Hacker News: gbro3n

New comment by gbro3n in "Claude Code Routines"

gbro3n — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:47:39 +0000

I have heard it said that tokens will become commodities. I like being able to switch between Open AI and Anthropics models, but I feel I'd manage if one of them disappeared. I'd probably even get by with Gemini. I don't want to lock in to any one provider any more than I want to lock in to my energy provider. I might pay 2x for a better model, but no more, and I can see that not being the case for much longer.

New comment by gbro3n in "Write less code, be more responsible"

gbro3n — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:17:19 +0000

My current take is that AI is helping me experiment much faster. I can get less involved with the parts of an application that matter less and focus more (manually) on the parts that do. I agree with a lot of the sentiment here - even with the best intentions of reviewing every line of AI code, when it works well and I'm working fast on low stakes functionality, that sometimes doesn't happen. This can be offset however by using AI efficiencies to maintain better test coverage than I would by hand (unit and e2e), having documentation updated with assistance and having diagrams maintained to help me review. There are still some annoyances, when the AI struggles with seemingly simple issues, but I think that we all have to admit that programming was difficult, and quality issues existed before AI.

New comment by gbro3n in "The End of Eleventy"

gbro3n — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:53:52 +0000

I built static site publishing into AS Notes, to add in to the mix (https://www.asnotes.io an extension for VS Code). It's markdown and wikilink based, and can publish either the whole workspace or from one or more specific folders. I've designed it so that I was not dependent on any platform for my static sites. Publishing is a pro feature, but it's a one time lifetime licence purchase.

New comment by gbro3n in "OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break"

gbro3n — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:15:33 +0000

What sort of tasks do you have it do for you?

New comment by gbro3n in "OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break"

gbro3n — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:15:03 +0000

That would be great if that comes to fruition. Investing in a model with weights updates would be like investing in employee training, rather than just giving the same unreliable employee more and more specific instructions.

New comment by gbro3n in "OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break"

gbro3n — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:44:36 +0000

I've used open claw (just for learning, I agree with the author it's not reliable enough to do anything useful) but also have a similar daily summary routine which is a basic gemini api call to a personal mcp server that has access to my email, calendar etc. The latter is so much more reliable. Open claw flows sometimes nail it, and then the next day fails miserably. It seems like we need a way to 'bank' the correct behaviours - like 'do it like you did it on Monday'. I feel that for any high percentage reliability, we will end up moving towards using LLMs as glue with as much of the actual work as possible being handed off to MCP or persisted routine code. The best use case for LLMs currently is writing code, because once it's written, tested and committed, it's useful for the long term. If we had to generate the same code on the fly for every run, there's no way it would ever work reliably. If we extrapolate that idea, I think it helps to see what we can and can't expect from AI.

New comment by gbro3n in "OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break"

gbro3n — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:28:21 +0000

I've had a crack at this problem in Agent Kanban for VS Code (https://github.com/appsoftwareltd/vscode-agent-kanban). The core idea is that you converse with the agent in a markdown task file in a plan, todo, implement flow, and that I have found works really well for long running complex tasks, and I use this tool every day. But after a while, the agent just forgets to converse in the task file. The only way to get it to (mostly) reliably converse in the task file is to reference the task file and instructions in AGENTS.md. There is support for git work trees and skipping commits of the agents file so as not to pollute the file with the specific task info. There is also an option for working without work trees, but in this flow I had to add chat participant "refresh" commands to help the agent keep it's instructions fresh in context. It's a problem that I believe will slowly get better as better agents appear, and get cheaper to use, because general LLM capability is the key differentiator at the moment.

New comment by gbro3n in "A practical guide for setting up Zettelkasten method in Obsidian"

gbro3n — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:28:29 +0000

I built the AS Notes extension for VS Code (https://asnotes.io) partly because I wanted to be able to write my notes with the support of other VS Code extensions, and because of the agent harness options in VS Code (copilot etc). The key thing for easy zettlekasten management is really good wikilink support in markdown. AS Notes supports nested wikilinking and automatic updating in the index on rename etc.

New comment by gbro3n in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

gbro3n — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:51:07 +0000

That is a very possible reality. Pay extra for no ads or a reduced cost trip if you consent to having your eyeballs held open while separate ads are played to each eyeball.

New comment by gbro3n in "Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters"

gbro3n — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:48:35 +0000

Maybe, I'm not clear what the goal is though.

New comment by gbro3n in "Show HN: Modo – I built an open-source alternative to Kiro, Cursor, and Windsurf"

gbro3n — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:26:03 +0000

This looks great. Building right into the editor looks like a solid way to go. I built "Agent Kanban" (anextension) for VS Code to enforce a similar "plan, tasks, implement" flow as you describe. That flow is really powerful for getting solid Agentic coding results. My tool went the route of encouraging the model via augmenting AGENTS.md and having the Kanban task file be markdown that the user and agent converse in (with some support for git worktrees which helps when running multiple sessions in parallel): https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/introducing-vs-code-agent-k...

New comment by gbro3n in "Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters"

gbro3n — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:17:53 +0000

It's always surprised me that Youtube being owned by the worlds leading search company has such awful on-site search. I've always left Youtube and searched for youtube videos via Google search, which brings up better results!

New comment by gbro3n in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

gbro3n — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:42:26 +0000

I think a good analogy is people not being able to work on modern cars because they are too complex or require specialised tools. True I can still go places with my car, but when it goes wrong I'm less likely to be able to resolve the problem without (paid for) specialised help.

New comment by gbro3n in "LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file""

gbro3n — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:25:26 +0000

I built AS Notes for VS Code (https://www.asnotes.io) with the option for this usage pattern in mind. By augmenting VS Code so it has the tooling we use in personal knowledge management systems, it makes it easy to write, link and update markdown / wikilinked notes manually (with mermaid / LaTeX rendering capability also) - but by using VS Code we have easy access to an Agent harness that we can direct to work on, or use our notes as context. Others have pointed out that context bloat is an issue, but no more so than when you use the copilot harness (or any other) inside a large codebase. I find I get more value from my AI conversations when I persist the outputs in markdown like this.

New comment by gbro3n in "The CMS is dead, long live the CMS"

gbro3n — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:44:38 +0000

I agree. Now we have the ability to have agents reason over our notes, it's more important for them to be in plain text. It was a big part of the reason I developed the AS Notes extension for managing documentation and blogs in VS Code / Markdown (https://www.asnotes.io)

New comment by gbro3n in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

gbro3n — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:41:00 +0000

Because we need to get information down quickly, but still have the option of parsing to a presentable format. Markdown is not perfect, but it's far better for the efficient capture of information or document authoring. I recently built AS Notes for VS Code (https://www.asnotes.io). It's markdown based, with wikilinks, mermaid diagrams, with the ability to publish to github pages etc. There is no way I'm writing my day to day notes with HTML and anchor tags without it being a huge distraction. And HTML is so much harder to read in longform if you need to come back end edit your writing. Markdown is for humans where HTML was designed to be simple, but is ultimately for parsers.

New comment by gbro3n in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

gbro3n — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:26:59 +0000

Really? That's awesome

New comment by gbro3n in "[dead]"

gbro3n — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:14:16 +0000

Every GitHub repository comes with a built-in wiki. It is a separate Git repository that stores markdown files, supports [[wikilinks]] between pages, and can be organised into subdirectories.

AS Notes is compatible with Github Wiki structure. Github wikis can be cloned locally. , Where initialised in the repository root, AS Notes provides wikilink autocompletion, markdown tooling and inline editor formatting (including Mermaid and LaTeX rendering Inline Markdown Editing Mermaid and LaTeX Rendering).

New comment by gbro3n in "Do your own writing"

gbro3n — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:29:12 +0000

I fully agree with the sentiment of the article. I will say that I feel I've had some success in having an LLM outline a document, provided that I then go through and read / edit thoroughly. I think there's even an argument that this a) possibly catches areas you I have forgotten to write about, and b) hooks into my critique mode which feels more motivated than author mode sometimes (I'm slightly ashamed to say). This does come at the cost however of not putting my self in 'researcher' mode, where I go back through the system I'm writing about and follow the threads, reacquainting myself and judging my previous decisions.

Show HN: As Notes – A Static Site Generator in Your Markdown Knowledgebase

gbro3n — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:20:11 +0000

AS Notes helps you to publish your notes to a static site in the same way that you might use Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy or Docusaurus, but from your existing markdown notes knowledge base and from within VS Code.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47519454

Points: 7

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