Hacker News: jonfw

New comment by jonfw in "I still prefer MCP over skills"

jonfw — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:26:46 +0000

With a good CLI, an agent may be able to do something outside of the scope of it's skill fairly easily, by running help commands or similar. With even a well written API it is not as easy.

I suppose that curl + API docs could replace a CLI but that's really token inefficient

New comment by jonfw in "[dead]"

jonfw — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:59:21 +0000

I dislike that the conversation about wealth is increasingly tied to comparisons with the wealth of others.

Just because I am not likely to join the class of billionaires, does not mean I can not become wealthy! I prefer to measure wealth in terms of quality of life rather than by comparison to others.

I do not have to join the capital class to produce a great life for my family and live in stability and happiness

New comment by jonfw in "White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward"

jonfw — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:55:32 +0000

I totally agree that republicans are irresponsible with the deficit. But americans don't seem motivated by the deficit, they seem motivated by inflation.

Inflation and the deficit don't have a 1:1 relationship. For the same dollar of debt, you'll see more inflation from social service spending than you will from tax cuts.

New comment by jonfw in "White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward"

jonfw — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:19:57 +0000

Generally speaking, people thought that government spending led to massive inflation, and the republicans have stronger rhetoric around cutting government spending.

New comment by jonfw in "US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike"

jonfw — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:56:01 +0000

Whatever your political affiliation and thoughts on the war, I hope we can all agree that it would an awful thing to base our foreign policy on the US election cycle.

New comment by jonfw in "I built a programming language using Claude Code"

jonfw — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:31:03 +0000

I'm sure claude does great at that, but it would be objectively better, for a large variety of reasons, if claude didn't have to keep syntax examples in it's context.

New comment by jonfw in "Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including database"

jonfw — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:31:25 +0000

If you are not terrified of your production terraform, you are doing it wrong!

New comment by jonfw in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

jonfw — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:59:16 +0000

Rather than saying that microsoft bashing has ramped up, I'd say that it is getting closer to it's standard levels.

Microsoft experience a sort of reputational resurgence in the tech world these past few years with some commitment to open source contribution and a really nice pivot towards linux and cloud.

Their pivot to AI is much less popular!

New comment by jonfw in "Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules"

jonfw — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:32:47 +0000

Yes, you are on the money. A cloud service provider needs to maintain reliability first and foremost, which means they won't have a runtime dependency on their billing system.

This means that billing happens asynchronously. You may use queues, you may do batching, etc. But you won't have a realtime view of the costs

New comment by jonfw in "Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs"

jonfw — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:19:38 +0000

> Decades ago companies would train new hires out out college, but that trend ended in the 90s.

Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today, developing countries did not have computing and educational infrastructure, and we had worse solutions to the logistics challenges from off-shoring.

It is increasingly difficult to justify the US salaries and I'm not sure that the talent pipeline in the US is so superior to make up for it.

As folks optimize for getting these high paying jobs it is increasingly difficult to find someone who has legitimate problem solving skills vs someone who has invested a lot of effort into looking hireable.

New comment by jonfw in "Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it"

jonfw — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:32:19 +0000

This is very much a tangent, and was asked in bad faith, but I’ll answer anyways!

One of the interesting things about working on distributed systems, is that you can reproduce problems without having to reproduce or mock a long stack trace

So I certainly don’t see the case you’re talking about where it takes hours to reproduce or understand a problem without a debugger. Of course there are still many times when a debugger should be consulted! There is always a right tool for a given job.

New comment by jonfw in "Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it"

jonfw — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:30:10 +0000

Keep cattle, not pets! The advice that used to apply for managing large numbers of machines also applies to managing coding agents.

If you rely on monitoring the behaviors of an individual coding agent to produce the output you want, you won't scale

New comment by jonfw in "Beyond agentic coding"

jonfw — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:41:12 +0000

“I have a PR from into main. Please break it into chunks and dispatch a background agent to review each chunk for , and then go through the chunks one at a time with me, pausing between each for my feedback”

New comment by jonfw in "Mermaid ASCII: Render Mermaid diagrams in your terminal"

jonfw — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:44:08 +0000

I love ASCII diagrams! The fact that I can write a diagram that looks equally wonderful in my terminal via cat as it does rendered on my website is incredible.

A good monospaced font and they can look really sharp!

I will definitely give this tool a shot.

I will also shout out monodraw as a really nice little application for building generic ASCII diagrams- https://monodraw.helftone.com/

New comment by jonfw in "Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory"

jonfw — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:13:11 +0000

Like all other job functions tangential to development- it can be difficult to organize the labor needed to accomplish this within a single team, and it can be difficult to align incentives when the labor is spread across multiple teams.

This gets more and more difficult with modern development practices. Development benefits greatly from fast release cycles and quick iteration- the other job functions do not! QA is certainly included there.

I think that inherent conflict is what is causing developers to increasingly managing their own operations, technical writing, testing, etc.

New comment by jonfw in "Git Rebase for the Terrified"

jonfw — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:15:22 +0000

Coding agents are excellent at solving merge and rebase conflicts according to natural language instruction.

New comment by jonfw in "Gentoo Linux 2025 Review"

jonfw — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:32:19 +0000

In my experience (this was about 5 years ago mind you) it was no more complex than an arch installation, but with a smaller community and less documentation.

New comment by jonfw in "AI as the Engine of Application State"

jonfw — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 12:50:44 +0000

Thank you for the kind words and feedback! Maybe I could have been more clear on the implementation details.

You were on the money with “UI just a reflection of the folders/files on disk that the AI updates.

There is no real UI integration with the AI, other than the UI embedding the chat interface of a coding agent (using an embedded terminal)

The UI just uses a filesystem watcher to keep track of updates to the relevant directories or files.

AI as the Engine of Application State

jonfw — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 02:25:28 +0000

Article URL: https://jonwoodlief.com/ai-app-state.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46562149

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by jonfw in "An Honest Review of Go (2025)"

jonfw — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:35:58 +0000

In my experience, people building APIs w/ python are almost always using frameworks, while people building APIs w/ golang are almost always using stdlib