> Before your agent can do anything useful, it needs to know what tools are available. MCP’s answer is to dump the entire tool catalog into the conversation as JSON Schema. Every tool, every parameter, every option.

Because this simply isn't true anymore for the best clients, like Claude Code.

Similar to how Skills were designed[1] to be searchable without dumping everything into context, MCP tools can (and does in Claude Code) work the same way.

See https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use and https://x.com/trq212/status/2011523109871108570 and https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

[1] https://agentskills.io/specification#progressive-disclosure

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.visua...

However after getting into it some I ran into some significant frustrations. After creating a medium-complexity diagram, I was excited to see the Whiteboard feature to drag things around / improve the layout manually. But it really started breaking, it just wouldn't let me organize/drag things where I wanted, and I couldn't get things to not overlap. I also wished more diagram types supported Whiteboard (I noticed some didn't).

Also I some confusion between the capabilities of mermaidchart.com and mermaid.live. Are these competitors? Variations of similar apps. I was confused. Also "Playground" vs "Live Editor" is confusing.

Overall glad this exists and hope it continues to improve.

What's interesting about 4d weeks is that it's 20% less work but 50% more days off, which can be very impactful for folks.

Our 80% option is a flexible thing, as in you can choose to do it for the summer but not the rest of the year. We try to adjust workloads accordingly. I've taken advantage of it myself for a period of time and it gave me more free time to be with family and also work on side projects.

Some people really love taking our 80% option / 4d and others absolutely don't want to.

Companies offering flexibility in work hours can really help retention IMO, and is a natural progression after (a) remote / freedom of location, and (b) freedom of specific work schedule.

I know a few companies offer "4-day week summers" to everybody or even "everyone always does 4-day weeks". But I like the "fairness" of giving people an option, since different people are in different life situations at different times where working more vs. less can be especially helpful.

What is the format that it creates that you could then persist in a database? Does it just save its state in HTML or some JSON format or what?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026740

Points: 41

# Comments: 18

I love seeing side projects, both because

- it shows you have entrepreneurial skills (care about and able to think about more than just code)

- as well as the technical side (shows you’re able to build from scratch, probably work across the stack, etc.)

Show off as much as you can:

- leave the websites up even if the business isn’t viable. Better to be able to see and play with a side project versus just seeing a line on a resume and having no idea how significant or good it was.

- open source what you can. It can be very helpful to point to code from real projects you wrote, especially if you have a gap in employment.

Try to foster great references. Even if they aren’t recent, you will do better if you have a few raving fans.

Unless you had a lot of management experience, I suggest trying to find a job as an IC. More open roles / people seem more desperate for developers. If you’re good, it won’t matter much if you have a gap. Personally I prefer to hire ICs who have a little management experience because they tend to be better employees as well as are more likely to be someone who can eventually lead/manage with us as well.

Overall: the biggest thing is you want to show that you have been doing good technical work over the last few years versus just some unemployable person who had “projects”.

I’m hiring frontend/React and backend/Python engineers: phil@close.com

Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it.

Just a few examples Stripe could handle:

- Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app.

- Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features.

- Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated.

Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so.

[1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681670

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

We had read many of the blog posts about the Python 3 transition, and yet still had a number of surprises. Here were some of the more interesting ones.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23180730

Points: 18

# Comments: 1

However I do want non-cloud OCR / text search on existing + new screenshots.

Basically I don't want you to change anything about my screenshot setup except make it searchable.

Does VisionShot do this for me?

The post here is using Lambda@Edge to handle pointing example.com/about/ to example.com/about/index.html

However there's a lot more you can do / may want to do with Lambda@Edge if you're hosting a Cloudfront+S3 website.

I just wrote up how I set up a system to make managing server-side redirects (e.g. 301s from /old-page to /new-page) easier via Lambda@Edge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22351484

https://engineering.close.com/posts/redirects-using-cloudfro...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22351484

Points: 12

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21966424

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Beyond that, there can also be additional tax advantages to giving to giving via DAF, especially if you have appreciated stock, bitcoin, etc. [3]

1. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

2. http://fidelitycharitable.com/

3. https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/964970877338247169