Hacker News: flashgordon

New comment by flashgordon in "Will Open Source Survive the Agents That Replaced It?"

flashgordon — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:40:42 +0000

I would say the bigger worry should be for "non open source". Where I work we buy so much "vendor crap" because they enter through one area of expertise (eg CRM) and upsell into a bunch of other crap they have no expertise in but purely via acquisitions they have done - I am talking about an imaginary vendor that rhymes with "DalesPorce". We have even demonstrated we are able to replicate their meagre (but highly marketed) offerings with our own high quality alternatives with much less cruft by using AI and a combination of OSS (especially by improving the OSS in the process).

The usual argument goes "oh but now you have to maintain it". Guess what - we have dedicated "DalesPorce" engineering teams just to maintain the expensive and buggy/unreliable DalesPorce setups - completely negating the so called "you can be fully hands off" value they promise. Even worse when we measure productivity of these dev teams - Teams on the DalesPorce stacks are 1/5th to 1/20th as productive as teams on the boring old stacks.

My 2c is that this is a great opportunity for OSS. Instead of just building basic early stage offerings they should help help companies embrace the "commodotize the complement" strategy. Not just for the main offering but also in offering uber easy to setup and manage control plane services over them.

New comment by flashgordon in "MCP 2026-07-28 Specification: transport going stateless"

flashgordon — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:41:38 +0000

Congrats mate - Great to see this and loved working with you all on a very very very tiny part of this! Looking forward to a lot more awesome releases and features!

New comment by flashgordon in "Superpowers 6"

flashgordon — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:09:54 +0000

This. I found superpowers a huge token guzzler. And more generic a skill is the worse it seemed to perform. I have found that skills are something you need to build yourself and for your needs and most importantly be willing to throw away. One team I know blindly checked this into every repo they had. They also had the highest cost per pr across all teams in our org (of about 60 eng teams). AI has already given people superpowers. How sad is it that they now need to be told how to just chat and prompt and use AI effectively as a pair programmer:(

New comment by flashgordon in "Show HN: Pulse – Dashboard for Claude Code, approve tool calls from your phone"

flashgordon — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:53:14 +0000

This is what i thought/hoped. But man it is surprisingly buggy. Connections drop so fast and flakily. So many times I steppedd out of the house in a rush hoping remote control would help stay connected. And every time ive been sorely disappointed. Fool me once, fool me ten times....

New comment by flashgordon in "Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP"

flashgordon — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:15:26 +0000

This is fantastic. Ive been so fortunate to work with the mcp folks last few months on a couple of the SEPs (and my own experimental sdk in go). I used to be a naysayer. "Its just apis" I used to say. "Sheesh the invented another abstraction" I used to say.

What folks dont realize is it is the "P" in MCP that throws people off. When you build a traditional app you have to build forms, ui, req/response handling, bidirectional channels, long running tasks, auth and so on.

With mcp 80% of this common layer is taken care for you. So mcp is really an "app framework" than a protocol (well there is that too).

Unified auth is a huuuge boost. Can't wait to see more cool things!

New comment by flashgordon in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

flashgordon — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:54:39 +0000

Im working on a batteries included and (aiming to be) production deployment ready go sdk for all things MCP:

https://github.com/panyam/mcpkit

New comment by flashgordon in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

flashgordon — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:10:34 +0000

Not to mention inflation. Whats not clear is whether UBI is cash or does it include access to "basic" facilities like health, education and housing?

New comment by flashgordon in "Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens"

flashgordon — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:03:01 +0000

I've actually been doing this for a year. I call it /checkpoint instead and it does some thing like:

* update our architecture.md and other key md files in folders affected by updates and learnings in this session. * update claude.md with changes in workflows/tooling/conventions (not project summaries) * commit

It's been pretty good so far. Nothing fancy. Recently I also asked to keep memories within the repo itself instead of in ~/.claude.

Only downside is it is slow but keeps enough to pass the baton. May be "handoff" would have been a better name!

New comment by flashgordon in "I Created My First AI-Assisted Pull Request and I Feel Like a Fraud"

flashgordon — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 02:08:59 +0000

Wait till you hit your 1000th. And its not just "assisted" but lock stock and barelled!

New comment by flashgordon in "LCM: Lossless Context Management [pdf]"

flashgordon — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:17:19 +0000

Clint thanks heaps for this. Really good to see a lot of old school CS/Graph theory applied in a nice way.

On an unrelated note - I did notice you were also a lawyer - So umm how what is next for you re this? What should we gear up for :)

New comment by flashgordon in "I made an open-source juypter alternative"

flashgordon — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 03:10:48 +0000

Dang this was my reaction too! I thought a large part of it was open source (i remember the old anaconda days). TIL I guess!

New comment by flashgordon in "Claude Opus 4.6"

flashgordon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:42:35 +0000

I am really flabbergasted. How are they thinking using React for a TUI is a flex? Having 5 sessions open - and all idea - is taking up 98% of CPU. Is this another case of - "When all you is hammer, everything looks like nails"?

New comment by flashgordon in "Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?"

flashgordon — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 23:20:41 +0000

Im confused. Are you asking how to make money or how to spend your time if money was not a concern?

Answering the second question - I can find 48hours worth of things to do in a 24 hour day and none of them would be about work or just lazying around (nothing wrong with it). Life has so much to offer!!! Yeah AI can produce things. But theres a reason id consume human generated art. And thankfully real deep mastery still takes effort and passion!!

New comment by flashgordon in "Ask HN: If you had $10M in the bank, would you still show up to your job?"

flashgordon — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:28:49 +0000

I mean duh? At the very least wouldnt one just show upt to their job for the "non work related" activities? Or work becomes your "passive income"?

New comment by flashgordon in "How did TVs get so cheap?"

flashgordon — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 19:07:33 +0000

Did they? I can get a 70" "smart"-tv for a few hundred bucks with a crap load of bloatware. But I cannot get the same TV that is "dumb" at anywhere near that price point (I just want a bunch of HDMI ports that I can connect other devices into - including my laptop). Those cost a lot more from what I recall. And part of this was due to TVs being a great port-key to grab your viewing habits etc?

New comment by flashgordon in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (Jan 2026)"

flashgordon — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 06:48:01 +0000

Oh man so many things. I wrote a bunch of cool things a few years ago (and recently too) but have been scared to publish - mainly because even though ive used them in production, I felt publishing means having high quality docs etc. So now the biggest vibe-coding use case is to bring everything I wrote in the past to be "publish-ready".

Here are a few things:

Notations - A carnatic music notation parser, editor and renderer for the web https://github.com/panyam/notations

Galore - A LR parsing playground and library (used by Notations DSL above) https://github.com/panyam/galore

A few protoc plugins (I am very much grpc proto first):

protoc-gen-go-wasmjs (https://github.com/panyam/protoc-gen-go-wasmjs) - A protoc plugin for creating wasm bindings out of your grpc services so you can have your "go based backend logic" on the browser:

protoc-gen-dal (https://github.com/panyam/protoc-gen-dal) - A converter between protoc messages and datastore messages so you avoid writing API <-> DB Models.

Weewar (https://github.com/turnforge/weewar) - A clone of a favorite game of my from the 2000s just for fun. Still in progress.

Plenty more but just dusting off old things has been my biggest thing lately and in the process building tooling to standardize my next gen of apps/sites etc.

New comment by flashgordon in "Claude Code creator says Claude wrote all his code for the last month"

flashgordon — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 20:12:12 +0000

There are different degrees of "ai wrote all my code". A very crappy way of doing it is to keep on one shotting it expecting it to "fall on the right solution" - very much infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters scenario.

The other way is to spend a fair bit of time building out a design and ask it to implement it while verifying what it is producing then and there instead of reviewing reams of slop later on. AI still produced 100% - just that it is not as glamorous or as marketing friendly of a sound bite. After all which product manager wants to understand refactoring or TDD or SOLID or design principles etc?

New comment by flashgordon in "Travel agents took 10 years to collapse, developers are three years in"

flashgordon — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 07:48:09 +0000

I really don't understand the fetishisizing of the demise of software engineers. Are other knowledge workers like doctors or lawyers going to be exterminated by AI? Or is there even a fantasizing of their demise? The only reason I can think of is shmchaudenfreud (it is relatively barrierless to get into and pays pretty well) and more importantly imo doesn't have cabals like other professions do.

Btw I love using my Claude code to crank out product but I don't get off looking for the day when engineers are a dead breed!

New comment by flashgordon in "Ask HN: What would you do if you didn't work in tech?"

flashgordon — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:52:46 +0000

Frankly I really don't know what id don't not in tech. Closest I van think of is some kind of mathematician but don't even know what those "jobs" look like. Academia might be another. But these are all tech adjacent aren't they?

New comment by flashgordon in "Is the golden age of Indie software over?"

flashgordon — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:54:29 +0000

This. Companies are chomping at the bits about developer productivity and how they can do 10x more. What is not clear even if they can fire 90% of their engineers (assuming the 10x productivity gain is real), how are they expecting that even a tiny sliver of that 90% cannot replicate the products - with AI? And if we are in such a world how are those companies' valuations justified any more?

I am really excited at indie software again!