product direction, not something that is steadily improving.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

andrewchilds — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:58:02 +0000

I've found that Opus 4.6 is happy to read a significant amount of the codebase in preparation to do something, whereas Opus 4.5 tends to be much more efficient and targeted about pulling in relevant context.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

andrewchilds — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:40:11 +0000

You're not alone: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23706

New comment by andrewchilds in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

andrewchilds — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:39:13 +0000

Many people have reported Opus 4.6 is a step back from Opus 4.5 - that 4.6 is consuming 5-10x as many tokens as 4.5 to accomplish the same task: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23706

I haven't seen a response from the Anthropic team about it.

I can't help but look at Sonnet 4.6 in the same light, and want to stick with 4.5 across the board until this issue is acknowledged and resolved.

Show HN: Productmap – local-first visual product planning for humans and agents

andrewchilds — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:27:23 +0000

Hi HN,

I'm working on getting a new startup off the ground that has a lot of moving pieces, components, and product areas and I was starting to struggle with seeing how far along everything was.

I decided to build this as a way to help me visually see where things are with my product, and as a way to connect specific tasks with specific Claude Code sessions.

Key features:

- No telemetry - Tasks are displayed as draggable, resizable cards on a recursive canvas - Tasks can have subtasks, markdown plan docs, open & resolved questions, and its own dedicated Claude Code process - The terminal tab automatically prompts Claude with context from the task - All data is stored locally as text files in a {project}/productmap directory, in a human (and agent) readable format

The README includes a screen-capture that illustrates how it looks with a full project.

Built using SvelteKit and Electron.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051893

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by andrewchilds in "Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal"

andrewchilds — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:23:45 +0000

The word "iran" is currently mentioned exactly zero times on https://nytimes.com. Plenty of baking tips though.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Bye Bye Gmail"

andrewchilds — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 21:05:20 +0000

Maybe it’s just me, but I have serious issue with Fastmail’s spam filtering. Meaning, it seems that I am the spam filter. I find myself considering closing the account on a regular basis because of it.

I am also extremely frustrated with Gmail’s AI features now being apparently impossible to disable.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options"

andrewchilds — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:49:28 +0000

Not the parent but my family also has a mac mini to offline TV setup - just a small bluetooth keyboard/mouse and the tv remote for volume. Works well.

As far as I know there are no remotes that work with MacOS.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Bad Dye Job"

andrewchilds — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:49:18 +0000

My hope is this will lead to the reversal of the insane "HDR auto-brightness" behavior that causes any photo marked as HDR to go extreme brightness mode while the rest of the screen darkens:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254050878 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/436949/why-are-som...

New comment by andrewchilds in "How to post when no one is reading"

andrewchilds — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:05:56 +0000

If your definition of a return on your blogging/writing investment is how many likes you got, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

I am in no way a good writer, and I don't have an audience, however a few of the articles I've published on my personal site have resulted in a small number of extremely high quality responses from almost exactly the people I wanted to reach. For example, I wrote a review of an insulin pump and received a reply a few days later from a director at the company thanking me for the review and that he was sharing it with his team.

So I'd say blogging can absolutely can pay off, if you think of it in terms of making connections with the right people over time.

Would Somebody Please Just Build This Browser

andrewchilds — Fri, 30 May 2025 22:06:13 +0000

Article URL: https://andrewchilds.com/posts/please-build-this-browser

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44140293

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by andrewchilds in "The David Lynch Collection"

andrewchilds — Fri, 30 May 2025 12:35:45 +0000

It’s not just David Lynch’s own coffee drinking. Making coffee (“there was a fish in the percolator!”) and drinking coffee was one of the most memorable aspects of the original Twin Peaks TV series.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Instagram Addiction"

andrewchilds — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:27:29 +0000

You are free to do whatever you want with your website. This is about the limited number of platforms where communities exist online these days, and how those platforms knowingly using addictive and harmful UX patterns to keep people hooked. I think you and I deserve some level of consumer protection from that.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Show HN: Sshsync – CLI tool to run shell commands across multiple remote servers"

andrewchilds — Wed, 21 May 2025 15:18:48 +0000

PR to add Vultr support: https://github.com/andrewchilds/overcast/pull/61

New comment by andrewchilds in "Show HN: Sshsync – CLI tool to run shell commands across multiple remote servers"

andrewchilds — Wed, 21 May 2025 13:05:05 +0000

It does not support Vultr currently, but it likely wouldn't be difficult to add. There's an open issue for it: https://github.com/andrewchilds/overcast/issues/58

New comment by andrewchilds in "Instagram Addiction"

andrewchilds — Wed, 21 May 2025 12:46:39 +0000

The point was that we should have some kind of social contract that pushes back against the worst known addictive product choices, and to create public awareness about them. Mobile Safari has some limited functionality built-in like "Hide Distracting Items" and reader mode, but it's not enough. iOS has Accessibility > Motion > Auto-Play Video Previews, but that seems to only impact Messages.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Instagram Addiction"

andrewchilds — Wed, 21 May 2025 03:39:58 +0000

Totally agree. There should be a digital consumer bill of rights, that includes the right to disable autoplaying videos. Even the NYTimes home page is plastered with them these days, it’s awful. Another one is control over sort order, having the option of “most recent first”, vs. “most likely to keep you here”.

New comment by andrewchilds in "Show HN: Sshsync – CLI tool to run shell commands across multiple remote servers"

andrewchilds — Mon, 19 May 2025 11:50:49 +0000

I built (and still use) a similar tool called Overcast 10 years ago: https://github.com/andrewchilds/overcast

New comment by andrewchilds in "LegoGPT: Generating Physically Stable and Buildable Lego"

andrewchilds — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:51:49 +0000

Meanwhile, Amazon is perfectly happy to sell/promote this "Boy and Tiger Adventure Blocks Set" which simultaneously rips off LEGO and Calvin & Hobbes: https://www.amazon.com/Adventure-Rotatable-Compatible-Charac...