What worked for me was to ask Astra/Fable to include pseudo code in the design doc. which comes to 1-2 pages. Easy for me to skim and change the direction/approach. Rest all of the flowery language is for LLM giving context.

IMO Fable 5.1 ~ Astra > GPT 5.6 Sol > Opus.

Another thing i discovered is less is more (in case of skills as well)., don’t add lots of skills., keep them very handful - I’ve got 9 skills so far (many people have 100s installed from marketplaces and plugins)

I can see this becoming much more useful once the docs get heavier: large PDFs, XLSX files, images, etc. At that point you probably need embeddings, reranking etc. But I think agents are smart enough to write scripts to retrieve what they want if we run them on a sandbox(which we are trying to do currently). bookmarking this for now.

Good write-up though!

Is this equivalent of DAGs for sub agents inside claude code? Can i pause and resume/retry workflows? How stateful are they?

Really appreciate it someone claude code can throw more light on above. I’m trying to see if I can get langgraph equivalent DAGs here.

Similar sentiment shared with other startup founders- check on x about all VCs talking about moats against big labs.

After AI happened, I built an app (promptfunnels) to scratch my own itch and generate funnels (fancy name for landing pages with a purpose).

Then came the harder part: marketing it. Coming from a tech background, I knew nothing about marketing, so I started reading and came across the $100M Leads book. I realized codifying those principles together with funnels and marketing automation had a real market. My family, friends, and acquaintances became the first customers. A friend joined me as cofounder and we both quit our jobs to do this full time.

As we talked to other startup founders, they kept describing a tangential problem they called GTM. At the core it was the same thing we were solving: marketing for non-marketers. So we pivoted to RevMozi(https://revmozi.com/), which helps non-marketers do both inbound and outbound GTM.

We’re dogfooding the product and coming out of beta next month.

Wish us luck.

I feel hooks are integral part of your code harness, that’s only deterministic way to control coding agents.

TDD was never really my natural style, but LLMs are great at generating the obvious test cases quickly. That lets me spend more of my attention on the edge cases, the invariants, and the parts that actually need judgment.

Frontend is another area where they help a lot. It’s not my strongest side, so pairing an LLM with shadcn/ui gets me to a decent, responsive UI much faster than I would on my own. Same with deployment and infra glue work across Cloudflare, AWS, Hetzner, and similar platforms.

I’m basically a generalist with stronger instincts in backend work, data modeling, and system design. So the value for me is that I can lean into those strengths and use LLMs to cover more ground in the areas where I’m weaker.

That said, I do think this only works if you’re using them as leverage, not as a substitute for taste or judgment.

I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.

That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”

On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.

I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.

My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best

I had three side projects and kept struggling to get any real traction or traffic without becoming spammy across the internet. So I decided to approach it the same way I approach learning anything new: through books, courses, and solid foundational material.

HN had a few excellent suggestions. One of them was Founding Sales. Another, which I came across through a friend’s recommendation, was Alex Hormozi’s series. He seems to have something of a cult following, which made me a bit skeptical at first, so I decided to just read the first 100 pages before forming an opinion.

I ended up finding it genuinely useful, especially for understanding the psychology and mindset needed to sell something. I now highly recommend his book $100M Leads to technical friends who are trying to figure out how to sell what they’ve built.

I’m still learning, if you’ve any good recommendations, please drop them below

For people suggesting it’s a skill issue: I’ve been using Claude Code for the past 6 months and I genuinely want to make Codex work - it was highly recommended by peers and friends. I’ve tried different model settings, explicitly instructed it to plan first and only execute after my approval, tested it on both Python and TypeScript backend codebases. Results are consistently underwhelming compared to Claude Code.

Claude Code just works for me out of the box. My default workflow is plan mode - a few iterations to nail the approach, then Claude one-shots the implementation after I approve. Haven’t been able to replicate anything close to that with Codex

https://explained.ai/matrix-calculus/

khan academy - Multivariable Calculus course by Grant Sanderson(3b1b fame)