Hacker News: jpallen

New comment by jpallen in "Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere"

jpallen — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:53:21 +0000

First impressions are good! Couple of small bits of feedback:

- I only had the option to create a worktree from main. I'd like to be able to pick any starting branch. Not a big deal, I just told claude to checkout the branch I wanted as my first instruction.

- For some reason in the Android app the usual automatic capitalisation of the first letter in a sentence doesn't work. Claude probably doesn't care, but I like to type in proper sentences!

- It would be nice if the worktree names got semantic names, e.g. by running my first prompt through Haiku. Maybe that's not the order things are set up in though

New comment by jpallen in "Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere"

jpallen — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:16:03 +0000

There's a lot of negative feedback in this thread, so let me say I'm really excited to try this! I have caring responsibilities at home that means I'm constantly switching between my laptop and phone. Claude code web has been a very useful tool for this, but it's not a great bit of software. Omnara looks much more configurable and thought out. I've looked for various solutions to this problem that just work, and nothing else mentioned in this thread fits the bill. Your demo looks like it nails it - I'm excited to try!

Show HN: A daily cryptic clue puzzle with a twist

jpallen — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:10:31 +0000

Hi HN,

I've created https://riddlegrid.com, which is a daily puzzle game with about 10 cryptic clues to solve each day. But rather than being arranged in a typical crossword, all of the letters from the clues are already visible and arranged in grid. You find answers by swiping through the letters (like Squardle if you know that).

I made it for myself and friends and family, and we've been enjoying playing it over the last few days, so I thought you might like it too. I find having all the letters available but jumbled up adds a new dimension to it where you search for words or fragments if you're stuck. As you solve clues the remaining ones get easier too.

Would love to know what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564096

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Maybe You're Not Actually Trying

jpallen — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:21:04 +0000

Article URL: https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-not-actually-trying

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44375592

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by jpallen in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)"

jpallen — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:05:38 +0000

What happens if you combine a full Dungeons & Dragons rules engine with an LLM to act as the dungeon master? Until the recent wave of reasoning models, the answer was mostly 'nothing coherent', but Claude 3.7 with thinking is very good at this! It will probably get rate limited with minimal traffic, but I have a demo up at https://lairsandllamas.com

New comment by jpallen in "Copying Angry Birds with nothing but AI"

jpallen — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 19:41:15 +0000

This is very cool! It's not as impressive, but here is a video of me writing Game of Life only by speaking out loud to VS Code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NSplhZ0DlY

I did that by building an open source VS Code extension to interact with GPT3.5/4 directly from your editor: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Biggles..... It cuts out copy/pasting between ChatGPT and your editor, or writing any boiler plate code since you can just ask it to insert the code you want, or change the code you have highlighted. You can also talk to it directly using the Whisper API!

New comment by jpallen in "GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month"

jpallen — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 16:28:05 +0000

A lot of people are commenting about how gpt4 is better than copilot, both in terms of getting it to do exactly what you want and in the quality of response. I've also found this and so I wrote a simple VS Code coding assistant that uses gpt4 and let's you be direct in asking what you want it to do: https://github.com/jpallen/biggles. Maybe it can be useful to some of you too.

It also supports voice, which is a fun way to code!

Show HN: Biggles, a coding assistant you can talk to

jpallen — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 09:16:22 +0000

Hi HN,

I created Biggles last weekend to let me speak out loud to VS Code and have ChatGPT translate my instructions into code changes.

For a lot of code I write I am fluent enough that translating my high-level intention into code doesn't break my out of the flow. But if I hit something I'm not immediately sure how to do, I can just open Biggles and start thinking out loud about. With the OpenAI Whisper and GPT4 APIs, it's surprisingly good at inserting the bit of code I want. This lets me stay in the flow at of thinking about what I want to implement, not how I want to implement it.

I find that it's easier for me to just start talking, and I don't have to think too much about what I want to say. If I need to translate my instruction into text first, that requires more thought. Maybe that's just me though, and there's a text mode option available. Might be useful in open plan offices!

I've not been using Biggles long for any real work, so I'm still iterating on it, but I'd love to know what you think and if you find it useful!

The extension is MIT licensed (https://github.com/jpallen/biggles), but you need to provide your own OpenAI API key at the moment. Keep an eye on costs, because GPT4 is quite expensive! You can switch to GPT3.5 for a cheaper but less good option.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37713840

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by jpallen in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)"

jpallen — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 20:16:43 +0000

Cogo build tech solutions that help businesses and consumers measure and improve their carbon footprint and impact. We’re looking for engineers who can help us quickly build well engineered features into our consumer app, in collaboration with product designers and behaviour scientists. We have lots of data to wrangle, and some complex models on our back-end, which all need to feed through into a quality UI and UX of the app.

We have two open positions:

- Full-Stack Software Engineer: https://cogo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=99&source=aWQ9NDk...

- React Native Software Engineer: https://cogo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=100&source=aWQ9ND...

Tech-stack: React Native, Typescript, Postgres, GraphQL

New comment by jpallen in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2022)"

jpallen — Wed, 11 May 2022 08:40:43 +0000

We have two open positions:

- Full-Stack Software Engineer: https://cogo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=99&source=aWQ9NDk...

- React Native Software Engineer: https://cogo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=100&source=aWQ9ND...

Tech-stack: React Native, Typescript, Postgres, GraphQL

Leaving Our Bodies Behind

jpallen — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 16:02:58 +0000

Article URL: https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/leaving-our-bodies-behind/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541113

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Retrospectives

jpallen — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:28:45 +0000

Article URL: https://ideaflip.com/blog/3/retrospectives/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836495

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The Planstorm

jpallen — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 16:02:36 +0000

Article URL: https://ideaflip.com/blog/2/the-planstorm/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506301

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jpallen in "Ask HN: What collaborative whiteboard are you using?"

jpallen — Fri, 22 May 2020 15:33:22 +0000

https://www.ideaflip.com - it's nice and simple compared to e.g. Miro, and nicely recreates the offline collaboration feeling of working around a whiteboard

New comment by jpallen in "For $39, Frontier Air Will Let Passengers Keep Their Distance"

jpallen — Tue, 05 May 2020 08:08:17 +0000

'if X is true then I expect to see evidence of X' is generally a reasonable assumption/prior. So not seeing evidence of X is evidence that X is false. It's not proof, but absence of evidence generally is evidence of absence, unless you have a specific reason to believe it's not.

New comment by jpallen in "UK Election Tech Handbook"

jpallen — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 11:55:47 +0000

I was part of creating the initial version of https://www.swapmyvote.uk/ that ran in the 2015 and 2017 general elections. My experience of it was that it was a slow ramp up, but the final week leading up to the general election got very exciting and busy. There's a fun kind of energy in working on something like this, where people get more and more engaged right up to voting day... and then an anti-climatic finish afterwards, when interest vanishes overnight.

New comment by jpallen in "How to Eliminate the Dreaded “Blind Spot”"

jpallen — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 22:23:57 +0000

I drive a van, and that absolutely has a blind spot on the far side from the driver, no matter what I do with my head. The problem is that there are no rear passenger side windows to look through, and you can't see into the blind spot through the front passenger window. A blind spot mirror helps partially, but it's disconcerting driving with a known blind spot.

New comment by jpallen in "Redefining the Mole"

jpallen — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 08:45:04 +0000

It's an arbitrary number, but it's nice because one mole of atoms with atomic mass number X will weigh approximately X grams. This is exactly true for carbon-12 (and is what defines a mole).

New comment by jpallen in "Writing Dockerfiles for Node.js Web Apps"

jpallen — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 09:44:23 +0000

Thanks! You've given me something new to try out :)

New comment by jpallen in "Writing Dockerfiles for Node.js Web Apps"

jpallen — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 08:09:59 +0000

Nice post, and very close to my experiences with Dockerfiles for node.

To the author: could you elaborate on the differences between carbon and alpine base images please? I can obviously go look this up, but this was the one part of the guide that was new to me. Your description wasn't enough to give me a complete understanding, so perhaps you could explain a bit more about carbon and alpine? Thanks.