Hacker News: clintonb

New comment by clintonb in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

clintonb — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:45:38 +0000

> make a code change and then deploy the changes to gamma and verify they work by making a sample request and verifying output from cloudwatch logs etc

This has been a godsend over the past week while deploying a couple services. One is a bridge between Linear and our Coder.com installation so folks can assign the work to an agent. Claude Code can do most of the work while I sleep since it has access to kubectl, Linear MCP, and Coder MCP. I no longer have to manually build, deploy, test, repeat. It just does it all for me!

New comment by clintonb in "MCP is dead; long live MCP"

clintonb — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:49:47 +0000

Nothing is “trivial” when you combine humans and computers. I worked at the MIT Computing Help Desk during my undergraduate years. We joked that we received callas from Nobel laureates who could find subatomic particles but couldn’t find the Windows Start button.

My company is currently trying to rollout shared MCPs and skills throughout the company. The engineers who have been using AI tools for the past 1-2 years have few, if any, issues. The designers, product managers, and others have numerous issues.

Having a single MCP gateway with very clear instructions for connecting to Claude Desktop and authenticating with Google eliminates numerous problems that would arise from installing and authenticating a CLI.

The MCP is also available on mobile devices. I can jot down ideas and interact with real data with Claude iOS and the remote MCP. Can’t do that with a CLI.

New comment by clintonb in "After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand [video]"

clintonb — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:50:18 +0000

You're producing technical debt. At some point you will invest more time fixing the vibe slop than it would have cost you to do the work yourself in the first place. A lot of vibe-coding just feels like shifting responsibility and resources from "development" to "incident response".

New comment by clintonb in "After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand [video]"

clintonb — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:47:25 +0000

How do you know the output is correct?

New comment by clintonb in "Claude Code gets native LSP support"

clintonb — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:13:57 +0000

You joke and folks downvote, but this is my biggest issue with WebStorm. I'm seriously considering switching for the first time in 16 years. Zed is quite snappy. The Claude Code integration in VS Code is brilliant. I've used the CLI in the JetBrains terminal. I had no idea I could revisit past conversations until I used the VS Code extension!

New comment by clintonb in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

clintonb — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:13:14 +0000

Thanks for the email and the reminder that we can use fewer shards with larger runners.

New comment by clintonb in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

clintonb — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:39:06 +0000

GitHub charges too much for hosted runners. It's pretty straightforward to switch to another runner provider at literally half the cost of GitHub.

New comment by clintonb in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

clintonb — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:37:49 +0000

Yikes! They seem to be gunning for services like WarpBuild, which we've used for a couple years to keep our costs low. The $0.002 per minute on top of WarpBuild's costs is exactly GitHub's new pricing scheme.

I'm happy for competition, but this seems a bit foul since we users aren't getting anything tangible beyond the promise of improvements and investments that I don't need.

New comment by clintonb in "Show HN: We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor"

clintonb — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:43:12 +0000

> Not to mention choreographing the lifecycle of our business domain with the Stripe checkout flow and webhook event types, of which there are 250+

You don’t need to listen for all event types if you aren’t using _every_ Stripe feature.

New comment by clintonb in "What if you don't need MCP at all?"

clintonb — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:23:21 +0000

I like MCP for _remote_ services such as Linear, Notion, or Sentry. I authenticate once and Claude has the relevant access to access the remote data. Same goes for my team by committing the config.

Can I “just call the API”? Yeah, but that takes extra work, and my goal is to reduce extra work.

New comment by clintonb in "Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support"

clintonb — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:19:11 +0000

I prefer TypeID: https://github.com/jetify-com/typeid

New comment by clintonb in "Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support"

clintonb — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:13:18 +0000

Client-generated IDs are necessary for distributed or offline-first systems. My company, Vori, builds a POS for grocery stores. The POS generates UUIDv7 IDs for all data it creates and that data is eventually synced to our backend. The sync time can range from less than 1 second for a store with fast Internet to hours if a store is offline.

Is a collision possible? Yes, but the likelihood of a collision is so low that it's not worth agonizing over (although I did when I was designing the system).

New comment by clintonb in "Database Linting and Analysis for PostgreSQL"

clintonb — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 23:35:27 +0000

Seems nice. It would be better if it could be run as a script or agent, instead of a plugin, so it could work against hosted installations on AWS or Google Cloud (both of which limit extensions).

New comment by clintonb in "Meta launches Hyperscape, technology to turn real-world spaces into VR"

clintonb — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:21:28 +0000

VRML was one of my early computing interests. I’m actually excited for more ways to share 3D spaces with folks!

New comment by clintonb in "GitHub was having issues"

clintonb — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:26:29 +0000

Do you mean free private repos? GitHub has allowed free private repos for a few years now.

New comment by clintonb in "“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps"

clintonb — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 15:21:30 +0000

Do you have children? You tell them something is animal-related and they tend to get really excited. Even more so for dinosaurs. My five year old has no concept of money, but he does have a concept of “new thing I can play with”.

When I was a kid we had Book It. I got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut for every 10(?) books I read. I read a lot of books! I also learned a lot along the way, and continued the habit of reading for fun through college.

New comment by clintonb in "Is Firebase Console Down"

clintonb — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 05:29:32 +0000

https://status.firebase.google.com/incidents/qFom8wi75A4owwT...

New comment by clintonb in "Claude Integrations"

clintonb — Fri, 02 May 2025 19:26:17 +0000

Greptile (https://www.greptile.com/) tries to do that, at least for bug tickets. I recall being annoyed by its suggestions (posted as Linear comments).

New comment by clintonb in "A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers"

clintonb — Thu, 01 May 2025 19:25:34 +0000

Despite the beta label and lack of a 1.x release, I would consider the project pretty stable. We've used it in production for over 18 months to support an offline-first point of sale system. We haven't had any issues with Litestream.

New comment by clintonb in "JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant"

clintonb — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:43:40 +0000

I'm not OP, but agree that the tooling—DataGrip and WebStorm for me—is getting worse. Here are issues observed for the latest updates:

- DataGrip sporadically stops working when returning from sleep. I have to force-kill it to continue.

- Take a relatively empty file with 10 lines. WebStorm is supposed to reformat on save. It hangs for 10+ seconds or until I cancel reformatting.

- I saw a low memory alert for the first time in months this week. My workflow hasn't changed drastically and I wasn't running anything, just editing a few files.

- Overall everything feels a little slower than it did a couple weeks ago with the older version.

I don't think it's worth filing issues in YouTrack because I've seen those go nowhere in the past.