Hacker News: boyter

New comment by boyter in "Is Grep All You Need? How Agent Harnesses Reshape Agentic Search"

boyter — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:34:15 +0000

Came here to post than and you already did. Thank you!

New comment by boyter in "Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"

boyter — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:44:30 +0000

You are welcome. Glad to hear its working for you. I have a few ideas I am working on to improve its relevance too that I hope pan out.

New comment by boyter in "Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"

boyter — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:24:00 +0000

Grep prints out every matching line. For some searches a LLM might do it will get a lot of noise, and it might have to make that search because it cannot be specific. Targeted search can reduce the number of tokens.

I suspect this comparison is against reading the whole codebase though compared to just getting the bits you need.

New comment by boyter in "Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"

boyter — Mon, 18 May 2026 03:51:32 +0000

Interesting. I too have been working in this space, though I took a different approach. Rather than building an index, I worked on making a "smarter grep" by offering search over codebases (and any text content really) with ranking and some structural awareness of the code. Most of my time was spend dealing with performance, and as a result it runs extremely quickly.

I will have to add this as a comparison to https://github.com/boyter/cs and see what my LLMs prefer for the sort of questions I ask. It too ships with MCP, but does NOT build an index for its search. I am very curious to see how it would rank seeing as it does not do basic BM25 but a code semantic variant of it.

This seems to work better for the "how does auth work" style of queries, while cs does "authenticate --only-declarations" and then weighs results based on content of the files, IE where matches are, in code, comments and the overall complexity of the file.

Have starred and will be watching.

New comment by boyter in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

boyter — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:26:01 +0000

Been working on https://searchcode.com/ again which I bought back, albeit as code search tool for LLMs. It solves the “should I use this library” by allowing the LLM to inspect search and analyse it before integration. Can use it to compare multiple repositories before downloading. It comes with a large amount of token savings and can be really useful when wanting to learn about a codebase.

Since it does it anyway I added dossier pages to it as well https://searchcode.com/repo/github.com/rust-lang/rust Which is useful for humans, and shows what the system is creating.

Best part is that I get to use the tools I have built, so https://github.com/boyter/scc and https://github.com/boyter/cs to improve it which benefits anyone using those tools.

New comment by boyter in "I quit drinking for a year"

boyter — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:35:50 +0000

Many Muslims drink anyway. A lot of those in Iran brew wine/beer in their house.

Tobacco in Australia has been taxed to the point we have a huge black market for it now. You would have thought people would have learnt from prohibition.

You cannot police morals.

New comment by boyter in "I quit drinking for a year"

boyter — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:21:34 +0000

Id be ok with that if wine had the same taste. No alcohol free wine tastes even close, and none of them are good in their own right.

Some of the non-alcoholic beers are pretty good though and I am happy to drink them.

New comment by boyter in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

boyter — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:45:04 +0000

I reimagined https://searchcode.com/ since I realised LLMs have issues when it comes to understanding code you want to integrate. It’s useful for looking though any codebase, or multiple without having to clone it.

I use it when I have candidate libraries to solve a problem, or I just want to find out how things work. Most recently I pointed it at fzf and was able to pull the insensitive SIMD matching it uses and speed my own projects up.

I can’t find it right now, but there was a post about how ripgrep worked from a someone who walked through the code finding interesting patterns and doing a write up on it. With this I get it over any codebase I find interesting, or can even compare them.

New comment by boyter in "Fast regex search: indexing text for agent tools"

boyter — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:51:39 +0000

I read this when it came out and having written similar things for searchcode.com (back when it was a spanning code search engine), and while interesting I have questions about,

    We routinely see rg invocations that take more than 15 seconds

The only way that works is if you are running it over repos 100-200 gigabytes in size, or they are sitting on a spinning rust HDD, OR its matching so many lines that the print is the dominant part of the runtime, and its still over a very large codebase.

Now I totally believe codebases like this exist, but surely they aren't that common? I could understand this is for a single customer though!

Where this does fall down though is having to maintain that index. That's actually why when I was working on my own local code search tool boyter/cs on github I also just brute forced it. No index no problems, and with desktop CPU's coming out with 200mb of cache these days it seems increasingly like a winning approach.

New comment by boyter in "Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)"

boyter — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:09:21 +0000

The disk cache has a huge impact. However they claim it’s for multiple searches so it should be in it.

New comment by boyter in "Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)"

boyter — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:10:15 +0000

Such a good read. I actually went back though it the other day to steal the searching for the least common byte idea out to speed up my search tool https://github.com/boyter/cs which when coupled with the simd upper lower search technique from fzf cut the wall clock runtime by a third.

There was this post from cursor https://cursor.com/blog/fast-regex-search today about building an index for agents due to them hitting a limit on ripgrep, but I’m not sure what codebase they are hitting that warrants it. Especially since they would have to be at 100-200 GB to be getting to 15s of runtime. Unless it’s all matches that is.

New comment by boyter in "Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator"

boyter — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:15:27 +0000

Its pretty easy to step over those limits.

Also localhost and presumably this are good for validating your logic before you throw in roles, network and everything else that can be an issue on AWS.

Confirm it runs in this, and 99% of the time the issue when you deploy is something in the AWS config, not your logic.

Bucketsquatting is finally dead

boyter — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:31:33 +0000

Article URL: https://onecloudplease.com/blog/bucketsquatting-is-finally-dead

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361913

Points: 330

# Comments: 171

Sloc Cloc and Code – Locomo (LLM Output Cost MOdel)

boyter — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:38:28 +0000

Article URL: https://boyter.org/posts/sloc-cloc-code-locomo-llm-output-cost-model/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319436

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Rare Not Random – Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

boyter — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:37:58 +0000

Article URL: https://lookingatcomputer.substack.com/p/rare-not-random

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47228931

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by boyter in "Ask HN: How are you all staying sane?"

boyter — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:43:33 +0000

All of the above.

Stop reading the news. It makes you depressed or angry. Go hiking. Walk on the beach. Play with a dog or your children. Climb a tree.

Leave the slave slab phone at home, or delete every news and social app. Do not browse the web. Take a book and read.

It will be hard at first. Then it gets easier. Best thing I ever did.

Reminder. What passes for news today wouldn’t have registered for most people 100 years ago.

Implementing a Clear Room Z80 / ZX Spectrum Emulator with Claude Code

boyter — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:23:55 +0000

Article URL: https://antirez.com/news/160

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162560

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by boyter in "Intel XeSS 3: expanded support for Core Ultra/Core Ultra 2 and Arc A, B series"

boyter — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:11:41 +0000

Chased the wrong thing. It’s the 1% lows that matter more generally.

New comment by boyter in "Intel XeSS 3: expanded support for Core Ultra/Core Ultra 2 and Arc A, B series"

boyter — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:04:06 +0000

If you have a high frame rate to start with it’s pretty nice and feels smoother. But a low frame rate turned into a high one looks good but feels laggy.

So arguably you never need frame gen for a game, since it only really works when it’s already pretty nice.

New comment by boyter in "Show HN: CS – indexless code search that understands code, comments and strings"

boyter — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 05:09:43 +0000

Not familiar with that tool. What follows is my best guess based on what I am seeing.

Serena looks to be a precision tool. Since it uses uses LSP its able to replicate a lot of what a IDE would allow and IDE for LLM's.

cs by contrast is more of a discovery tool. When you're trying to find where the work actually happens it can help you, and since there is no index involved you can get going instantly on any codebase while they are index.

You could use cs for instant to find where the complexity lies, and then use Serena to modify it.