Hacker News: philipodonnell

New comment by philipodonnell in "Fable Took My Job"

philipodonnell — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:44:02 +0000

AI did not take your job; a person decided to use the productivity improvement from a new technology to realize increased short term profitability at the cost of losing you. That is not so much of a value judgement on the choice than a plea to the people making the choices to realize how short term that thinking is and to the author to not let them off the hook for making it.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Claude Code’s suggested message feature: I think the real customer is the model"

philipodonnell — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:53:52 +0000

But, they have the full traces of everything you’re saying, if they wanted to see what the model would say at a given point they could just truncate and ask? It seems more likely It’s just a way to keep you engaged ala infinite scroll.

New comment by philipodonnell in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

philipodonnell — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:07:21 +0000

I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models"

philipodonnell — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:17:58 +0000

What the best way to see how a homegrown version compares?

New comment by philipodonnell in "Markdown in /src"

philipodonnell — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:02:11 +0000

I think these are different things. The source code, it’s tests, it’s documentation, it’s data. They are different perspectives to approach a given body of work while together building an overall understanding. It doesn’t matter at all where the files live but when you approach the work from that perspective you know how to find it, and I don’t think next to the source but away from the others is a good combination.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Do not fear AI. Fear AI companies"

philipodonnell — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:18:37 +0000

This landed for me. I wonder though if we aren’t giving a pass to the companies who pay the AI companies to replace their employees.

New comment by philipodonnell in "DAG Workflow Engine"

philipodonnell — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:14:09 +0000

This particular example aside, I don’t think it being derivative and simplified is necessarily bad. Libraries that are popular today were written for humans and reinforced by LLMs via training. It’s unlikely they represent the ideal interaction surface for an agent.

There was a study recently that LLms prefer resumes written by LLMs rather than by humans. Stands to reason they would prefer apis written by LLMs.

This is probably the early days of such intentionally simplified agentic semantic primitives like “DAG Workflow” where the answer for why not Temporal is that LLMs prefer different things than humans.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Show HN: Sup AI, a confidence-weighted ensemble (52.15% on Humanity's Last Exam)"

philipodonnell — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:52:27 +0000

Is the difficulty that in high entropy situations, you can’t really tell whether it’s because the model is uncertain, or because of the options are so semantically similar that it doesn’t matter which one you choose? Like pure synonyms.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI"

philipodonnell — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:28:25 +0000

Despite being a different kind of writing, there are some interesting parallels with the article in what you wrote here

New comment by philipodonnell in "Many Small Queries Are Efficient in SQLite"

philipodonnell — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 13:05:02 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with LiveStoreJS which uses a custom SQLite WASM binary for event sync, so for simplicity I’ve also used it for regular application data in browser and found no issues (yet). It surprised me that using a full database engine in memory could perform well vs native JS objects at scale but perhaps at scale is when it starts to shine. Just be wary of size limits beyond 16-20mb.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Composing APIs and CLIs in the LLM era"

philipodonnell — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:36:11 +0000

Of all the interface modalities available, CLIs seem like the most natural for copilots to work with. Lots of examples in the training data, universal interface for help, maps well to the sequential nature of token generation, similar syntax for different OSs… I can see them replacing skills and MCP et al from the model’s perspective.

New comment by philipodonnell in "A lawsuit says Workday's AI shut out applicants over 40"

philipodonnell — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:56:12 +0000

How do they prove this? It sounds like the plaintiffs basically claimed they were rejected a bunch of times and since the resume had recognizable indicators of protected classes they must have been discriminated against?

Don’t get me wrong, I do this work, and Workdays statement of “we don’t use protected classes” instead of “we test our models to prove they are unbiased when given recognizable indicators of protected classes” is pretty telling. Because it’s hard and if you solved it you would be proud. If you don’t control for it it WILL discriminate. See Amazon’s experiment a decade ago.

I’m just really curious how all this plays out in front of a judge.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

philipodonnell — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:00:56 +0000

You should just need the AGENTS.md right?

New comment by philipodonnell in "95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend"

philipodonnell — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:19:35 +0000

Anyone have a link to the actual report?

New comment by philipodonnell in "Show HN: Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?"

philipodonnell — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:17:39 +0000

This is a great use case for using an algorithmic difficulty ramp where it can really dial in that curve to solve for getting people to play longer over multiple sessions.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Building agents using streaming SQL queries"

philipodonnell — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 17:38:36 +0000

I’ve built lots of pre-LLM data processing pipelines like this and the more I read people putting “agents” into this kind of context the less they resemble agents like the Anthropics of the world defines and the more they just resemble functions. I wonder if eventually there won’t be a distinction and it’ll just be a way to make processing and branching nodes in a pipeline less deterministic when you need more flexibility than pure code-rules can give you.

New comment by philipodonnell in "Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally"

philipodonnell — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 14:02:04 +0000

Isn’t this an arbitrage opportunity? Offer to pay a fraction of the cost per token but accept that your tokens will only be processed when the batch window isn’t big enough, then resell that for a markup to people who need non-time sensitive inference?

New comment by philipodonnell in "Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?"

philipodonnell — Sat, 31 May 2025 18:26:44 +0000

What kind of customers are using this API? I’ve had many similar thoughts but I get hung up on the idea that customers are “developers” from a marketing standpoint, because those developers are developing something and that something is probably a bigger driver of utility that a truly generically developer tool like Cursor.

New comment by philipodonnell in "In the US, a rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight"

philipodonnell — Thu, 15 May 2025 12:02:44 +0000

If I’m understanding this correctly, if you set off one bomb the explosion travels at a certain speed, but if you put a bunch of bombs in a circle and set them off one at a time, the very last explosion will be going a lot faster than the first one?

New comment by philipodonnell in "Evolving OpenAI's Structure"

philipodonnell — Tue, 06 May 2025 18:05:55 +0000

The contributors to the charity get a write off too