This is the process that nothing can do for us.

Sanctum is a voice journal, think Obsidian but for voice notes. I am really honing in on data sovereignty, privacy, 1 click to record and self organization of notes / ideas.

While this isn't anything revolutionary, or technically difficult, I do think I've landed on a form factor and stack that is in my opinion not served by current products. So much so that I just simply had to build it myself. Sanctum was born out of an Obsidian plugin that I built and have been maintaining for about 2 years called Scribe and it's been a wonderful way to really hone in on a more full fledged agentic development process for a full stack experience.

The stack is simple

  - For transcription I am using AssemblyAI - they have solid terms, 24hr retention and no training

  - LLM inference is running inside a TEE using redpill.ai, it's slow af but as private as I could find.

  - For cloud backup I am using full E2E encryption with Backblaze for storage

  - Endpoints and the like are AWS lambdas, DynamoDB for billing storage, Supabase for auth

Anyway, something I am most definitely curious on is if people are recording their thoughts, what they are using (either a cobbled together solution or a product) and what value they feel they've been getting from it!

TLDR: What is your company doing? What is the interview process for Senior / Staff level full stack engs? What has changed over the last year or so in regards to interviews at your company?

Background

I have been working for myself for the last 2 or so years and am about to begin prep for interviewing.

Which is to say, I am all the way out of the loop when it comes to interviewing and what is going on in more traditional companies.

I've been building, consulting, advising, etc throughout this time so I am very much so in the loop and feel at the frontier of many things.

In my last role I was at the crux of senior -> staff as a full stack engineer, most comfortable in the TS ecosystem, but have done plenty in Java etc.

I am assuming that with the rise of agentic development that the general interview process is different now? I would hope so?

...Should I be studying algorithms and tree traversal? Does the coding portion still exist, like writing lines of code while someone is watching me to traverse a tree to output nested comments in a thread?

My hunch is that there will be a bigger focus on architecture?

I don't know - you tell me!

Thanks for your time, attention and responses! It's super useful for me!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49578420

Points: 12

# Comments: 0

I was all in on sandboxes and safehouse for my agents but the moment I got into iOS development it felt like my hand was forced to just run Claude / codex / pi directly on my machine because nothing else could do the dev loop.

It’s been a painful reality for me, I’m going against core pieces of how I feel I should be interacting with agent harnesses and yet, I need to get the work done so

>often harnesses also mention in their system prompt locations of markdown files that the model can consult if the model thinks they might help >that hint alone as part of the system prompt can be strong enough to make the model read in more tokens than would have been necessary

I purposefully do this as I imagine it is useful. In my project I am seeing solid adherence to norms and a deep capacity to iterate on completed features. Essentially for each feature I have the model make a {featureName}.AGENTS.md at the root folder of the feature, where it maintains what is going on.

I am moving between Claude Code and Codex atm, but I began this pattern when pi + kimi 2.6 was my main driver.

My current agentic workflow is having a github repo that is a workspace and essentially a single obsidian vault over it called agents. I modify with Claude code (or other harness), check diffs in...VSCode and read it in...Obsidian.

It's separate from my actual personal Obsidian vault (that I don't send to any AI providers), and is only for agents. It's been really nice on all sorts of varied projects and for performing web research. I also have a bun monorepo setup in the root with varied tools for search, fetching individual websites, setting up folder structures - etc.

But essentially, in my experience, the moment you tell the model that it's in an Obsidian Vault - magic happens.

I am so curious how this will play in with it all and am hoping this will improve my workflow!

I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that.

Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?

We still run into the same issues that this brings about in the first place, AI or no AI. When requirements change will it update both functions? If it is rewriting them because it didn't see it existed in the first place, probably not. And there will likely be slight variations in function / components names, so it wouldn't be a clean grep to make the changes.

It may not impact velocity or stability in the exact moment, but in 6 months or a year - it likely will, the classic trope of tech debt.

I have no solution for this, it's definitely a tricky balance and one that we've been struggling with human written code since the dawn.

On top of that, I actually have it as an Obsidian vault, and I have the llm themselves use Obsidian markdown for the frontmatter and knowledge graph linking. It makes it very easy for me to navigate the data and interact in a way that is deeply enjoyable, and it also helps the model navigate the files.