Hacker News: jes5199

New comment by jes5199 in "OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic"

jes5199 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:50:12 +0000

somewhat better leadership, I think

New comment by jes5199 in "The future of version control"

jes5199 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:15:32 +0000

This is just CRDT merges and better diffs?? I think the future of version control is much, much weirder than this. Like if you have CRDTs why not have ephemeral branches with real-time collaborative editing and live CI as you type

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:37:29 +0000

one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost?

and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined

but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:30:07 +0000

it was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most. Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:25:18 +0000

yes perhaps only the big players have this problem

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:53:00 +0000

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)

but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

New comment by jes5199 in "A sufficiently detailed spec is code"

jes5199 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:48:40 +0000

anything can be reliable if you have good tests

New comment by jes5199 in "If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?"

jes5199 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 07:43:51 +0000

instead of committing code, we should just save videos of all of the zoom meetings about the code

New comment by jes5199 in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

jes5199 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:55:24 +0000

there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription).

But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space

New comment by jes5199 in "Show HN: I wrapped the Zorks with an LLM"

jes5199 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 23:10:57 +0000

I was wondering when I’d see someone try this! I started work on a very similar idea last year but kept getting distracted by weirder and weirder ideas along the way, and never shipped anything. So, bravo!

New comment by jes5199 in "A Brief History of Ralph"

jes5199 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 01:04:39 +0000

I asked Claude a few days ago and it said it didn’t have access to the /clear command? maybe it was wrong or maybe that has changed

New comment by jes5199 in "What is Plan 9?"

jes5199 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:57:18 +0000

I guess I feel like if we’re rewriting device drivers then we’re in a turing tarpit. I think there’s room for innovation at what is traditionally considered the application level - we run git, postgres, document stores etc as applications. I think the way to solve the next generation of coordinating is by doing more interesting stuff on this layer.

New comment by jes5199 in "What is Plan 9?"

jes5199 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:49:17 +0000

I’m actually building an “OS” that’s up a level. it’s more like git, it has a concept of files but they’re documents in a distributed store. I can experiment with interaction patterns without caring about device drivers

New comment by jes5199 in "A Brief History of Ralph"

jes5199 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:46:49 +0000

I forked the anthropic Ralph Wiggum plugin: https://github.com/jes5199/chief-wiggum

there’s some debate about whether this is in the spirit of the _original_ Ralph, because it keeps too much context history around. But in practice Claude Code compactions are so low-quality that it’s basically the same as clearing the history every few turns

I’ve had good luck giving it goals like “keep working until the integration test passes on GitHub CI” - that was my longest run, actually, it ran unattended for 24 hours before solving the bug

New comment by jes5199 in "What is Plan 9?"

jes5199 — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 16:41:15 +0000

I’m not sure it still makes sense to do OS research so close to the metal. Most computing is done up on the application level, and our abstractions there suck, and I haven’t seen any evidence that “everything is a file” helps much in a world of web APIs and SQL databases

New comment by jes5199 in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

jes5199 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 02:45:32 +0000

I've been using Telegram bot to talk to a Claude SDK agent who talks to my Claudes via tmux commands (all running on a DigitalOcean VPS)

New comment by jes5199 in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

jes5199 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:14 +0000

I'm running Claude Code in a tmux on a VPS, and I'm working on setting up a meta-agent who can talk to me over text messages

New comment by jes5199 in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

jes5199 — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:04:11 +0000

Cursor makes it easier to watch what the model is doing and to also make edits at the same time. I find it useful at work where I need to be able to justify every change in a code review. It’s also great for getting a feel for what the models are capable of - like, using Cursor for a few months make it easier to use Claude Code effectively

New comment by jes5199 in "Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays"

jes5199 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 13:30:00 +0000

ride the BART

New comment by jes5199 in "Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max"

jes5199 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 07:04:09 +0000

I think this might be the way forward, Claude is great at project managing.

I’m already telling Claude to ask Codex for a code review on PRs. or another fun pattern I found is you can use give the web version of Codex an open ended task like “make this method faster”, hit the “4x” button and end and up with four different pull requests attacking the problem in different ways. Then ask Claude to read the open PRs and make a 5th one that combines the approaches. This way Codex does the hard thinking but Claude does the glue