Hacker News: benswerd

New comment by benswerd in "Brainless: Shadcn components that look like Claude Code, Codex and Grok"

benswerd — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:33:08 +0000

i agree, very pro that

New comment by benswerd in "Brainless: Shadcn components that look like Claude Code, Codex and Grok"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:32:50 +0000

I'm a big believer in guides. ShadCN provides great starting points for continued engineering as do other ShadCN libraries. For companies with the resources to, they do just start with BaseUI.

In the long run I think most UI will be BaseUI/RadixUI + Component and style guides, prompts, and traditional packages will no longer be relevant.

New comment by benswerd in "Designing APIs for Agents"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:24:07 +0000

Just did this, found result fairly interesting, I reject most of its objections on the basis of bad code. When I say Im pro explicitness I'm also pro comment, and pro separating the "this is core fact" and "this is configuration that i don't care too much about". Will use this test for future writing.

New comment by benswerd in "Designing APIs for Agents"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:06:22 +0000

This is a fair point. Im not opposed to the open function existing, but I do think its valuable to own the underlying implementation of thigns like it (maybe not open) in your codebase so you can review the implementation and reconfigure it to your precise requirements.

New comment by benswerd in "Designing APIs for Agents"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:05:33 +0000

One strategy I like for this is a notes field on every single MCP route. Lets the AI optionally just decide to tell you things.

New comment by benswerd in "Brainless: Shadcn components that look like Claude Code, Codex and Grok"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:04:33 +0000

I think this is a misinterpretation. BaseUI provides baseline semantics that because the code is in your codebase you can choose to keep or remove. BaseUI is also actively unstyled/unopinionated, you use it to compose your own components, which again live in your codebase.

When you import shadcn components you can rebuild them however you want, thats the point.

New comment by benswerd in "Brainless: Shadcn components that look like Claude Code, Codex and Grok"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:33:38 +0000

gonna use it on my websites homepage

New comment by benswerd in "Designing APIs for Agents"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:20:50 +0000

im not opposed to good defaults, i just believe they should be explicit. The AI should read the starting.md to fill in explicitly what its JVM configuration is. Then, when you want to tune in the future its clear what options are available and what specifically is changing.

New comment by benswerd in "Designing APIs for Agents"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:19:26 +0000

Conservatively speaking, LLMs degrade past 40% of a 2M context window, 4k tokens is 0.2%, so no degradation there. Thats also current generation conservative estimate.

I think wasteful is an irrelevant metric. Claude ingests those tokens in a quarter of a second, if it causes it to catch any bug ever it saves far more time than it ever uses.

Any individual default that causes unexpected behavior causes more problems, takes more time and costs more than the small cost of being explicit.

New comment by benswerd in "Brainless: Shadcn components that look like Claude Code, Codex and Grok"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:27:48 +0000

Think MUI, heroUI, traditional components have you install their package, import the component and configure it through arguments.

ShadCN components have you copy the component code into your codebase, you own it. They come with the ability to configure arguments, but also because the code is yours its expected that you change the internal logic/styling/structure of the component.

I believe in the era of AI code the ladder just makes more sense.

New comment by benswerd in "Designing APIs for Agents"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:05:31 +0000

Why not?

The docs for git clone at https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone are less than 4000 tokens, I don't think this is unreasonable.

New comment by benswerd in "Designing APIs for Agents"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:03:18 +0000

MCP Auth is just Oauth, its designed for humans to authenticate their sessions for connections.

TBH I know nothing about A2A.

Agent Identity and Authz is a different problem, allowing agents to operate independently from humans with granular permissions is coming/whether from these protocols or others, and when it does I think CLIs/CLI Device Auth which is used as a rough proxy for this where the agent just takes your identity will finally go away.

New comment by benswerd in "Brainless: Shadcn components that look like Claude Code, Codex and Grok"

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:50:27 +0000

Generally, when using these components I ended up wanting to customize a lot. I switched around the options, coloring, the words in the loading, I mix and matched the components from different CLIs, etc.

I think these are more useful as baselines than as final destinations, and I expect production users to customize them far more than options in components.

I also separately don't really believe in traditional components anymore, code is cheap. The value in these components is that I took the time to pixel match a bunch of the CLIs, not the specific interface used to integrate them.

Brainless: Shadcn components that look like Claude Code, Codex and Grok

benswerd — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:42:53 +0000

Article URL: https://brainless.swerdlow.dev

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926085

Points: 109

# Comments: 22

New comment by benswerd in "Launch HN: Agnost AI (YC S26) – Extract user feedback from agent conversations"

benswerd — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:16:02 +0000

Without using agnost, what are some basic SQL queries I can run on my data to find outliers I'd otherwise be missing?

How far can I get with just keywords, common phrases, boring traditional analysis?

Depending on what I measure there, when is the right time for me to consider upgrading to something like Agnost/what is a specific example of what it will find that traditional/rigid analytics approaches will miss?