amrangaye

So many things - reminds me of the days when you'd throw together a quick shell or Perl script to solve a very particular itch. So I have a whole collection of apps, portals, demos, etc.

Which is what leads to my issue: cognitive overload, and very high context switching costs especially as I'm usually on multiple work and "hobby" projects at a time, with multiple projects spread across term tabs, IDEs and Claude remote on phone.

So I built a "Workshop" to tinker. It analyses all the projects I'm working on currently as git repos on disk, then builds project pages complete with summary and a full control and data planes including its own startup method, commits being made etc. It does some agent introspection so it's able to display all agents running on machine in unified view.

But the "killer" feature for me is the "Pulse" - this contains human readable summary of what's happening with each project and agent in real time. So one use case is an "overnight view" - I set up architecture and design, assign the agent a goal, then wake up next morning to quickly scroll through the results. It also lets you track changes happening in real time ("We finished adding an export function for receipts, containing your company logo and signature" to summarize a feature across 10 commits).

I also added other useful to me utils such as being able to append a ? To any command in its inbuilt terminal and it'll convert it from English to a cli command waiting for you to confirm, for example; a system load monitor; a network sniffer, sys admin tools etc. all written in Rust, which I've never written a line of :)

Will put it online but need to clean it up first it's very specific to my use cases so not sure it'll be useful to others.

Spoken like someone who’s never lived under a dictatorship :)

“Kills the fun part of coding” - absolutely not! Coding is a lot more fun now that I can move from idea to working prototype in an evening without having to figure out individual libraries, research and learn them etc. The last time I felt this excited / into tech was when I first discovered Ruby on Rails and started using it for projects.

I’ve done several projects that would take months to complete otherwise with “vibes coding”, including: an African fairy tale generator for my daughter, a farm management system for the ministry of agriculture in my country, a Gambian political comic strip creator, a system that generates ten minutes summary podcasts of all my country’s news etc. I’ve also had great success with clients - and got them to sign on much faster - by just putting together a quick demo now that I show them instead of sending a proposal and pitch deck describing what I’ll build for them. It makes them so much more excited and we can make changes almost in realtime.

I’ve noticed a lot in the industry and even on hn, that coders - especially long time ones - tend to “look down” on vibes coding, the same way they did with scripted languages back in the day, and I imagine the same way with compilers. I think this will generally fade out as it becomes industry standard, but in the meantime sometimes I see comments on hn that are so discouraging and cynical it makes me wonder if the person actually tried it out or had just pre judged it. I also think the phrase “vibe coding” is a terrible name, cause it makes it sound like a lazy way of doing things. It’s so much more than that, and lets you think and plan at the idea level. Things like planning your system before you ask it to implement also help a lot.

I think he missed one of the use cases for advertising: providing “free” services to people in the “third world”. I come from west Africa, majority of people can’t afford to pay for Facebook, YouTube, whatsapp etc even though these are their main means of communications. Even if they could afford it (“just a few cents is nothing” to us on here - to these people that’s how much they make in a day), they don’t use traditional banking services and certainly not access to credit and debit cards to make payments. I hate ads too, for all the reasons mentioned in the article. But I don’t see a feasible way to make these services available for the 1 billion plus people I’m describing. Open to ideas.

Not yet as I’m still finessing it to her needs. She has a problem getting rid of thumb sucking, and finally asked for a fairy tale with a thumb sucking princess who eventually stops sucking her thumb lol. It’s a fun activity and also letting me learn about LLMs.

Will do. Hn has no way of tagging people or following up though so I’m not sure how to share once I go live. But if you shoot me a message I’ll update you once done. amrangaye at gmail dot com.

Thank you. Yes she’s been enjoying them a lot now that we don’t have to repeat the same stories every night :) I’ll share on here once I’m done and also the right up.

Does “vibe coding” count :-) I’m from west Africa and lately been very interested in African fairy tales to read to my daughter. Ended up building ( a GPT-backed interface that can insert her in any African story she wants. We also have a list of African queens who’re not famous anymore but did amazing things (look up Queen Nzinga for example). So I’m doing a series of little children’s books about each queen - have them exported to PDF so I can print them out and bind for her: her own little Collection of fairytales. I plan to put it online later - even if you’re not African I think it’s a great way to explore our history.

+1. And “figure out a government ledger” sounds like a friend who would ask why google spend so much money when “it’s just one page with a search box”. Government spending and the amounts involved in budgeting and appropriation etc are far more complex than that, even for small countries.

“The majority of them don’t even have taste” - by your definition of taste perhaps? :-) just sounds condescending - taste is whatever they like, not what you decide is good to like.

Only a “laughable debate” and “just the free market” if you haven’t actually had to deal with these insurance companies when you have a health issue and have never paid your dues late. I’m guessing you’re from somewhere in Europe with universal health care?

Sidebar: interesting how you typed out the email address (I’ve also seen variations like me at gmail dot com). This worked for spam and phishing crawlers that just did a brute force search across texts. But now that we have LLMs, I’m wondering if this will be effective anymore, since it gets the context as well and is not just a “dumb” regexp search?

What prompts do you use for DnD / dungeon master? Think this would be great for solo campaigns.

I’m heavily invested in 1p for years now, but have been impressed by the new Apple Passwords app (in beta) - it’s nowhere near as advanced, but it implements like 90% of what you need including 2FA. I’m sticking with 1p for now but worth watching as well.

That makes more sense. Thanks.

Sorry I don’t understand - the link you posted shows that “most people” actually speak mandarin and Spanish?

lol - just out of curiosity: are you doing this yourself? Provide tech support to all your aunties and uncles, cousins, friends etc (already bad enough - now formalized) then you add installation and maintenance (including on all their devices), keeping everything updated etc. And having to troubleshoot every single problem they run into.

“make decisions as a group” sounds great and democratic - but you really think anyone cares about this enough amongst non-techies to be part of all this “decision making” about what apps to use? And this is in addition to your day job. And please don’t say well we can evangelize - again: no one has time for that.

It sounds great esp to us techies - that’s how WE would solve the problem as a group. Doing that with non-techies esp with family and friends would be HORRIBLE in practice. Unfortunately I have a feeling I’ll get responses of the type “well you never know till you try” and “maybe YOU can’t / don’t want to do it but others will”. To which I say more power to you :) but this is def not a solution outside of hacker forums where we can pore over tech surveillance and freedom etc. and create a bubble where everything is libertarian and can be solved if only we had the right systems in place for the normies.

I thought it was just me - I even tried different mobile browsers. You’d think before you wrote a whole article about how bad Wikipedia is you’d at least make your site work on mobile. (And I have js turned on - the site is just one long column of unreadable text)

Welp - messed up the line breaks - hope that made sense.

Kinda. We were open to believing in God. But the start of our journey was just realizing the secular world had nothing to offer us.

I'm curious how you interprete "secular"? Cause it seems you're setting it up to mean anti-religion which is certainly not what the usual definition is.

Here’s the thing: if you’re not a militant atheist and you start spending a lot of time around sincerely religious people who you like, you’ll end up believing sincerely yourself.

I won't question your own experience, but you're being way too broad here. I know many people who are not "militant atheists" but still don't believe in organized religion. I also have a lot of friends whose families are extremely religious - meaning they're around them all the time - none of them has been pushed or convinced to join. They just don't observe prayer etc compared to their friends.

Since you’re secular, I’ll explain it like this: we’re evolved to cohere around a shared system of belief and the appropriate mental machinery will kick in as part of becoming embedded in a religious community. And that’s what I used to believe. But now I know those were just the breadcrumbs I needed to find my way.

This sounds more like a self-justification than something actually supported by science. Please note I'm not trying to "religion shame you". Just curious. :)

What’re you talking about? We’re discussing how in this particular case it would be trivial for the police department to see that this house has been SWATed 47 (!) times, which obviously means there’s something going on. How do you get from that to a school shooter executing students (what a horrible image to use for your argument so it’s based on emotion, and accusing people who disagree with you of being OK with school shootings). There’s place for nuance, esp when guns and lives are involved.

I’m sorry - but if you ARE psychotic this is exactly what you would believe. I don’t know you at all so sorry for assuming, but I think you need to listen to your family and get some help. Posting on online forums for advise from strangers is not the best option for you right now - esp since you’re only agreeing with posts that agree with your diagnosis of the situation, but getting frustrated at ones that done. Just think you should get help - in the most non-patronizing way possible, as I have seen a friend fall down the same rabbit hole and he didn’t come out of it until he got medical help. All the best.

Thanks for this - looks great. Do you have any other recommendations? Videos, blogs, etc?

Location: Ontario (Canada)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, GCP, Postgres / MySQL, React, Node, Writing, Engineering Manager, Perl, Rails, etc

Resume:

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/031A47l8fn_4NHpBzUq9LA3PQ...

Email: mailto:amrangaye@gmail.com

About:

Have about 15 years of experience. Taught myself to code in Banjul, The Gambia where I was born and graduated from university of Maryland with a compsci degree. I'm a full stack developer and have worked extensively at every level of the stack, from frontend in React to deploying docker images and designing cloud business architecture. Extensive experience with GCP after working at Google Cloud. Prefers companies that are truly making the world better, esp the "third world" part of it. Very interested in making all our tech as accessible as possible, both in terms of people living with disabilities; and people - like the majority of my country - who have not been connected to the Internet at all yet. Currently assisting the Gambia government to help them achieve these goals.

Hack is great.

Every. Single. Apple product launch post. “Meh”, “I can’t see the use case for this”, “it’s all already been done before”. Like clockwork. Then they’ll sell a million of these, and by v3 it’ll be much smaller / better / cheaper, and gain mass adoption. It’s like people have an “apple event reaction” algorithm going, and it never changes.

We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat. China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government. Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those requirements, so don't operate there.

Wow. Talk about being disingenuous. “oh you can vote - you just have to take a literacy test first and show us 5 different types of ID we’re sure you don’t have - it’s just the law”.

“It’s just the rules” - what else could it be? Censorship isn’t this mystical thing the government does - it’s implemented with rules. Sounds like “go back to your country” at company scale.

+1. Not even sure this is “eligible” for an hn post. It actually makes less sense than the CNN ones I saw earlier, and boy those were terrible takes.

I’ve had the same experience with Python code. I found this article poorly written and alarmist - he really doesn’t prove his main point beyond hand waving, and phrases about MS about to “hand over” their search engine to the AI sounds like someone who really doesn’t know much about GPT. Guess I’m disappointed because when I clicked the title I was expecting a cogent criticism I could learn from.

My experience as well - I now just disable it on new phones. I think they only thing worse - or a close second - is the Apple TV interface.