Hacker News: podlp

New comment by podlp in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

podlp — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:51:43 +0000

I love SQLite and have ran it even on networked drives with queued writes for read-heavy applications. It’s an incredibly robust piece of software that’s often cost me pennies per month to serve 100k+ monthly users. But there’s definitely a time and place for solid, dedicated database servers like Postgres.

Show HN: I built a local coding agent using Apple Intelligence

podlp — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:55:52 +0000

Hi HN! I built an on-device coding agent called Junco, designed to explore what's possible using the AI (Apple Intelligence) you already have on your Mac.

Junco is a ~9MB Mach-O binary written entirely in Swift using the LanguageModelSession API. It's primarily an exploration and learning exercise for me, but it's also exciting to see what's possible. A clear pattern emerged: deterministic scaffolding is critical to guiding a small model along. Whereas Claude Code can defer task decomposition to Opus 4.6, small models need a lot more hand-holding.

Of all the techniques I explored, the Compile-Verify-Fix (CVF) loop was clearly a winner. Even when I was just prompting the AFM directly, I always knew I would need some self-healing mechanism because the Apple Foundation Model (AFM) was not designed to code. When it wrote code, it was often indented strangely and riddled with minor syntax issues.

I initially set out to build a general-purpose coding agent, but given the AFM was not tuned for coding, I quickly realized that scope would never work so I focused specifically on Swift. It also helps that XCode ships with API headers that allow for on-device API signature discovery, since the model lacks recent world knowledge (the knowledge cutoff is probably around mid-2024).

So I wouldn't recommend Junco anytime soon for production work. Make sure you've committed any changes before playing around with it. But conceptually the idea of a batteries-included, on-device coding agent shows real promise.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703108

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by podlp in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

podlp — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:13:30 +0000

Subjectively, AFM isn’t even close to Qwen. It’s one of the weakest models I’ve used. I’m not even sure how many people have Apple Intelligence enabled. But I agree, there must be a huge onboarding win long-term using (and adapting) a model that’s already optimized for your machine. I’ve learned how to navigate most of its shortcomings, but it’s not the most pleasant to work with.

New comment by podlp in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

podlp — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:45:02 +0000

Sent a LinkedIn request. I’m building a language-specific coding agent using Apple Intelligence with custom adapters. It’s more a proof-of-concept at this point, but basic functionality actually works! The 4K context window is brutal, but there’s a variety of techniques to work around it. Tighter feedback loops, linters, LSPs, and other tools to vet generated code. Plus mechanisms for on-device or web-based API discovery. My hypothesis is if all this can work “well enough” for one language/ runtime, it could be adapted for N languages/ runtimes.

New comment by podlp in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

podlp — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:17:57 +0000

Rig sounds cool, I just joined the waitlist! I’m building something similar although with a much narrower purpose. Excited to learn more

New comment by podlp in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

podlp — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:15:26 +0000

That’s awesome! I’ve got a similar project for macOS/ iOS using the Apple Intelligence models and on-device STT Transcriber APIs. Do you think it the models you’re using could be quantized more that they could be downloaded on first run using Background Assets? Maybe we’re not there yet, but I’m interested in a better, local Siri like this with some sort of “agentic lite” capabilities.

New comment by podlp in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

podlp — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:11:38 +0000

Neat! I’ve actually been building with AFM, including training some LoRA adapters to help steer the model. With the right feedback mechanisms and guardrails, you can even use it for code generation! Hopefully I’ll have a few apps and tools out soon using AFM. I think embedded AI is the future, and in the next few years more platforms will come around to AI as a local API call, not an authorized HTTP request. That said, AFM is still incredibly premature and I’m experimenting with newer models that perform much better.

New comment by podlp in "Building a coding agent in Swift from scratch"

podlp — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:54:57 +0000

I’m also working on agents in Swift with the AFM, just having it locally already installed is a huge selling point. I think narrowly-focused agents with good tooling and architecture could accomplish quite a bit, with tradeoffs in speed and cost. But I’m under the assumption that local models (like frontier models) will only get better with time

New comment by podlp in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"

podlp — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:45:26 +0000

Location: Boston, MA

Remote: true

Willing to relocate: Seattle

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, AWS, Docker, Android, React, Svelte, CSS, Etc

Résumé/CV: https://resume.barrasso.me

Email: tom@barrasso.me

New comment by podlp in "Show HN: OpenWhisper – free, local, and private voice-to-text macOS app"

podlp — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 20:48:08 +0000

Pretty nice to have menu bar integration. For macOS 26+, why not use the already-installed on-device speech transcription models?

New comment by podlp in "Run Pebble OS in Browser via WASM"

podlp — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:51:36 +0000

Love the idea, would be great to see a modes to switch to circular interface for the Time Round 2. Definitely lots of potential for rapid iteration on new watch faces and apps!

New comment by podlp in "Why Elixir is the best language for AI – Dashbit Blog"

podlp — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:50:55 +0000

I tried Elixir a few months back with several different models (GPT, Claude, and Gemini). I’m not an Elixir or BEAM developer, but the results were quite poor. I rarely got it to generate syntactically correct Elixir (let alone idiomatic). It often hallucinated standard library functions that didn’t exist. Since I had very little prior experience, steering the models didn’t go well. I’ve since been using them for JS/ TS, Kotlin/ Java, and a few other tasks where I’m much more familiar.

My takeaway was that these models excel at popular languages where there’s ample training material, but struggle where the languages change rapidly or are relatively “niche.” I’m sure they’ve since gotten better, so perhaps my perception is already out of date.

New comment by podlp in "Extension to Fix YT Background Play"

podlp — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:04:44 +0000

How do sites stop background playback? I’m guessing there’s more than just FocusEvent on the window.

New comment by podlp in "Show HN: Microwave – Native iOS app for videos on ATproto"

podlp — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:05:14 +0000

Cool app! It’s quite polished and scrolling is smooth on a 13 Mini. Some quick thoughts:

- I didn’t see any loading indicator, and some videos took multiple seconds to load - When I scroll up then back down, I get a white gradient at the bottom of the screen that goes away after a few seconds - I’d like to be able to expand the description text, but clicking it didn’t do anything - Without signing in, my initial feed was almost entirely ICE videos

New comment by podlp in "Intricuit: A touchscreen add-on for Mac laptops"

podlp — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:43:13 +0000

Kind of like the Axiotron Modbook from 2008 but cheaper and as an accessory, not a full mod

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modbook

New comment by podlp in "Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell"

podlp — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 17:45:29 +0000

I run a podcast app for flip phones called PodLP. Revenue hasn’t always been $500/month, but averaged over the past 5 years it’s been over $500. It’s been primarily from sponsorships (podcasts get featured on the homepage to get more listeners), although next year looks more uncertain so I’m looking at other avenues.

https://podlp.com

New comment by podlp in "This is not the future"

podlp — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:47:31 +0000

As a counterpoint, consider reading Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable.” I also avoid most social media and have an aversion to all things “smart,” but these may actually be “inevitable.” In a capitalist society, these forces feel inevitable because there’s no Anubis balancing the scales. Only local decisions, often short-sighted. When demand is being created in a market, people will compete to capture it any way possible. Some of those ideas will last, and others will be a flash in the pan. It’s not clear to me that if you reran the tapes of history again, you’d get a significantly different outcome that didn’t include things like short-form video to exploit attention.

https://kk.org/books/the-inevitable

New comment by podlp in "Leaked Apple M5 9 core Geekbench scores"

podlp — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:46:40 +0000

Are there viable options? I run Asahi on my M1 Air and it performs quite well, but certain software like Android Studio has issues and hiccups. I’d love a decent ultrabook to replace my Air, but I hate Windows and got overwhelmed with reading Reddit forums to know which PCs will and won’t work with Linux. I don’t mind doing some setup, but I’d rather not be disappointed by non-functional or missing drivers for WiFi, Bluetooth, display, etc.

New comment by podlp in "Pico CSS – Minimal CSS Framework for Semantic HTML"

podlp — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 03:39:06 +0000

I’m using Pico for a hackathon project. It’s a good way to prototype, especially the class-less version. You don’t need to pay attention to every detail to get the concept in a good enough state, nor do you need an LLM to remind you of Tailwind’s library of classes

New comment by podlp in "LLM Inevitabilism"

podlp — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 10:06:03 +0000

Well many have come true, a few have not. As someone who gets vertigo from headsets, I’m a VR skeptic. But his AI predictions are pretty much spot on