Hacker News: robbomacrae

Do Skills Improve Coding Agent Accuracy?

robbomacrae — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:12:36 +0000

Article URL: https://orcabot.com/labs/do-skills-improve-coding-agent-accuracy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000144

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Free Desktop OrcaBot for macOS

robbomacrae — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:06:41 +0000

OrcaBot is a virtualized sandbox for securely orchestrating your AI tools.

Its secrets broker keeps credentials hidden from agents. Network egress controls help prevent data exfiltration. The tools and agents themselves run inside an isolated virtual machine.

Until now, OrcaBot has run exclusively in the cloud using Fly.io virtual machines. Those machines cost money to operate, which is why the cloud version of OrcaBot requires a subscription.

Now OrcaBot Desktop is available for free on macOS

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000099

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by robbomacrae in "Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE"

robbomacrae — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:22:37 +0000

I think I'm more on your side on that rather than letting agents go wild like Steve Yegge/Pete Steinberger do. In fact OrcaBot quickly adapted into a knee jerk reaction to OpenClaw because I saw that as inherently dangerous.

But with regard to Juggler and orchestration, have you seen "claude agents" (started in the terminal as claude agents instead of just claude). I ask because your tree like approach has similarities to how claude agents manages claude agents/subagents doing tasks with the ability to drill down in to each at a time which is why for me its not such a leap from what you already have.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE"

robbomacrae — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:08:39 +0000

This looks really interesting and a unique take on the AI agent orchestration. I think we need a bunch of experiments in this area as it's clear we are entering a new paradigm and the tools for it are lacking. The session tree in particular has merits.

I've got my own attempt with OrcaBot (short for orchestration of bots). It's also been a 6 month solo build experiment. I'm not trying to plug.. just that I'm also neck deep in Steve Yegge's Stage 8 AI-assisted coding chart and understand how much thought and effort went into this.

Thinking about where this is all going with talking to AI like fully autonomous employees similar to @Claude can you see a comms app type approach that combines something like slack with your tree/thread structure? It's somewhat orthogonal to your "inspect everything" but could intersect by bringing click through/open in options...

New comment by robbomacrae in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

robbomacrae — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:23:30 +0000

https://orcabot.com

OrcaBot was my Jan+Feb attempt to defeat the lethal trifecta whilst offering all the bells and whistles of a claw like sandbox: https://orcabot.com/blog#breaking-the-lethal-trifecta

This month I've been working on the free desktop version which is available as of today but probably carries a few too many bugs to not be worth promoting just yet.

New comment by robbomacrae in "The SpaceX IPO Will Be the Theft of the Century"

robbomacrae — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:19:44 +0000

AAPL and MSFT have a P/E an order of magnitude lower than TSLA whilst both having revenue growth % yoy in the teens. They both make over a $100b in PROFIT a year. TSLA's? $4b and shrinking btw. Their highest P/E's since 2005 was under 50. AAPL reached 100 in June 2003 (around the time of the iTunes Store release.. mid iPod era but pre iPhone).

Comparing with MSFT and AAPL makes TSLA look even more insane.

New comment by robbomacrae in "The ways we contain Claude across products"

robbomacrae — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:41:32 +0000

I've been working on addressing the exfiltration leg as well as the other legs of the lethal trifecta in my OrcaBot [0][1] platform and I thought I had it mostly covered with the help of a network snitch and egress allowlist until I read these comments.

Domain fronting and Steganography in commits to public repos are not solved and probably in all honesty not completely solvable. I wonder if this well end up like in banking where no bank can completely eliminate fraud. I've got some ideas to do bank like fraud detection within OrcaBot now so might be able to limit the impact a little. Thank you!

[0] https://orcabot.com/blog#breaking-the-lethal-trifecta

[1] https://github.com/Hyper-Int/OrcaBot

New comment by robbomacrae in "1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices"

robbomacrae — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:11:51 +0000

I believe it's the way the HN algorithm works. In order to give new and obscure posts a shot, it will add them to peoples feeds in their front page and see how they measure. Otherwise new posts wouldn't get seen and the flywheel would never get started.

So everyone acts as a sort of beta tester for obscure posts.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Claude for Small Business"

robbomacrae — Thu, 14 May 2026 06:54:58 +0000

I'm trying to do this with orcabot.com

A figma like dashboard for turning ClaudeCode, Gemini Cli, Codex into an OpenClaw but with security measures to break the lethal trifecta while running on a VM.

But it's not quite there in terms of usability. I agree that is the hardest part of the equation. It's something I'm constantly experimenting with and haven't found the solution to it yet. Open to feedback!

New comment by robbomacrae in "Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge"

robbomacrae — Sun, 03 May 2026 09:25:21 +0000

I don't think that is entirely fair.. I don't see them stating anywhere they are measuring coding capabilities... "Using complex games to probe real intelligence."

And this seems very much in line with the methodology in ARC-AGI-3.

The results here, in the OP article and in https://www.designarena.ai all tell a similar story: Kimi K2.6 is up and in the SOTA mix.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Hear your agent suffer through your code"

robbomacrae — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:26:48 +0000

You could have the actual output of the agent turned into TTS using the model of your choice with TalkiTo… or listen to whatever weird sounds this makes. Seems like this is copying that viral Mac moan app. 2026 is weird.

Printed neurons communicate with living brain cells

robbomacrae — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:27:21 +0000

Article URL: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/4/printed-neurons-communicate-with-living-brain-cells

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804744

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by robbomacrae in "Human Accelerated Region 1"

robbomacrae — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:50:25 +0000

You sound like you’ve never been disdainfully stared at by a cat..

Really interesting article though. I’m very hopeful AI can help work out how all these things interact.

New comment by robbomacrae in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

robbomacrae — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:53:34 +0000

"Let's be honest here: there is no benefit to alcohol (for example wine) and is only detrimental." - That is a pretty extreme statement and easily falsifiable.

There are many studies a quick google away that show a much more nuanced take ie [0] and [1]. But the strongest evidence is our most successful societies and civilizations have been intentionally drinking alcohol for ~10000 years [2]. If it was only detrimental then I'm pretty sure it would have worked its way out by now. I acknowledge there are negative issues.

[0]: https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-skinny-cocktails [1]: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-drinks/drin... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_beverages

New comment by robbomacrae in "Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits"

robbomacrae — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:58:03 +0000

OrcaBot does this with the VM but whereas the author mentions the risk of GitHub keys being leaked, OrcaBot uses a key broker to ensure the LLM doesn’t have access to any keys. It even works on the API keys to the LLMs themselves. https://orcabot.com/blog#breaking-the-lethal-trifecta

New comment by robbomacrae in "Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5"

robbomacrae — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 07:36:36 +0000

Genuinely surprised they didn't try to get away with department of peace.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw"

robbomacrae — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:56:17 +0000

Thanks for mentioning that. The bot filter has been causing trouble so I def need to go and look at it. Debated disabling it but any basic bot that starts a dashboard is spinning up a VM I pay for! Changing browser might be a workaround?

New comment by robbomacrae in "Show HN: Context Mode – 315 KB of MCP output becomes 5.4 KB in Claude Code"

robbomacrae — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:33:15 +0000

Really cool. A tangential task that seems to be coming up more and more is masking sensitive data in these calls for security and privacy. Is that something you considered as a feature?

New comment by robbomacrae in "Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw"

robbomacrae — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:16:34 +0000

“so the API use is in addition to the subscription, but it can't be helped.” - I beg to differ. OrcaBot.com is a claws that runs using vanilla Claude Code so you can do all that with your regular subscription. Disclosure: I’m the author. The only reason these other claws can’t offer that is because they front it with their own AI.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Show HN: enveil – hide your .env secrets from prAIng eyes"

robbomacrae — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:51:36 +0000

Thank you! Great feedback. Again agree with you on all points. Will take it onboard!