Hacker News: dalenw

New comment by dalenw in "So where are all the AI apps?"

dalenw — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:24:54 +0000

I recently "vibe coded" a long term background job runner service... thing. It's rather specific to my job and a pre-existing solution didn't exist. I already knew what I wanted the code to be, so it was just a matter of explaining explicitly what I wanted to the AI. Software engineering concepts, patterns, al that stuff. And at the end of the day(s) it took about the same amount of time to code it with AI than it would've taken by hand.

It was a lot of reviewing and proofreading and just verifying everything by hand. The only thing that saved me time was writing the test suite for it.

Would I do it again? Maybe. It was kinda fun programming by explaining an idea in plain english than just writing the code itself. But I heavily relied on software engineering skills, especially those theory classes from university to best explain how it should be structured and written. And of course being able to understand what it outputs. I do not think that someone with no prior software engineering knowledge could do the same thing that I did.

New comment by dalenw in "Why Developers Keep Choosing Claude over Every Other AI"

dalenw — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:38:40 +0000

I've heard a lot of people prefer OpenCode to Claude Code, myself included. Having tried both, I find myself having a much better time in OpenCode. Have you tried it?

I'll admit it lacks on the agent teams side but I tend to use AI sparingly compared to others on my team.

New comment by dalenw in "The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)"

dalenw — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:05:07 +0000

I think so. The last few months have shown us that it isn't necessarily the models themselves that provide good results, but the tooling / harness around it. Codex, Opus, GLM 5, Kimi 2.5, etc. all each have their quirks. Use a harness like opencode and give the model the right amount of context, they'll all perform well and you'll get a correct answer every time.

So in my opinion, in a scenario like this where the token output is near instant but you're running a lower tier model, good tooling can overcome the differences between a frontier cloud model.

New comment by dalenw in "Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work"

dalenw — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:06:17 +0000

I wonder if there's something to be said about screenshots preventing context poisoning vs parsing. Or in other words, the "poison" would have to be visible and obvious on the page where as it could be easily hidden in the DOM.

And I do know there are ways to hide data like watermarks in images but I do not know if that would be able to poison an AI.

New comment by dalenw in "How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI"

dalenw — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:53:09 +0000

While I don't use Gemini, I'm betting they'll end up being the cheapest in the future because Google is developing the entire stack, instead of relying on GPUs. I think that puts them in a much better position than other companies like OpenAI.

https://cloud.google.com/tpu

New comment by dalenw in "MinIO is now in maintenance-mode"

dalenw — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:17:00 +0000

I use garage at home, single node setup. It's very easy and fast, I'm happy with it. You're missing out on a UI for it, but MountainDuck / CyberDuck solves that problem for me.

New comment by dalenw in "Ruby 4.0.0 Preview2"

dalenw — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:43:43 +0000

I used to be a big ruby/rails fan but I have to agree with you. I now write c-sharp and it's a lot less stressful than Ruby. If a Ruby/Rails codebases get to a large enough point it's really difficult to keep track of what types a method you wrote accepts. You end up just constantly double checking your own code. Or you end up with a few type checks and/or type conversions at the top of every method. And maybe I was doing it wrong because it was early on in my career. But when a method can accept literally anything and return literally anything, not even a strong IDE like RubyMine can save you.

New comment by dalenw in "Homebrew no longer allows bypassing Gatekeeper for unsigned/unnotarized software"

dalenw — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 22:41:10 +0000

For Mac, yes and no. IIRC you don't need a developer's license to build and sign software for yourself. But you do need one to distribute pre-built software.

New comment by dalenw in "Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management"

dalenw — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 20:07:50 +0000

To be fair, there’s a massive banner on their front page warning users it’s in beta. Until they settle on a proper release it’ll continue to be a bit chaotic. All software development is like that.

New comment by dalenw in "Vtm: Text-Based Desktop Environment"

dalenw — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 02:48:23 +0000

I just built it on macos 15.3.1 without issues, if that helps.

New comment by dalenw in "Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux"

dalenw — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 02:29:07 +0000

Same, in a way. I've been using it for a couple months on my MacBook Pro M2 Max, zero issues. Recently I installed it on my work laptop, M4 Max, and I get frequent crashes. No idea why it would make a difference.

New comment by dalenw in "Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search"

dalenw — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 23:59:16 +0000

They're saying that when someone uses a privacy token to search, they cannot track which account it's tied to. Therefor, they cannot track limits & billing.

New comment by dalenw in "The Future of Htmx"

dalenw — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 23:55:13 +0000

I use it at work with asp.net MVC, no issues either. I did have to use Webpacker though...

New comment by dalenw in "Building a robust data synchronization framework with Rails"

dalenw — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 02:56:39 +0000

I like Ruby a lot, but I find it large codebases get convoluted since it doesn't have a proper typing system. RBS doesn't count lol. Even RubyMine by JetBrains gets confused with classes and such in a "large" codebase I wrote (50k lines give or take). And that's with doing things the proper Ruby/Rails way, with full RBS files for everything.

New comment by dalenw in "Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site"

dalenw — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 06:43:21 +0000

I've always been a fan of cloudflare or firebase for static sites.