Hacker News: robbomacrae

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!

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

robbomacrae — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:27:51 +0000

This is amazing. I agree with your take except "You’re not actually zeroizing the secrets"... I think it is actually calling zeroize() explicitly after use.

Can I get your review/roast on my approach with OrcaBot.com? DM me if I can incentivize you.. Code is available:

https://github.com/Hyper-Int/OrcaBot

enveil = encrypt-at-rest, decrypt-into-env-vars and hope the process doesn't look.

Orcabot = secrets never enter the LLM's process at all. The broker is a separate process that acts as a credential-injecting reverse proxy. The LLM's SDK thinks it's talking to localhost (the broker adds the real auth header and forwards to the real API). The secret crosses a process boundary that the LLM cannot reach.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed"

robbomacrae — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:43:02 +0000

Indeed. The biggest waste might be the overuse of MCP for everything. Sure it makes the initial development easier but then for every connection you're using a hundred billion dollar parameter model to decide how to make the call when it's usually completely unnecessary and then prone to random errors. MCP is the hammer that can make literally everything look like a nail...

New comment by robbomacrae in "Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT"

robbomacrae — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:23:25 +0000

As someone who has been waiting for the same thing as op tyre posted, I went to investigate this claim and it seems that it might be true but only when running apps within the Google AI Studio itself.. ie if you were to make an app that was on something like the App Store using Google AI Studio, it would be back to an API key that the developer bears the costs for.

The problem with the current model is that there is a high barrier to justifying the user pays essentially a 2nd/3rd subscription for ultimately the same AI intelligence layer. And so you cannot currently make an economically successful small use case app based on AI without somehow restricting users use of AI. I don't think AI companies are incentivized to fix this.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Apple Releases Open Weights Video Model"

robbomacrae — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:19:09 +0000

Hi Devin and other folks, I'm looking for software developers who are blind or hard of sight as there is a tool I'm building that I think might be of interest to them (it's free and open source). If you or anyone you know is interested in trying it please get in touch through my email.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Show HN: TalkiTo – enabling voice and Slack for Claude Code and Codex CLI"

robbomacrae — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:53:17 +0000

Yeah that sounds reasonable. I've been thinking about how to make it more modular. I'll make it so that base TalkiTo doesn't need any heavy libraries.

EDIT: also to be clear whisper doesn't run or even download the model unless it's selected and the user confirms the DL. This can be configured. Google cloud has a free ASR option and ASR can be switched off completely.

New comment by robbomacrae in "Show HN: TalkiTo – enabling voice and Slack for Claude Code and Codex CLI"

robbomacrae — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:12:49 +0000

You've hit the nail on the head of one of the main motivators of this project! I always context switch and miss when its done its task or sometimes forget completely..

So essentially at present when you setup TalkiTo with a Slack bot (instructions are shown by running `talkito --setup-slack`) it will do this its just its sending all the output to slack not just the final completion. I have verbosity levels and I could try tweaking them so that -verbosity 0 essentially does what you want ie filter everything except for prompts to the user. If you put in an issue on GitHub I'll get to it!

Show HN: TalkiTo – enabling voice and Slack for Claude Code and Codex CLI

robbomacrae — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:47:51 +0000

Hey everyone, here is an open source project I've been working on to add voice input/output to terminal based coding agents.

One thing about the new terminal coding agents I really like is being able to multi-task but right now it's a bit like a Tesla on autopilot needing your hands still on the wheel. You need to be checking often if your input is required or if it's going off the rails. To be able to go fully hands free I wanted to add TTS and ASR. Then I added slack and WhatsApp hooks to TalkiTo as well.

It's fully open source with a BYOK philosophy and it's configured to work with any of the major ASR/TTS providers. It also supports local whisper and kokoro/kittentts if you want a decent free/private option.

It works by wrapping the coding agent and capturing the input/output. It does have an MCP server running but thats mainly for configuration - I found that using MCP to speak or listen was too slow. The upshot of the MCP server is you can type (or say) "talkito disable ASR" or "talkito change tts to kokoro".

Here is a demo video I made here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf8jFt0smqs

I like to think of it as similar to SuperWhisper but with TTS, the focus on coding agents and configurability.

Really curious to get feedback.

Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927954

Points: 5

# Comments: 5

New comment by robbomacrae in "GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients"

robbomacrae — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:02:37 +0000

Right. On the whole I think these things are incredible.. looking to try myself after reading here in HN the other day about it working for all sorts of distractions. Just wanted to point out it's not all sunshine and rainbows which would certainly be suspicious.