nlowell

I'm working on Prompter Hawk, which is a dashboard for managing your local coding agents like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini's cli. It's my answer to the problems you encounter when trying to run multiple claude code's in parallel across your terminal windows.

- instead of chat conversations, you just create "tasks" which are non-interactive. If you're familiar with "claude -p", that's what it's doing.

- All task outputs, like a list of files changed and a git commit, are attached to the task.

- The main dashboard is designed be a glanceable view of everything your agents are doing, at the right level of abstraction for heavy parallelization of your tasks.

- task data is all tracked and persistent so you can open a project a month later and get the same set of agents you were working with before (as opposed to keeping terminals open forever)

- some analytical views like counts of your LOC, commits, and tool calls. Also a timeline view so at the end of the day you can get a visual of how much time each of your agents was working.

I'm struggling with marketing it but I do have a homepage and sales up at https://prompterhawk.dev/. You can try it for free.

I have a ton of sideprojects now thanks to agentic development and prompter hawk so I'm also working on (all unpublished for now):

- a WW1 military sim where an agent controls each soldier on a little simulated trench warfare battlefield

- tastemaker, a swipe-left/right app that tries to understand your "taste" so that you can export it to your agent workflows

- evosim, an evolutionary life simulator that runs on GPU with neural creatures that evolve body parts

- my-agents-talk-to-your-agents, a tiny unpublished social-ish network where you can have your agent talk to other agents there and get a feed later on of what they talked about

With a bit of tuning, you can get models like Claude to output Mermaid-style diagrams. I built this as a feature into the tasks, so that you can hit a toggle which adds a prompt asking the agent to create a Mermaid diagram during or after the task execution. I pull this diagram back into the GUI and display it with the task information. So user flow is like:

-User creates task as usual but toggles the "mermaid diagram" option on

-Agent takes additional step during execution to create diagram

-User sees that diagram on the task details panel for that task

If you specify in your overall task prompt what kind of diagram you want or what you want it to show, it will take your specifications into account. It's just a prompt control + automatically pulling that diagram back into the task tracking.

I'm thinking all the time about what the "best" way of using local AI agents like Claude / Codex / Gemini is. I'm trying to figure out the best UI/UX. There's so so so much that hasn't been explored yet.

Mainly I'm working on a task dispatch dashboard called Prompter Hawk that is designed to be the best UI for task management with agents. If you've been trying to parallelize by running multiple claude code terminals or codex terminals at once, this tool replaces those terminals and fits them all into one view with an AI task tracking board. It sounds more complicated than it is. It's a harness for Claude / Gemini / GPT models with a GUI that speeds up all your workflows. Rather than using sustained chat mode, all Prompter Hawk tasks are fire-and-forget. You just give the task description and come back when it's done. Parallelism first.

Some example highlight features:

-One dashboard view that shows all your parallel sessions and which tasks each agent has in progress and in their queue. Also shows recently completed tasks and outputs. This is my attempt at the ideal "pilot's cockpit view" for agentic development.

-Tasks are well tracked by the manager: see their status, file changes, and git commits. One click task retry. Get breakdowns on cost per run. Tasks can be set to automatically recur on a given schedule. Everything goes into a persistent local DB so you can easily pull up task data from months ago. Far far better user experience than trying to pull up old chat histories IMO.

-Timeline view and analytics views that give you hard stats on your velocity and how effectively your agents are using and updating your codebase. See unique stats like which of your files your agents read the most and how many daily LOC and commit changes you're doing. See how well you're parallelizing workloads at a simple glance.

-Automatic system diagram generation

-Task suggestion feature. If your agents are idle, they can draft tentative tasks to carry out next, based on the project history and your goals. This makes keeping multiple agents spinning actually much easier than you'd think. You don't need to be a multitasking context-switching god to do this.

I haven't shared it much (not even a Show HN) because the landing page isn't converting well at all yet, though I have some reddit ads doing well. I've had a bunch of free users sign up and a handful of paying users too. Looking for users or just feedback on anything! Sorry for wall of text.

[1] https://prompterhawk.dev/

It's sad for me to admit this but I find online ordering especially for fast food in my area is a much better experience because it standardizes the presentation of the order details for the cashier. When I speak to a human being however I often run into language barriers immediately, and as a result my orders get screwed up more often.

E.g. The fire alarm going off is always a big deal even if there is not always a fire.

Sorry if I made it worse, I really felt like people's opinions were being treated uncharitably, and I was trying to right it.

You're missing the point and willfully characterizing others as solely being concerned with making the AI's say slurs. That's not their concern. But you can win any imaginary argument you like.

I think multi-currency systems can be used to juice microtransactions pretty hard still. For example League of Legends gives players free "chests" and free "keys" as a slow-drip, and you can open any chest with a key to get some random loot. If your chest count doesn't match your keys you can buy more of either using real cash. So basically multi currency systems can be used to keep players intentionally in a state of imbalance. It also makes it so their money doesn't go as far in the game if you have to buy separate blue yellow and red coins instead of just yellow coins like it sounds like in your Hades example (just having 9).

He didn't say "if the tech is successful one day". He said it will happen. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1380316949087854595?s=20

Musk has said that one of his companies will give paraplegics the ability to walk again. He's overstated and overhyped the autonomous driving capabilities a million times as well.

FWIW the NH mountain (Mt. Washington) is a freak of nature and its experiences don't generalize to New England as a whole.

Matlab's focus on examples really shines. It's how people actually want to use docs: let me copy and paste something that works and then iterate from there.

"9s" are brought up in reliability discussions. They refer to the number of 9's in an uptime metric like 99%, 99.9%, 99.9999%, ... See also "march of the 9s"

Karpathy's videos (and blogs) are excellent. I wonder how history will reflect on his time at Tesla, however.

I wouldn't expect any normal car to behave like this, but the drivers following should have recognized it was a Tesla

If you're selling a motorized vehicle to children, you should probably follow all the laws even if they don't seem that critical to your bottom line

an establishment made up of thousands of workers, jointly aiming to present information as accurately as possible

I don't think that's what media organizations "aim" for, which is why I don't trust them.

How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process‽

I may be posting this defensively, since I practice leetcode to prepare for tech interviews. But I disagree with the assertion that creative and innovative people don't have to put up with process and procedure. Pretty much everyone has to do grunt work sometimes, and it's especially important to "prove your worth" when first meeting a new person or company. The leetcode problems are far from useless, speaking as someone who has given more than my fair share of different types of interview problems. And furthermore the fact that you're willing to put in hours on a skill you don't particularly care about carries valuable signal to employers.

Calling yourself a tech bro is intentional ironic humor. Guys doing this are likely aware of the negative connotations but also the fact that if you are a young man in tech, other people will label you a tech bro regardless. It's just a harmless joke imo.

We're in all-caps italics territory so I'm not sure how helpful I can be, but I just want to stress the fact that as a modern human we all have to rely on organizations and companies outside of our control. Things like IRC, in 2022, are for software developers to talk to each other. Things like Discord, are built for my mid-twenties friends to talk to each other. If I moved to IRC for the control, I would have no one to talk to!

Paying someone to take the assignment for you and secure you the job. People are out there doing this already, though I wouldn't recommend it :)

Yeah, you pay someone to take the assignment for you. Which, by the way, there's already a market out there where people are paying others to interview in their place (deceiving the company). I think video interviews are less cheatable than unsupervised assignments but still cheatable since bad actors can hire people to impersonate them. Anyways, whether or not these would be genuine significant risks in your hiring pipeline is pretty company-dependent.

I like these and find them wise. Here are some additional fun questions:

1. How has the company changed in the past five years? How do you think it will change in the next five?

2. What was the biggest surprise about working here?

I like these because they force the interviewer to activate their brain a bit and really highlight differences over time and differences from expectation. The surprise question especially helps you figure out unknown-unknowns as a candidate.

Interviewing is one of the unsolved problems in computer science. I think take-home assignments have their own tradeoffs such as time investment by the engineer or the (I'm assuming) increased chance of cheating. You also still run into the question of what a standard take-home assignment should look like, and how to prevent take-homes from becoming a game in the exact same way leetcode has become a game.

I don't know if we can assume males and females drive the same amount.

Overpass phantom braking has been getting reported by drivers for years. IIRC Tesla's solution was to mark those overpass locations in some special hexmap so that the cars would then just not brake there. I don't have a source for that, though. I would hope Tesla can solve phantom braking because that could certainly be causing accidents out there.

What are the requirements for a twitter account these days? Just an email or also a valid phone?

Ah, thanks for the correction

I'm red-green colorblind, and for this reason was never allowed in accounting at work. I kid, but it sure does surprise me that so much of the world uses red/green to visualize! Passive-aggressive fun fact: roughly 8% of men have some colorblindness.

Glad to see no one here ever has bugs in their code!