robgough

814 karmajoined 17 lat temu

https://robgough.net

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/robgough; my proof: https://keybase.io/robgough/sigs/B9QUm5q3cFdtCQFnvSl82vQxy8ua7GFsnejCuicA9XM ]

comments

wczorajdiscuss

It pairs quite nicely with agentic development as it has a history of plenty of open-source projects published on GitHub, which means they have learned to work with Rails et al. rather well.

It also helps to have a "boring" framework with strong opinions and strong community standards etc.

I wouldn't claim it to be the best as I'm not sure how you'd measure that, but I can say that in my experience it is letting me build things to a decent standard really rather quickly.

If you're building something new today, I'd generally recommend starting with a framework that you already know. But for those of us who already know Rails, it continues to be a wonderful choice. I'm playing with Phoenix LiveView for some projects, which is letting me build real-time UI's really easily – but they have some real-time requirements which Rails can do but is not it's strength. For anything a little more CRUD, it's a no-brainer.

3 dni temudiscuss

Wow, thanks, I'd missed that. It's impossible to keep up with Anthropic and their rather erratic way of operating.

3 dni temudiscuss

What makes you think your usage is getting cut by 50% post July 13th? It's just that you can use up to 50% of your usage on Fable right now, and that is what is going away.

I'm going to miss Fable too, I found it surprisingly tough going back to Opus when we lost Fable first time round, but paying API costs is simply out of the question for me right now.

3 dni temudiscuss

Quickly switching between multiple sessions, and seeing which sessions are waiting for input.

I generally run a session per project. Then within each session, a window for Claude, a window for running whatever dev server/logs, a window for neovim, and finally a plain terminal window for things like kicking off deploys etc.

3 dni temudiscuss

I'm a big tmux fan, but admittedly I've found myself switching between a lot of sessions recently and wishing it was a little bit more mouse friendly.

If you're a Mac user, and can forgive the shameless plug, you might find belfry.robgough.net useful. Connects to local and remote machines entirely through tmux, ssh and libghostty - populating the sidebar from tmux session info, and optionally adds a little Claude visibility in there for good measure.

There's even an iOS/iPadOS version – though for the moment you'll need to build that yourself. Source is all on Github.

19 dni temudiscuss

I've been surprised by how far my motivation has taken me. I have multiple projects now that are so much further ahead than I have ever managed before. I would get stuck on some small issue or key-decision and then would struggle to move past it.

Certainly, I still have those tendencies, but it's easier than ever to push through and build a throwaway version with code that might not be what I end up shipping, but is enough to help me understand the final shape of the solution. Once that happens, I'm unblocked and away I go again.

The mental cost of building throwaway code has essentially dropped to zero for me. Of course, I keep working now until light mode comes on automatically on my Mac, but that's a whole other problem.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

They've said there are limits, and increased limits for those on iCloud+ ... so it seems that Apple is in the selling LLM access game now. I don't think there are any details yet on the nature of those limits, and whether they can be increased as required etc.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

Have you seen that they've added an `fm` tool? It was mentioned in the Platforms State of the Union.

Here's what you get when you run it... https://gist.github.com/robgough/7893602895e7580117475076198...

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I'm fully expecting an updated foundation model of some kind, but I would bet money they don't utter the words "Google", "Gemini", or "Gemma" even once.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

Mac only I'm afraid, but I already did [1]. Packaged it too as I figured it might be useful to others [2] (and I'd want to install it on machine's that I might not have Xcode on)

[1]: https://github.com/robgough/dictator [2]: https://dictator.robgough.net

I spent the best part of a couple weeks making improvements and tidying up the UI, but to actually get something working was essentially only a couple of prompts.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I've got a home-built dictation app that uses a local model to clear up the text and fix grammar. It was super easy to build. I’m extending it to capture meeting notes and summarise too. All on-device.

I saw a little app the other day, I think someone posted on here, that looks at your screenshot and renames the file based off the contents of the file.

There's tons of little examples like that. For a lot of use cases, you really don't need the frontier models.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I recently built a similar app, and so hit the same limitations – I wasn't too upset on Mac, happy to distribute without the App Store (though it's a shame).

Where I was more frustrated was how much this limited the potential usability of the iPhone app. Because of app store restrictions it is a far worse app ... though like in your example, still useful to a degree.

I can only hope they use the new CEO as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate their entire approach to how they work with developers, though I'm not actually expecting them to. If anything, with the increase in apps being created via AI tools I worry they will go the other way.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

It's not as powerful as Gemma 4, but I think they likened it to GPT-3. It's perfectly capable of looking at images and classifying them at the level you'll need for this app. And it runs everything on the Apple Neural engines, so decently quick. Of course, this assumes that your users are using Apple Silicon processors, I believe that's the limitation – and they must have enabled Apple Intelligence which downloads the model at that point.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

As clever as this is, it seems like the names are fairly straightforward (as you'd want!) – did you try using the on-device Apple Foundation model at all? That's actually pretty powerful for a use case like this, and if you're happy to require the user has Apple Intelligence turned on already, your shipped app can end up being tiny. The biggest concern for an app like this is how much RAM you end up using trying to run it. Especially if we end up with lots of different apps all doing the same thing.

Being able to super-power apps with on-device models is a lot of fun. I recently did the same building my own dictation app using small local models, and I still can't believe how effective it is. The download is just 20mb, though it will download parakeet ~475mb for audio, but can use the on-device model as the second-pass LLM and works pretty well (though better models are available to download and use e.g. Llama 3.2 4bit and Qwen 2.5 7B 4bit)

I'm currently building a little tool for a professional photographer friend to go through and classify images in their photoshoots, so I can build a searchable db for them to quickly find very specific images in the future. I simply don't think it would have been possible for me to build a tool like that just a couple years ago at any price.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

Review times have already spiked, apparently, although I've never found them particularly good. There used to be a third-party website that tracked this via user submissions, though that was shut down when they made genuine efforts to improve timings several years ago as it was deemed no longer neccesary.

I think it's a fair criticism that there will be a lot of people putting "lower-quality" apps on there. I do think Claude did a better job of this than I would have managed. It certainly seems to work well enough.

I do believe Apple will have to rethink exactly what they want to gatekeep and why. If nothing else, in the context of allowing people to get more out of their powerful devices. For example, I wish my iPad Pro could actually do more useful things with it's M4 processor. Hopefully that's something the new CEO has on his list.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I think that's a fair question. For this app I didn't see the harm in releasing it. You have to pay for the account etc. to get it onto TestFlight anyway, so I might as well just put it out there. And avoids me having to resubmit every 90 days. There also wasn't a lot of custom "me" stuff in this one, but I could see going that route for other apps in the future.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

That looks great! It's so clearly going to be the dominant way of working with your computer. I was such a cynic, so I was completely shocked at how quickly it became my favourite way to interact with my devices.

I'm fully expecting to be completely sherlocked during Apple's WWDC event in the coming weeks. In fact, I'm hoping we will be. However, I fear that they might not be quite ready for that yet. This functionality really should sit at the top OS level, equal to Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad etc.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

Exactly this.

For example the iOS app failed first time as I accidentally used "Free" in the app name, and the app declared support for UIBackgroundModes but they were "unable to locate any features that require persistent audio". The dictation keyboard switched you to the app, then if you left would keep recording... fairly basic and obvious stuff. I could have either gone back and argued the case, or simply rip it out which I opted for.

It's now failed again because: The keyboard extension does not provide any functionality when the "Full Access" setting is toggled off.

Well no, hardly my fault you've locked down the usefulness of third-party keyboards, but now I've added a full keyboard in there so it's a bit more useful without that access. I don't expect any users to ever see this. Admittedly this was more frustrating when that would be a couple days work, not just a quick prompt, to fix.

Good luck with your app. Don't worry too much, you can generally work through their issues... but it can be a slow process. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your submission and when you want to launch!

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I had a go at building both a Mac and iOS dictation app the other day (dictator.robgough.net) thinking that with Claude's input, this probably wouldn't work... but it was a real problem I had, and I wanted to see how far we could get. Best way to learn the tools, right? I'd already spent the day playing with alternative apps that didn't quite do what I wanted.

The app itself is fairly straightforward, but it included some intermediate complexity in terms of audio capture and calling local models. Both something I'd never done, and as not-a-mac dev something I probably wouldn't have attempted for a side-project while I'm meant to be bootstrapping my own thing.

I didn't touch a line of code, and I was blown away. I'm so impressed in fact that I'm predicting we'll see a resurgence in native apps in the near future. By far the worst (and slowest) part of the process is having to deal with the App Store, and the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to get past review.

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I do yeah, Tailscale is generous with the "device" counts so I'm not worried about using them up -- especially as I spin them up as ephemeral, so as soon as I shutdown the stack they're gone, but the "random" name persists across shutdowns as I store it in a file that stays out of git.

The subdomain routing then works by pointing to that ephemeral machines ip, and my site in dev mode populates the sidebar with active links for this so it's not like I have to keep updating bookmarks etc. Super convenient. It's probably the weakest part of the setup (no https) but works fine for my needs.