Hacker News: wkirby

New comment by wkirby in "Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out"

wkirby — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:30:39 +0000

My experience thus far is that the local models are a) pretty slow and b) prone to making broken tool calls. Because of (a) the iteration loop slows down enough to where I wander off to do other tasks, meaning that (b) is way more problematic because I don't see it for who knows how long.

This is, however, a major improvement from ~6 months ago when even a single token `hi` from an agentic CLI could take >3 minutes to generate a response. I suspect the parallel processing of LMStudio 0.4.x and some better tuning of the initial context payload is responsible.

6 months from now, who knows?

New comment by wkirby in "iPhone Pocket"

wkirby — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:24:38 +0000

Make. A. Smaller. Phone.

New comment by wkirby in "Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code"

wkirby — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:44:26 +0000

I see this as the next great wave of work for me and my team. We sustained our business for a good 5–8 years on rescuing legacy code from offshore teams as small-to-medium sized companies re-shored their contract devs. We're currently in a demand lull as these same companies have started relying heavily on LLMs to "write" "code" --- but as long as we survive the next 18 months, I see a large opportunity as these businesses start to feel the weight of their accumulated tech debt accrued by trusting claude when it says "your code is now production ready."

New comment by wkirby in "Show HN: Octofriend, a cute coding agent that can swap between GPT-5 and Claude"

wkirby — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 02:47:48 +0000

Looking forward to trying this out. An early comment: I would love to be able to override tool descriptions and system prompts from a config. Especially when working with local models, context management is king and the tool descriptions can be a hidden source of uncontrollable context.

New comment by wkirby in "Brut: A New Web Framework for Ruby"

wkirby — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 18:24:38 +0000

I'm not trying to start a fight, but fwiw I adore both typescript and rails.

New comment by wkirby in "Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver"

wkirby — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:27:52 +0000

I dream of building an apple watch case that adds a T9 bluetooth keyboard. Turn the standalone Apple Watch into the dumbphone I've always wanted.

New comment by wkirby in "Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen"

wkirby — Tue, 20 May 2025 01:42:17 +0000

It’s trying to convey that Sam Altman is a dweeb.

Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen

wkirby — Mon, 19 May 2025 12:09:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44028964

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Good Readers and Good Writers [pdf]

wkirby — Mon, 05 May 2025 13:48:48 +0000

Article URL: http://moodyap.pbworks.com/f/nbkv.GoodReaders_Writers.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43895103

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by wkirby in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)"

wkirby — Fri, 02 May 2025 19:17:57 +0000

Like my co-founder said, we're a small company based in the US, and hiring in foreign jurisdictions is both expensive and time consuming. We're currently set up to hire in the US and Canada, and while we'd be willing to expand our footprint for the right candidate, the easiest thing for us is to look for candidates in our current operating jurisdictions.

New comment by wkirby in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)"

wkirby — Fri, 02 May 2025 15:08:24 +0000

Apsis Labs | Staff Frontend Engineer | REMOTE (US, Canada) | $132,000 | https://www.apsis.io

Seeking a skilled frontend-focused full-stack engineer who thrives on building beautiful and functional user interfaces, but still feels comfortable on the back-end.

While we’re looking for developers with strong technical skills we don’t typically hire for experience in a particular framework or technology. We’re mostly seeking generalists that enjoy working in new technical stacks and have exceptional communication skills; because we’re a small company, everyone here takes on a lot of roles, and strong relationships with our clients are essential to our success.

We offer a 20-hour work week, retirement and health benefits, a competitive salary, an unlimited vacation and parental leave policy. You can read more on our work philosophy here: https://www.apsis.io/mission.

If you're interested, please reach out to us with any questions or with your resume at contact@apsis.io.

New comment by wkirby in "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip"

wkirby — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:11:01 +0000

I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that this represents a "hideous theft machine", but I think even if we discard that, this is still bad.

It's very clear that generative has abandoned the idea of creative; image production that just replicates the training data only serves to further flatten our idea of what the world should look like.

New comment by wkirby in "Show HN: Bubbles, a vanilla JavaScript web game"

wkirby — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 20:03:21 +0000

Absolutely love the sound design on this.

New comment by wkirby in "The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here"

wkirby — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:34:30 +0000

The bottleneck is not putting code on the hard drive, or turning my thoughts into code — the productivity bottleneck is thinking and frankly no LLM is thinking better than an average developer.

New comment by wkirby in "The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here"

wkirby — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:31:01 +0000

Even if that’s what they mean (and I agree, that’s plausible, though not obvious) it’s still an asinine statement in the context of their broader thesis: advancements in generative AI are going to power the rise of the solopreneur. In absolute terms, an individual developer may be more productive in 3 years than they are today, but in relative terms, they will still be underpowered when compared to large teams building complex software. It only makes sense if we also assume the consumer and quality bar of today as well — and I don’t think LLMs are expected to crack time travel.

There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.

New comment by wkirby in "The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here"

wkirby — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 20:50:58 +0000

Depends on if you think AI is more like a shovel or an excavator. The article to me implies a shovel: a tool used by one person to increase individual productivity. An excavator is not run by a single worker — it’s run by a team. If AI assisted coding is an excavator, a solo developer won’t outperform a 100 person dev team, because they won’t be able to operate the AI tooling efficiently or effectively.

New comment by wkirby in "The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here"

wkirby — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:08:17 +0000

> An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team.

What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks.

That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.

New comment by wkirby in "I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass"

wkirby — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 15:32:12 +0000

This is fun, but there's an amusing oxymoron embedded in needing an app on my phone to verify that I'm... not using my phone

New comment by wkirby in "Broken Legs and Ankles Heal Better If You Walk on Them Within Weeks"

wkirby — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 16:08:31 +0000

They are within 1 inch of each other, which is fine with me. I haven’t measured in over a year, I know there’s still a strength imbalance but that’s not what feels limiting to me anymore.

New comment by wkirby in "Broken Legs and Ankles Heal Better If You Walk on Them Within Weeks"

wkirby — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 16:07:12 +0000

For sure! Not to mention all the tendons and nerves. My recovery continues, as I’m sure yours does too — I’m back to my pre-injury PRs for most weight lifting, and my goal for this year is to match my pre-injury mile time.

All things considered I’m still pretty lucky. This could have happened when I’m much older and been debilitating for life.