Hacker News: mrdonbrown

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Show HN: Sx – an open-source package manager for AI skills, MCPs, and commands"

mrdonbrown — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:26:35 +0000

Gotcha. What would the ideal look like? Someone could create a financial doc they want to share then tell their agent to "Share foo.md with my team", and it would via mcp? On the backend, that mcp server takes the file and packages it into the plugin, which hopefully auto-updates?

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Show HN: Sx – an open-source package manager for AI skills, MCPs, and commands"

mrdonbrown — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:08:07 +0000

Makes sense. Would a tool that let non-tech people easily share and distribute skills without needing git be worth adoption? Would the info being shared just be skills or something else?

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Taste in the age of AI and LLMs"

mrdonbrown — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:56:22 +0000

This is an underrated comment. You could have the best product out there, but AI has not only lowered the effort for competitors but has flooded traditional ways to get your product known, from outbound sales to content marketing. Sometimes make you question whether there are customers anymore.

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Show HN: Agent Skill Harbor – a GitHub-native skill platform for teams"

mrdonbrown — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:55:52 +0000

Why stop at skills though? If you are trying to solve the provisioning problem for agent tools, shouldn't that also include MCP, commands, hooks, rules, etc in addition to skills?

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Show HN: Agent Skill Harbor – a GitHub-native skill platform for teams"

mrdonbrown — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:54:56 +0000

I could be wrong, but I don't think there is anything in the skills spec that prohibits a skill from having binaries? A skill may even choose to embed them to be able to run in sandboxed environments.

Agreed on skills not being static. Of course, with the way the internet works, I don't want them to be too dynamic either :)

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Dockerhub for Skill.md"

mrdonbrown — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:59:10 +0000

If you want to share skills using something that has versioning, automatic updates, and focused on teams vs the internet at large, consider sx - https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Show HN: Agent Skills Leaderboard"

mrdonbrown — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 07:02:24 +0000

If you want to share skills (and other tools) with teams at scale, consider sx - https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx

[yup, my project :)]

Show HN: Sx – I fixed Claude Code for teams

mrdonbrown — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:59:36 +0000

Claude Code is amazing for individuals but terrible for teams.

I spent the last six months building my perfect mix of MCP servers, subagents, commands and skills. Claude Code writes 100% of the code now, but sharing this with my team? Painful.

1. Blog posts and workshops don't work (and don't scale)

2. Committing tools to N repos means N PRs. A tool changes? N more PRs.

3. Same tools, different files or folders for each AI assistant; not everyone uses Claude Code

It is like 1999 all over again; FTPing files up to prod and versioning with ".bak" suffixes.

So I built sx. It is your team's private NPM for Claude Code (and others).

How it works:

  # Set a git repo as your vault
  sx init --type git git@github.com:my-org/sx-vault.git

  # Add a local skill, command, mcp, etc
  sx add my-skill

When your team installs sx, they automatically get the right versioned tools for the right projects (mono-repos too!). No more PRs, no more stale docs, no more tedious brownbags. Supports Claude Code and Cursor today. Others soon.

Claude Code wrote every line of sx. How'd it do? :)

GitHub: https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46593419

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Tuxracer.js play Tux Racer in the browser"

mrdonbrown — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 22:06:51 +0000

I have a CD copy of the game, and many fond memories playing it with the wife in the early 2000's...

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Show HN: Automate best practices across your toolchain – Sleuth Automations"

mrdonbrown — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 17:18:24 +0000

Right, Jira is great at planning, but requires a lot of gardening to keep it up to date with actuals like when things ship and where. Glue automations like this can be really helpful.

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Remembering Bob Lee"

mrdonbrown — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 18:36:57 +0000

I met and worked with Bob in open source work in the mid 2000's, mostly with what would become Guice. He wrote this framework, again, thanks to his distaste of Spring and we put an early version of it what would become Apache Struts 2. Man, if I ever got cocky in my programming skills, I just needed to read that Guice prototype code and I was quickly humbled. The best part is he was just an awesome guy to be around. Very friendly, accepting, humble, and a ton of fun. I still talk about this guy I know who was married on the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise 1701 D (at the MGM before it was torn down)...

New comment by mrdonbrown in "T-Mobile will start charging a $35 fee on all new activations and upgrades"

mrdonbrown — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:45:08 +0000

I tried and liked Mint, but ended up with Red Pocket (MVNO that does Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T) when I moved somewhere that needed AT&T. It is pretty handy having one provider but having a choice of network. It also helps they have plans as low as $5/month, which is great for kids and infrequent users.

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor"

mrdonbrown — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 18:32:33 +0000

Where I found that fell down was wanting to do things like slow zooms and interesting transitions. I'd love something like a Python or bash script to tweak that addressed those.

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor"

mrdonbrown — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 17:46:27 +0000

Shotcut has this one cool feature [1] - drop a bunch of pictures into it and it'll create an animated slide show automatically. I've looked for ways to automate that via something like ffmpeg, but haven't found any better options.

[1] https://forum.shotcut.org/t/slideshow-generator/19162

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Using a "proper" camera as a webcam"

mrdonbrown — Wed, 18 May 2022 06:26:16 +0000

I haven't tried using the teleprompter with a webcam, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. I use a Sony a6600 myself, with a Sigma 16mm/f1.4 prime lense.

Regardless, I recommend capturing in 4k, and running that through OBS so you can zoom/crop the image for ideal framing, optional of course.

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Using a "proper" camera as a webcam"

mrdonbrown — Tue, 17 May 2022 18:12:44 +0000

Sure, this is what I see [1] and you can see how it looks on the other side from my Twitch streams [2]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/4JPIHx1.jpg [2] https://www.twitch.tv/mrdonbrown

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Using a "proper" camera as a webcam"

mrdonbrown — Tue, 17 May 2022 16:35:08 +0000

I use the Caddie Buddy one [1], which is a bit more robust for bigger cameras. There are other options where you can use your phone or something, but I prefer using a mirrorless and a good sized monitor.

[1] https://caddiebuddy.com/teleprompter-for-ipads-androids-and-...

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Using a "proper" camera as a webcam"

mrdonbrown — Tue, 17 May 2022 16:31:22 +0000

I'm surprised no one has mentioned using a teleprompter yet. You can pick one up for around $100 and when combined with a little 7" monitor (another $100) attached to your computer, creates a nice setup for zoom calls where you can look directly at your partner. Also doubles as a great talking head setup for video production.

The wrong lessons to learn from the Log4j vulnerability

mrdonbrown — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 17:03:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1R6WWV33Qo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29580485

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by mrdonbrown in "Software designers, not engineers: An interview from alternative universe"

mrdonbrown — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 05:02:15 +0000

Exactly! Faster cycles means less waste and more productivity, not to mention better solutions and happier team members. It takes work for sure to build those relationships, but everyone is better off for them.