Hacker News: chrisrickard

New comment by chrisrickard in "Newly discovered spider builds spring loaded snare to catch ants"

chrisrickard — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:08:12 +0000

Of course it’s an Australian spider

New comment by chrisrickard in "Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5"

chrisrickard — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:57:02 +0000

Cursor 3 is a full rewrite. No VS Code

New comment by chrisrickard in "Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore"

chrisrickard — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:54:27 +0000

I’ve found it interesting too.

It’s like I spent 20 years mastering painting in watercolour… nerding out on other painters, canvas options, even the backstory on some guy that makes a specific paint etc.

And I don’t regret any of that. but now I’m just loving creating my art 100x faster.

I thought I loved the craft (and I did) but more, I loved the product.

New comment by chrisrickard in "Anthropic forms $200M partnership with the Gates Foundation"

chrisrickard — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:07:47 +0000

… i’m still seeing a therapist about this time period.

New comment by chrisrickard in "Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)"

chrisrickard — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:35:24 +0000

Thank you, a refreshingly interesting read

New comment by chrisrickard in "My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder"

chrisrickard — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:47:20 +0000

I have read all your yearly reviews and you’ve been an inspiration Michael. Keep it up, and I’m glad your 8th year was your happiest yet!

New comment by chrisrickard in "Agent Skills"

chrisrickard — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:32:08 +0000

Skills are chainable e.g. skill A can invoke skill B and then decide to invoke skill C etc… I don’t believe your slash commands can do this?

New comment by chrisrickard in "Show HN: Everything Is Remixed – Serverless Web Audio Mixer with URL State"

chrisrickard — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:04:18 +0000

Very cool, I didn’t realise the web audio API was so extensive these days

New comment by chrisrickard in "Ask HN: How do you safely give LLMs SSH/DB access?"

chrisrickard — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:44:30 +0000

I did this recently. Created a Skill that had access to executing very specific ific (reviewed) script for DB interaction, that connects to your a replica/anonymised DB, read only user, via VPN, via a jumpbox.

New comment by chrisrickard in "Show HN: npm install @ichbinsoftware/everything-is-free"

chrisrickard — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:16:42 +0000

Really fun idea treating an album like a dependency!

New comment by chrisrickard in "You can make up HTML tags"

chrisrickard — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:06:54 +0000

Also, probably a good way to give LLMs more context compared to “div soup”

New comment by chrisrickard in "10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13"

chrisrickard — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:04:06 +0000

Amazing achievement guys, seriously impressive. Now onwards and upwards!

New comment by chrisrickard in "Show HN: Everything Is Free – An open source, CC0 electronic album"

chrisrickard — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:11:19 +0000

very cool concept. and great tracks. congrats on shipping!

New comment by chrisrickard in "Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving"

chrisrickard — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 18:44:56 +0000

Another 15-yearer here too! Thank you HN, and for all the work you do @dang and @tomhow

New comment by chrisrickard in "Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign"

chrisrickard — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 13:16:51 +0000

Because the ridiculous scope creep perhaps? And spending $96M of government money on an website (still with large faults that were backed out)

This was Accenture and Deloitte - not some backyard dev shop.

New comment by chrisrickard in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)"

chrisrickard — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:11:42 +0000

I’m working on Userdoc, a spec-driven development workspace.

Break down your software requirements (Userdoc guides you through the process), refine/confirm, setup your technical specs, coding/business guidelines & guardrails, and then create development plans (specs) which can be easily consumed by coding agents via MCP, or by platforms like Lovable / v0 using Markdown. Working on Cursor background agent integration atm.

https://userdoc.com

New comment by chrisrickard in "Vibe engineering"

chrisrickard — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:17:38 +0000

Your second point “planning in advance” could be referred to as spec-driven development… it’s a funny term in a sense (didn’t we always do that?), but I think your 7th point drives it home “a very weird form of management” - clear instructions, necessary context, and actionable feedback. As far as written words go, much more like waterfall than agile.

New comment by chrisrickard in "Users only care about 20% of your application"

chrisrickard — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:34:41 +0000

This is why AI development will be huge in the “Buy vs Build” space… Businesses (with a capable tech team)can build the 20% of the SaaS they need, and stop paying for the 80% every single month.

New comment by chrisrickard in "The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management"

chrisrickard — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:19:05 +0000

We are tackling this at https://userdoc.fyi - we help you build your specs (epics, stories, acceptance criteria, tech notes, test cases, etc) - then you can generate what we call Dev Plans, one or more requirement layers for implementation.

e.g maybe a dev plan is all your authentication feature requirements, or in the house of analogy – all the requirements for the rooms, but with instructions to actually just first build the floor, and the walls.

Dev plans then slice the reqs into meaningful units of work, as mentioned in the article – a feature/story, is often too large of a checkpoint, or often needs to be implemented in collaboration with other features/stories, so it understands the correct architectural context,.

You can then implement Dev plans over MCP, or copy to .md for tools like Lovable or V0.

New comment by chrisrickard in "Ask HN: Dear Product Managers – How do you use LLM's in your day to day work?"

chrisrickard — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:07:09 +0000

Tools like Userdoc (https://userdoc.fyi) help in a few ways, you can easily create requirements (stories, personas, journeys, test cases), but also reverse engineer existing source code into detailed docs, then ask natural language questions etc. AI helps us plan our product in Userdoc, and our devs connect via MCP to bring those requirements directly in to Cursor (full disclaimer, I work at Userdoc - but we eat our own dogfood)