Hacker News: jamest

New comment by jamest in "Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps"

jamest — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:28:21 +0000

They actually deliver on the promise of "relational queries && real-time," which is no small feat.

Though, their console feels like it didn't get the love that the rest of the infra / website did.

Congrats on the 1.0 launch! I'm excited to keep building with Instant.

Tasklet's 6 year "overnight success"

jamest — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:41:17 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/startupandrew/status/2018396943672889372

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891400

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jamest in "Show HN: You are now the product manager of this site"

jamest — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:55:28 +0000

Add a list of people (PMs) who have added feature requests. Have their username be " () - " and then I can click through to see their bio.

New comment by jamest in "Shell Grotto, Margate"

jamest — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 21:32:54 +0000

It was not on my bingo card to see the Shell Grotto on HN.

I loved this place as a kid and would marvel at the patterns.

The air of mystery around who made it and why invites some fun speculation.

New comment by jamest in "Show HN: Tasklet – Automate your business with AI agents"

jamest — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:07:16 +0000

I don't trust an AI model to operate my computer, but giving me my own VM that AIs can use on my behalf is a brilliant way to do this.

Kudos Tasklet.

New comment by jamest in "Kradle: Eval AI with Simulations"

jamest — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:47:49 +0000

Genie 3 is super impressive -- but you can't manipulate it programmatically like Minecraft.

We've built our infra so that we can plug in any simulation environment. If an AI-generated world starts being programmatically modifiable (and has really solid object permanance :) then we'd happily use it!

New comment by jamest in "Kradle: Eval AI with Simulations"

jamest — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:43:30 +0000

Hi HN -

Minecraft has a DSL that lets you manipulate the world. We've piggy-backed on that, along with a K8s infra to run N worlds in parallel, to let you create simulations of arbitrary complexity.

We think simulations are the best way to test frontier AIs due to their degrees of freedom and expressivity.

AMA!

New comment by jamest in "How and where will agents ship software?"

jamest — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 21:39:34 +0000

I don't have the prompts, but here you go:

  - https://the-inference.vercel.app
  - https://github.com/jamestamplin/instant-test

New comment by jamest in "How and where will agents ship software?"

jamest — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:01:40 +0000

I built an app (HN Clone, of course) with Instant's MCP hooked up to Claude Code.

The experience was brilliant.

Pros:

+ Fast

+ Easy

+ "Vibe coding on steroids" basically

+ The sense of 'wow' that comes very rarely with new tech

Cons:

- It used Instant as the database/backend, but I wasn't sure what it had done / how exactly it worked and had to spend a bunch of time asking Claude + reading the code to get it. It seemed reasonable, but if I were doing a prod system vs a PoC, this is where the time would be spent. ("Vibe coding lets you create tech debt 10x faster")

Net-net: This is the way for prototyping / validating. This is probably the way for production systems in N months too once the toolchain + agents get better.

New comment by jamest in "Superhuman built an engine to find product market fit (2018)"

jamest — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 21:45:56 +0000

+1 to Shortwave being great

New comment by jamest in "Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase"

jamest — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 18:00:27 +0000

[Firebase founder] The thing I'm excited about w/Instant is the quad-fecta of offline + real-time + relational queries + open source. The amount of requests we had for relational queries was off-the-charts (and is a hard engineering problem), and, while the Firebase clients are OSS, I failed to open source a reference backend (a longer story).

Good luck, Joe, Stopa and team!

PostgreSQL comes to Firebase

jamest — Tue, 14 May 2024 23:46:17 +0000

Article URL: https://firebase.google.com/products/data-connect

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361450

Points: 32

# Comments: 4

Meet your AI Executive Assistant

jamest — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:11:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.shortwave.com/blog/meet-your-ai-email-executive-assistant/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37585990

Points: 49

# Comments: 21

New comment by jamest in "Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough"

jamest — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 01:31:15 +0000

We were talking to (and using the sites) of all our customers of any reasonable size. This was one of them.

New comment by jamest in "Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough"

jamest — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 17:58:55 +0000

The satire in the title is reminiscent of how Firebase was born.

We were previously working on a chat system called Envolve (https://www.envolve.com), that was 'Facebook Chat for any website'. A game that was using us for in-game chat created channels, used display: none on them, and passed game state through the chat.

We scratched our head, asked them why, and learned they wanted to focus on the frontend, not to deal with realtime message passing.

This led us to create a 'headless version' of our chat infra (re-written in Scala) that became the Firebase Realtime Database.

Build charitable giving into your app

jamest — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:00:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.daffy.org/developer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36060961

Points: 21

# Comments: 1

Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

jamest — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 21:15:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.shortwave.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34961951

Points: 74

# Comments: 66

New comment by jamest in "Google removed my Yubikeys from a Google account 'just to be safe'"

jamest — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 20:46:13 +0000

Related, but different, & if there's someone at Google looking at this:

There was a Titan Bluetooth Key (for 2FA) Vulnerability, you've said you'll replace the affected keys[1], but you're no longer doing so. Which is frustrating.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/titan-keys-update.ht...

New comment by jamest in "We're moving on from Firebase"

jamest — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 02:35:13 +0000

Fun fact: the original App Engine datastore evolved into Firestore (which now powers Snapchat and many others).

New comment by jamest in "We're moving on from Firebase"

jamest — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 22:09:16 +0000

Thanks, fixed!