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pbowyer

3,783 karmajoined 13 lat temu
To contact, strip all upper-case letters: [email protected]

Submissions

[untitled]

1 points·by pbowyer·25 dni temu·0 comments

Lessons from Debugging GLM-5 at Scale

z.ai
1 points·by pbowyer·2 miesiące temu·0 comments

Scaling Pain of Coding Agent Serving: Lessons from Debugging GLM-5 at Scale

z.ai
12 points·by pbowyer·2 miesiące temu·0 comments

Weave, an entity-level semantic merge driver for Git

github.com
2 points·by pbowyer·5 miesięcy temu·0 comments

AliSQL, a MySQL branch with a DuckDB storage engine

github.com
2 points·by pbowyer·6 miesięcy temu·0 comments

I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours

simonwillison.net
278 points·by pbowyer·7 miesięcy temu·145 comments

Cardinal: Fastest file searching tool for macOS

github.com
2 points·by pbowyer·7 miesięcy temu·2 comments

Ask HN: How to quickly animate system sketches and 2D diagrams?

142 points·by pbowyer·4 lata temu·62 comments

comments

pbowyer
·przedwczoraj·discuss
Can you say more? This sounds like it could be more useful than trying to build a knowledge base (say qmd) and then get the models to search it for the right context each time.
pbowyer
·9 dni temu·discuss
> I feel like this benchmark reiterates my disbelief that anyone uses the latest Anthropic models for any productive work. They seem to be the best at burning tokens and spawning unnecessary subagents even for well-defined and tightly scoped tasks.

I keep Claude around for some specific tasks:

- Linked up to Figma MCP to implement front-end stuff

- Data analysis, in the "Connect AI to a data source and ask questions" way. I've tried both Opus 4.8 high and GPT 5.5 high for this and Opus is stronger because it gets the intent in the question better

I used to keep it around for planning too, but the 4.8 plans have had more holes than swiss cheese.
pbowyer
·9 dni temu·discuss
> I'm only using Opus at all because GPT-5.5 in the subscriptions only has a small (400k, but 258k effective) context window.

Do you find that makes a difference in your work? I've been using 5.5 high/xhigh to optimize and benchmark a C codebase, and just reading the initial code virtually fills the first context window. A session will auto-compact 5-15 times, but it seems to do okay in spite of that because the task is mainly focused on the latest window each time.

I think for programming the strength of GPT over Opus is winning here over the context window.
pbowyer
·23 dni temu·discuss
The one positive of this is it seems to have livened up the open source project (Vinyl Cache). Features that haven't been added for years are now being worked on, whether they step on the toes of the commercial offering or not.
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Jira is the one product I feel needs to be AI native.

AI native in the sense that it papers over the pain points.

New JIRA admin? AI will set it up to do what you want (after all, Atlassian has a great training set as they can see which Cloud installs work well)

Need to set up a workflow? Bam, AI to do that.

Need to onboard a user or manage permissions? Again, have a chatbot to do it (as a time-to-time Jira standin Admin, changing permissions always needs doing in 2+ places and devolves into a "Can you see this yet?" round of questions)
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Previously covered at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053623
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
What's led to the higher prices than Germany? Usually substantially lower earnings would mean lower prices, even if not substantially lower (look at the UK, higher prices than much (all?) of Europe, average earnings slightly less).
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
> Extremely debatable. They still have never fully implemented health checks and auto healing.

Agree.

Plus there's the monitoring of the host that is always overlooked in articles. I've ended up chucking Monit on there to monitor disk usage et al, and also used it for monitoring compose too and restarting containers.

And then there's Healthchecks.io, and external uptime monitoring... the list goes on. Properly monitoring systems, even single server systems, is not simple.
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Only at the "hmm that seems an interesting idea" level.

Thanks for the links, going to have a read and see if I can apply any to my work.
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
If you can type code fast and accurately, it sounds a great process to use. You're using LLMs for the bit where they bring great value, and yourself as a higher quality coding agent :)
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Developer of 20+ years here, can't give you an accurate multiplier but I am faster.

Because spotting holes in specs has never been one of my strengths. And working without technical colleagues much of the time, it's a boon to be able to "rubber-duck" my ideas with something that is at least more intelligent than plastic.

Grabbing multipliers from thin air, the coding bit may only be 2x faster with a poorer-quality outcome, but working out what's needed is a good 5x faster.

And yes, I'm using the same adversarial AI MO as @wood_spirit, combined with Matt Pocock's excellent /grill-me and /grill-with-docs skills [1] and Plannotator [2] to review the plans.

1. https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

2. https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
pbowyer
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
> Hermes is one of these OpenClaw clones

So that's what it is. Reading its README I thought it was another harness like Pi [1], but with built-in memory so it remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs.

Like Letta [2], Dirac [3][4] and the other "more experimental harnesses that look interesting but I haven't had time to try out".

1. https://pi.dev/

2. https://www.letta.com/

3. https://dirac.run/

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920787
pbowyer
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
What's the privacy/data security like? I can't find that on that page.

Edit: found it.

> We may use your Content to operate, maintain, improve, and develop the Services, to comply with legal obligations, to enforce our policies, and to ensure security. You may opt out of allowing your Content to be used for model improvement and research purposes by contacting us at [email protected]. We will honor your choice in accordance with applicable law.

Section 3 of https://www.kimi.com/user/agreement/modelUse?version=v2
pbowyer
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
> Stripe APIs being simple and easy is a meme from the 2010s. It isn't anymore.

I'm working with Stripe subscriptions at the moment for a charity taking donations via their website. The subtle differences between subscriptions done through Stripe checkout and subscriptions set up yourself using Stripe elements are by turn infuriating and frustrating.

The documentation is geared towards people using checkout. Stripe's own AI help could find us a bit of information which going through the documentation didn't give us, and it even struggled to find the reference in the docs for it.

One product, two different ways to use it, and slightly diverging feature sets between the two. Argh!
pbowyer
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
The Peter Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
pbowyer
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
Let us know if it does, because we all want it to work :)
pbowyer
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
Dealing with Google is a nightmare. I'm one of the volunteer sysadmins for https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/, a DIY and self-build forum. For 10 years it ranked very well on Google, particularly in the UK, and then on 28 December 2025 it disappeared from Google's index.

Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and there's no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm change or something gone wrong. I'm a paying Workspace customer and it's made me think I need a backup plan in case I'm ever suspended. Reports like this don't encourage.
pbowyer
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
This nono? https://github.com/always-further/nono

> Just remember to disable CC’s auto-updater if that’s what you’re using.

Why?
pbowyer
·4 miesiące temu·discuss
Can anyone enlighten me how having a coding harness when for most customers you say "we won't train on your code" helps you do RL? What's the data that they rely on? Is it the prompts and their responses?
pbowyer
·4 miesiące temu·discuss
If you were creating a new programming language in 2026, which DateTime/Temporal library would you copy and why?