I'm VERY impressed with Claude 5. I had long ago given up hope that my real-time systems would work without a lot of hacky time-windows and throttle checks. On a lark to try things out, I decided to try out the new model and talk in the output I wanted for a rewrite [1], not the solution. I just listed my problems and places I've had keeping track of my code. It went off and rewrote everything in a much more elegant solution where the state followed a very clear pipeline. It had to navigate YJS, Partykit, Svelte, Three JS, R2 hosting, and a Turso DB I was running in an embedded state for speed.

I watched it hit the wall a few times, and then sudden say... fuck it, i'm making something easier to reproduce over in /tmp to try and solve this (with a more minimal setup). I'm utterly bewildered with how well it did and how much better my app runs. The /usage would have cost me $230 bucks based on how many tokens it consumed if I wasn't already on a max plan. I'm going to miss not having it when the time-window runs out later this month, and will likely occasionally dip in for big projects and just pay my way out of some problems.

I'll also say I like it's MOOD much better now. It's a lot less congratulatory, and talks through it's reasoning in a much better way. Look, it's not a real coder, and I'm sure there is some flaws, but it took my crappy ideas and said... hey, i understand what you want to do, here's a way to do it better. Also, I removed 2x the amount of code that it added. Really impressive.

[0]: https://tableslayer.com

[1]: https://github.com/Siege-Perilous/tableslayer/pull/448

What folks seem to avoid is that a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant, and that becoming an expert has accelerated for those with the personal stamina to dig deep (this as a requirement hasn't changed). I spend just as much time with my AI tooling asking questions as I do asking it to "build" or "fix" things. "How does this work?". "Can you suggest other tools?".

I think some people always think about AI as an input / output relationship, when a lot of the time, the fiddling in between, with or without AI was always the important part. Yes people will suck in the beginning, against they always did. I think the good folks though will suck for a MUCH shorter time than I did getting into things.

A lot of people will drop out and get discouraged. That happened before too. Learning things requires persistence. I think the only real case to be made is that AI's sense of immediate pleasure can neuter people away from running into friction. AI natives likely won't understand friction and question it.

My wife used to work at Acoustic Guitar magazine. She said the most common sales line to sell a guitar at Guitar Center was "it looks good on you". The sound of guitars might not be aesthetics, but in regards to sales, it most certainly is. Everyone plays the same guitars because they grew up seeing their idols play those guitars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/technology/andreessen-hor...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120511

Points: 22

# Comments: 2

I built Counter Slayer specifically for 3D board game inserts, and that's really all I use it for. It sits on the shoulder of Svelte and Threlte (Three.js) for most of the hard stuff.

Being a user of your own product is everything. Every designer I've ever hired were good, not so much because they were a great designer, but because they understood the product and could sit in the user's seat.

[0]: https://tableslayer.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053770

Points: 85

# Comments: 7

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/business/the-billionaire-...

This is often done in stores where they say that prices can change daily, and that these tools help them keep prices up to date. The darker pattern is what this law prevents, and that even with this sort of labeling, they can't charge you different from what they charge me in the same store.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480586

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Eventually I moved to JSCAD for the application mentioned in my blog post because I realized I wanted a more complex UI (which meant a web app) than what FreeCAD provided natively. If you're looking for something simple with some var statements though, FreeCAD might be enough.

In my experience, the MCP isn't really needed. Claude at least already can write the code pretty well. The problems are more with getting it to understand the output, which the blog post covers.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365299

Points: 200

# Comments: 43

Over the last year I've been hacking on Table Slayer [0] a web tool for projecting DnD maps on purpose built TV-in-table setups. Right now I'm working on making hardware that supports large format touch displays.

Since I also play boardgames, this past month I threw together Counter Slayer [1], which helps you generate STLs for box game inserts.

Both projects are open source and available on GitHub. I've had fun building software for hobbies that are mostly tactile.

[0]: https://tableslayer.com

[1]: https://counterslayer.com

The quality of the software, and the fact that it isn't really updated, is another thing, but the actual software availability is there.

All that said, it's still odd there's not at least one boutique option for hobbyists.

[0]: https://tableslayer.com