Hacker News: rowanseymour

New comment by rowanseymour in "Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer"

rowanseymour — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:51:35 +0000

Very impressive. Love the motion blur on stars as you move around and fascinating to toggle on asteroids to see how busy our solar system really is.

New comment by rowanseymour in "A system prompt to get AI to stop pretending to be human"

rowanseymour — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:25:21 +0000

I might try this but I've gotten so accustomed to talking to agents as I would a human - I worry that if I get accustomed to speaking coldly and directly to agents I'll find myself talking like that to people.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Claude Cookbook"

rowanseymour — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:22:36 +0000

I think that's something that has changed in the last 6 months. It used to be standard practice to let Claude scan everything once and describe your repo in the CLAUDE.md - the logic being you don't want to do that every time for every prompt. But now I think the tooling has gotten so good at just grepping around your repos, and maintaining memory from previous sessions, that the best practice is only use CLAUDE.md for things that aren't obvious from the code.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Claude Cookbook"

rowanseymour — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:18:25 +0000

Right now I feel like I'm getting so much value out of working daily with Fable, but I'd be embarrassed to share my sessions because they're pretty much how I would talk to a colleague. Spelling mistakes and half-baked thoughts included. Gone are the formal sounding prompts and specs I was proudly writing 6 months ago. But it's getting the results.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Show HN: Shirei, cross-platform GUI framework in native Go"

rowanseymour — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:39:59 +0000

To be clear I don't want to detract from what you've made here. Agentic engineering done right does still require a lot time and attention IMO. But you've still got a challenge on your hands to demonstrate to potential adopters that you're in it for the long haul.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Show HN: Shirei, cross-platform GUI framework in native Go"

rowanseymour — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:06:35 +0000

I think a challenge for a vibe coded library to gain adoption is if there is a lack of human time investment in its creation, how do we know there will be investment in its maintenance?

New comment by rowanseymour in "Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline"

rowanseymour — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 22:54:13 +0000

I know plenty of women who have delayed starting a family and they were well aware of the increased risks.. as they struggled to meet the right person, establish themselves professionally etc. They were certainly not brainwashed.

New comment by rowanseymour in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

rowanseymour — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:08:50 +0000

Maybe but those people are also having claude summarize their inbox and get nice little daily reports on things they might want to look into.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Many people misunderstand the purpose of code review"

rowanseymour — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:08:58 +0000

We even find ourselves creating PRs in situations where the code is going to be merged immediately anyway, and tagging other devs, just so they have a convenient way to see what got merged and why. So people don't lose track of what is in the codebase.

New comment by rowanseymour in "From Australia to Europe, countries move to curb children's social media access"

rowanseymour — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:07:05 +0000

I'm back in the UK for a bit and one of the first things I notice besides the infuriating and pointless "Accept Cookies" popups on every webpage is that I can't view half the news about Palestine on Twitter/X without handing over a government ID to prove I'm an adult. No thanks. Please let's find a way to protect children without giving up the right to anonymity on the internet.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

rowanseymour — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:52:48 +0000

To be clear I meant it's good to be small team on the assumption that we're all using AI... I honestly can't imagine not using AI in May 2026.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

rowanseymour — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:50:01 +0000

Now feels like a very good time to be a small team of experienced developers who can largely work on stuff by themselves and not a corporation of hundreds of developers of varying abilities all now trying to show how much code they can generate and how many tokens they can burn.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Sleep research led to a new sleep apnea drug"

rowanseymour — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:38:46 +0000

I think one problem is that a lot of sleep doctors are essentially CPAP salespeople and they will just keep pushing that even if you protest that you don't feel any better. I got better answers from an ENT doc who did a Drug-Induced Sleep Endoscopy and told me mechanically why I was not breathing well at night.

New comment by rowanseymour in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

rowanseymour — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:32:27 +0000

IMO if you've got a use case that requires querying in so many ways that you need several indexes, then DynamoDB is probably the wrong choice. It excels at stuff like user specific histories that are well partitioned, read back in one way, and ideally can be written asynchronously by a separate writer process.

New comment by rowanseymour in "“Kitten Space Agency”, a Spiritual Successor to “Kerbal Space Program” (2025)"

rowanseymour — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:40:24 +0000

So excited to play this but also sad that they didn't get the IP to use Kerbals. Not loving the cutesy baby kittens.. should have gone with a more serious animal like capybaras.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Claude Login Down?"

rowanseymour — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:09:03 +0000

Yup.. just started seeing OAuth errors in the desktop app. This is becoming an almost daily reminder of the risks of being locked into one AI platform.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Give Django your time and money, not your tokens"

rowanseymour — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:03:31 +0000

I totally get this and I also think it's now the case that making a PR of any significant complexity, for a project you're not a maintainer of, isn't necessarily giving that project anything of value. That project's maintainers can run the same prompts you are running - and if they do, they'll do it with better oversight and understanding. If you want to help then maybe's it's more useful to just hashout the plan that'll be given to an AI agent by a maintainer.

New comment by rowanseymour in "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion"

rowanseymour — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:39:15 +0000

I don't buy this journey vs destination binary I keep hearing. I always considered myself lucky to be 44 and still writing code all day. I love the journey - the mental satisfaction of creating something complex yet elegant. The perfectionism that leads you to ask yourself can this be simpler, faster etc. But I also now love creating things that frankly I was never going to find the time for.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Disruption with Some GitHub Services"

rowanseymour — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:23:32 +0000

Ah the daily HN get together for devs waiting for Github to resolve its issues.

New comment by rowanseymour in "Anthropic is Down"

rowanseymour — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:10:20 +0000

Aren't most developers accessing Anthropic's models via vscode/github? It takes seconds to switch to a different model. Today I'm using Gemini.