<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: nimonian</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nimonian</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:09:07 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=nimonian" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Both. Command the author to use the style, then command a reviewer to check it. Write one skill called review-prose with your rules, and another called write prose which tells the author they will be judged by review-prose, so you only write the rules once.<p>What I have found is that getting a model to rewrite a badly written passage is hard, because it seems to key off what it reads. It might swap some vocabulary around ok, but it doesn't fix structures very well. So getting it close to the preferred style in the first place is better.<p>To take this further, if you must fix existing bad prose, write a clean-prose skill which extracts the bare structure of the prose with none of the style, hands it to an author subagent who isn't poisoned with the original bad prose, then hands the output to a reviewer subagent.<p>Opus 5 writing is horrendous, so I have been experimenting with improving the output!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 23:56:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117395</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117395</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117395</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>_Exactly_.<p>Both the article and the parent comment treat "happens to have Kik account" as an independent discovery that affects our Bayesian inference.<p>No. The innocent was identified exactly _because_ they have a Kik account, so the conditional probability they have a Kik account is 1.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:04:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49082571</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49082571</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49082571</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What you're describing is very close to what education theory calls "assimilation" and "accommodation". When we assimilate knowledge, it just fits into our schema of understanding. When we accommodate knowledge, we need to change our schema, and that is where the feeling of being challenged (and often the feeling of profundity) comes from.<p>For example, a child learns that "foreigner" means someone from outside their country. Then, when they're 11, they go on their first holiday abroad and realise "Wait! _I_ am a foreigner here!"<p>So, maybe one way to frame what you're saying, is that LLM output tends towards being easily assimilable.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:10:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019243</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019243</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019243</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The article presents hypothesis as fact with insufficient science. I have no problem discussing speculation, but if the author wants to promote their claims to any more than that I would want to see more journalism.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 07:17:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965681</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965681</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965681</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Control the Ideas, Not the Code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I completely agree with this you. The article is NOT about product ideas. Your parent has misunderstood the article.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:22:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895877</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895877</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895877</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Control the Ideas, Not the Code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is pretty unfair. If the author didn't establish some context there would be someone else here saying "Check out this dilettante telling me what to think."<p>I have a degree in mathematics followed by twenty years in software development (pillory me, if you like). My conclusions after 6 months of using LLMs every day are remarkably similar to the author's. I increasingly think in shapes, architectures, data structures and ideas; less and less in lines of code.<p>And I fully understand his point that, once the architecture of an idea is settled, reading LLM code does not feel worse than reading human generated code. Especially if you have a strong style and conventions guide.<p>The idea is the hard part, and it's the right place to focus your effort.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:20:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895854</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895854</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895854</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Neat! I think agents making Word docs and PowerPoints is going to go away. I think something like small docs is the future.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:16:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809212</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809212</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809212</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "International chess federation sanctions Kramnik"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Online chess is taken seriously as an e-sport, especially at the top levels, and is played for cash prizes. Imagine if the best cs:go or competitive programmers were found to be cheating. They would be ostracized.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 05:45:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782933</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782933</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782933</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Agentic Resource Discovery Specification"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very close to this at my company. We have docs each of which having its description in the yaml. An MCP tool lists the doc sections, a full section with its descriptions, or the entire contents of a doc. A kind of progressive disclosure. Works really well. We even write "skills" this way so they can be used in all our chat environments.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:18:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591762</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591762</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591762</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Fable is really good at front end (Opus 4.8 is decent too) but it really needs a verification loop - it can't always infer the output from the code alone. Give it Playwright to check its work, and it'll generally do a good job. Also if you're using a framework, add to your CLAUDE.md to always rtfm before making changes!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:28:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500601</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500601</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500601</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I do quite a lot of what this post describes in a reasonably large project. Here's what works for me:<p>- write gherkin features for new features; update them for enhancements; don't touch them for refactors. Label your PRs with these nouns.<p>- use pre-push hooks for type checks, linting, unit tests, and other quick, scriptable validations.<p>- make a viteperess subsite in your repo, have the agents maintain it - document important principles, architecture, etc.<p>- make a cli command which lists all pages along with the yaml frontmatter description so agents can choose what to read without blowing up the context window.<p>- use ddd and monorepo - write your logic in headless layers, and compose layers into apps. agents navigate layers very successfully.<p>- use zod (or your language equivalent) and contract-first API development; this is my favourite bit tbh, I use orpc<p>- make a single skill called "code" which describes the lifecycle: open a worktree, setup .env to guarantee no conflict with other agents (choose unused ports etc - docker is good here), write or update feature file (this is where you negotiate the spec), implement, validate (e.g. using playwright mcp), pre-push checks, push and wait for review, tear down and fast forward main<p>- testcontainers is great for ensuring multiple agents can run tests that don't conflict<p>Seriously I only have one skill that's it. Everything else is in the docs. I'm feeling very productive like this, in a "making good software" sense not a LoC sense.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 03:38:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431534</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431534</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431534</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ghostty with Claude Code. That's pretty much it.<p>For each new feature, I open a worktree, spar with Claude to work up a gherkin spec with @todo on each story. Each agent pushes commits to a WIP PR in GitHub where I review and leave comments or questions. Once the spec is done we mainly interact on the PR. @todo becomes @wip and @done as the agent progresses. I really like gherkin for agentic engineering, it's very clarifying.<p>I have about 2-4 agents running at a time. Large test suite, linters and formatters enforced on push.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:27:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416351</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416351</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416351</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a tangent but I'd also mention sli.dev -- slideshow-as-website is really great and fun to make with llms</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 08:22:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145956</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145956</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145956</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "The AI zombification of universities"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I read a lot of AI prose three days and this bears none of the hallmarks. If this is AI, if really live to see the prompt.<p>I'm confident this is human.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2026 20:02:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48140473</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48140473</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48140473</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "What's a mathematician to do? (2010)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a delightful counterintuition that your gut feeling is mostly wrong: <a href="https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf</a><p>Far from being motivated by some applications, the most useful discoveries in mathematics are usually discovered "for their own sake" and their application is only discovered later. Sometimes centuries later!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 14:42:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084389</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084389</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084389</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you think of it as being an accumulator function it can feel a bit more natural - the _definition_ of this accumulator is that, F(x) is the area from 0 to x<p>The fact that the derivative of this accumulator function is equal to the original function, this is the fundamental theorem of calculus, and I violently agree with you that this part is shockingly, unexpectedly beautiful</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:58:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875850</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875850</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875850</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "I still prefer MCP over skills"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm with you on this (I think). Digitising my org is much easier if I can assume my colleagues' agents will be acting on their behalf. Even if I can't convince most humans to cooperate with solutions, I can usually trust their agents to do so. MCP hides the wiring somewhat, which I enjoy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:13:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715885</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715885</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715885</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "The CMS is dead, long live the CMS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am building _exactly_ this for my org for the past month, using Nuxt Content.<p>A "draft" is a row in a database with live preview. Users can click a button to make a checkpoint (git commit, by GitHub API, but they don't know that). When they click "publish", the PR for their draft is merged.<p>Writers in my team can use a nice Tiptap editor with custom components. I get the change management of git.<p>The API for reading content and editing drafts is also exposed over MCP meaning AI can collaborate in the authoring process from anywhere that can connect to MCP.<p>Loving it so far.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:13:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646952</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646952</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646952</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Writing to the board is not customary. When you do so, it is customary to do it through the secretary.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:08:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632300</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nimonian in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable.<p>I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits.<p>I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:04:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613298</link><dc:creator>nimonian</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613298</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613298</guid></item></channel></rss>