Hacker News: iamwil

New comment by iamwil in "FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self"

iamwil — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:36:52 +0000

The bug is in the software in our heads, if anything. We learned a little too much, that we're thinking further ahead than we would have when we first started out. So you need to purposefully shut off that part of your eval, so that you get started on anything at all.

If you design with the LLM, then it can make this easier by prompting it to help you not talk yourself out of things.

I found that gstack's /office_hours to be good about encouraging, while being firm. I've only done one of the modes, but it didn't dismiss my pushback when it was just based on my intuition. It took it as a baseline, and tried to evaluate it by taking it seriously. If that's any indication, the other modes for side projects should be just as supportive.

I think LLMs can make it easier to be more ambitious. Non-techies are blown away by being able to build web pages? I'm blown away that I was able to root my 1st gen Kindle Fire to repurpose it as a remote terminal to ssh into my laptop to talk to claude code. I've been trying to root the thing for years and could never find the right instructions to make it work.

New comment by iamwil in "FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self"

iamwil — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:47:42 +0000

It's easy to talk yourself out of doing things when you know a little too much. Sometimes, it's good to get back into the mode where you knew nothing and do things for their own sake, just to get the engine started again.

Polish Rocks and Cans with Shaders

iamwil — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:58:30 +0000

Article URL: https://rocks.benhylak.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514169

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Departure Mono Font

iamwil — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:19:57 +0000

Article URL: https://departuremono.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463949

Points: 86

# Comments: 4

New comment by iamwil in "Having Kids (2019)"

iamwil — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:37:43 +0000

The quip I keep going back to is: "All joy, no fun."

New comment by iamwil in "Optimizing Content for Agents"

iamwil — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:37:16 +0000

I didn't find llms.txt useless at all. I was able to download all the library docs and check it into my repo and point my coding agent to it all the time.

New comment by iamwil in "The Brand Age"

iamwil — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:15:24 +0000

I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.

It's Time for LLM Connection Strings

iamwil — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:05:24 +0000

Article URL: https://danlevy.net/llm-connection-strings/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185594

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

New comment by iamwil in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

iamwil — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:19:29 +0000

Isn't that what happens when they post their projects on HN?

Slide rule simulator teaches you how to calculate the old-fashioned way

iamwil — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:17:39 +0000

Article URL: https://hackaday.com/2026/02/18/sliderule-simulator-teaches-you-how-to-do-calculations-the-old-fashioned-way/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102111

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by iamwil in ""Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker"

iamwil — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:46:08 +0000

Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.

New comment by iamwil in "Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out"

iamwil — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:27:44 +0000

Claude -> Clawd -> Moltbot -> Openclaw

Only a few things have claws. Lobsters being one of them.

Surfel-based global illumination on the web

iamwil — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:18:35 +0000

Article URL: https://juretriglav.si/surfel-based-global-illumination-on-the-web/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830042

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by iamwil in "Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game"

iamwil — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:22:00 +0000

I'd be interested in what kind of eSports game is condusive to VR spectating.

I tried doing Dota spectating before, and rigged up a mod for Minecraft vlogging/spectating, and concluded it wasn't quite like being at a stadium, or watching it on Twitch in a way that was interesting.

New comment by iamwil in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

iamwil — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:36:57 +0000

I write about reactivity, local first, visual programming, start ups, and a smidge about game design.

https://interjectedfuture.com

We put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon

iamwil — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:28:17 +0000

Article URL: https://labs.ramp.com/rct

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588972

Points: 526

# Comments: 288

New comment by iamwil in "Developers Are Solving the Wrong Problem"

iamwil — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:03:49 +0000

Of course they have no literal heads. Please use a more gracious interpretation when reading.

New comment by iamwil in "Developers Are Solving the Wrong Problem"

iamwil — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:00:15 +0000

I have a hunch we'll eventually swing back when we find the limits of vibe coding--in that LLMs also can only hold so much complexity in their heads, even if it's an order of magnitude (or more) greater than ours. If we make it understandable for humans then it'll definitely be trivial for LLMs, which frees them up to do other things. I mean, they don't have infinite layers or units to capture concepts. So the more symmetrical, consistent, and fractal (composable) you can make your code, the easier time an LLM will have with it to solve problems.

New comment by iamwil in "A website to destroy all websites"

iamwil — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:25:06 +0000

The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.

New comment by iamwil in "Welcome to Gas Town"

iamwil — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:42:49 +0000

> For instance, I know Project A -- these are the concerns of Project A. I know Project B -- these are the concerns of Project B. I have the insight to design these projects so they compose, so I don't have to keep track of a hundred parallel issues in a mono Project C. On each of those projects, run a single agent -- with review gates for 2-3 independent agents (fresh context, different models! Codex and Gemini). Use a loop, let the agents go back and forth.

Can you talk more about the structure of your workflow and how you evolved it to be that?