Hacker News: duggan

New comment by duggan in "Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap"

duggan — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:47:48 +0000

Takes all the fun out of it.

New comment by duggan in "Automating myself out of development"

duggan — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:00:49 +0000

> First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed

Replace OpenAI/Anthropic with AWS and this is not too dissimilar to the arguments in 2009 about cloud providers.

It’s not that there's nobody for whom this is true, it’s just that there’s enough of everyone else to build an empire with.

New comment by duggan in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

duggan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:46:42 +0000

- FileTranscriber, for getting Whisper transcriptions of media files from the context menu on macOS: https://github.com/duggan/filetranscriber

- usagi, for tracking Claude usage in the macOS taskbar. Lots of these around, but I wanted one that wasn't buggy and constantly adding features: https://github.com/duggan/usagi

- RockstarNinja, for sharing Claude plans and sessions. Since it's a bit of a data hog signups are limited, but me and my cofounder use it all the time: https://rockstar.ninja

- TweetEmbed, for browsing an offline Twitter archive and getting self-contained HTML copy/paste-able cards: https://duggan.github.io/tweetembed/

- bewitch, a terminal based metrics collector and data visualization system: https://bewitch.dev/

Each one of these has been a great way to really push on automating build processes, see what Claude can do for automatic documentation (screen captures, etc), and trying to give a distinct visual identity. In my next project, I'm trying to de-LLMify the prose it generates by using my own blog posts and aggressively pruning and integrating into the prompt.

The biggest change has just been unlearning "cost". Stuff I've subconsciously shied away from since intuition built up over a career has given me a sense of how long things take that just isn't true anymore. Still learning!

New comment by duggan in "We should be more tired than the model"

duggan — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:48:37 +0000

I used JetBrains IDEs for years. The refactoring tooling was fancy find-replace as far as I recall? Pretty cool in 2015, though.

New comment by duggan in "Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc"

duggan — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:55:08 +0000

LLMs are a force multiplier, not magic. They benefit from good tooling.

Vibe Maintainer

duggan — Fri, 01 May 2026 07:49:53 +0000

Article URL: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/vibe-maintainer-a2273a841040

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972247

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by duggan in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

duggan — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:11:17 +0000

The bar for "create software" up to this last year or so was "learn software development" or "pay someone else".

Personally, I think millions more people having the ability to create some subset of software is an incredible shift.

New comment by duggan in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

duggan — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:20:42 +0000

> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population.

1. You can build small applications with the $20/month sub, much more with the $100/month. Competition and technology improvements will inevitably improve the price to value ratio.

2. Cable sports subscriptions are in a similar price range. Expensive, but not exclusive to “the elites”.

New comment by duggan in "Kyushu Railway Company Train Varieties"

duggan — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:50:56 +0000

There are some enchanting non-JR regional trains you can get in Kyushu, too.

Got the Shimabara line[1] last summer and it was this tiny cute little single car sailing through farms and along the coast.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimabara_Railway_Line

Build Everything

duggan — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:28:04 +0000

Article URL: https://duggan.ie/posts/build-everything

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47405151

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Paddy, Not Patty

duggan — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:28:39 +0000

Article URL: https://paddynotpatty.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47396774

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by duggan in "Agents that run while I sleep"

duggan — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:19:49 +0000

> I worked at a startup, they built their API in PHP because it was easy and fast. Now they're successful

You can stop there! Sounds like PHP worked for them. Already doing better than 90% of startups.

Building a Stripe dashboard with an ESP32 desktop clock and Rust

duggan — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:28:26 +0000

Article URL: https://duggan.ie/posts/building-a-stripe-dashboard-with-an-esp32-desktop-clock-and-rust

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47307171

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by duggan in "We might all be AI engineers now"

duggan — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:08:20 +0000

> We're playing with a fire that catches and spreads so fast, by the time anyone realizes the forest is catching and starting to react, the entire forest is already well on the way to joining in the blaze.

I suspect this has been said in one form or another since the discovery of fire itself.

New comment by duggan in "We might all be AI engineers now"

duggan — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:10:38 +0000

Very much on the same page as the author, I think AI is a phenomenal accelerant.

If you're going in the right direction, acceleration is very useful. It rewards those who know what they're doing, certainly. What's maybe being left out is that, over a large enough distribution, it's going to accelerate people who are accidentally going in the right direction, too.

There's a baseline value in going fast.

New comment by duggan in "Welcoming Elizabeth Barron as the New Executive Director of the PHP Foundation"

duggan — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:35:14 +0000

Liz is one of the most genuine and thoughtful people I ever worked with. The software world would be a better place if more people like her were running the show. Best of luck to her.

New comment by duggan in "GitHub having issues [resolved]"

duggan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:57:30 +0000

I did give additional context in the blog post I linked, but yes, to be clear, this is something that will really work best for small projects with reasonably fast build cycles.

If you're already at the point where you're fielding pull requests, lots of long running tests, etc., you'll probably already know you need more than git over ssh.

New comment by duggan in "GitHub having issues [resolved]"

duggan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:10:42 +0000

It does, you're just running a command over ssh, so if you've a particularly long build then something more involved may make more sense.

New comment by duggan in "GitHub having issues [resolved]"

duggan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:11:40 +0000

A directory over SSH can be your git server. If your CI isn't too complex, a post-receive hook looping into Docker can be enough. I wrote up about self hosting git and builds a few weeks ago[1].

There are heavier solutions, but even setting something like this up as a backstop might be useful. If your blog is being hammered by ChatGPT traffic, spare a thought for Github. I can only imagine their traffic has ballooned phenomenally.

1: https://duggan.ie/posts/self-hosting-git-and-builds-without-...

Microgpt on the ESP32 – But Why?

duggan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:52:25 +0000

Article URL: https://duggan.ie/posts/microgpt-on-the-esp32-but-why

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47236091

Points: 4

# Comments: 0