paulbjensen

AWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.

Fantastic, this is brilliant.

I have tried to cancel a newspaper subscription in the UK a few times, which is only possible by telephone, and they have a serious churn-reduction program in place where I end up getting a major discount on the subscription.

Our hypothesis is simple: session logs are now the most important artifact in software development, and should be stored alongside the code itself in the repository.

Pi.dev has a feature where you can export the session as a html file and look at it later. I foresee that potentially you could store this in the same Git repository and get the benefit of reviewing how a particular code change came about during a session with an agent.

I guess the next step would be having the coding agent save that session context automatically in a folder in the git repository rather than requiring a human to export it.

This startup also seems to be operating in a similar space to tangled.org - moving code repos into a decentralised hosting environment.

I’m talking about CI pipelines where you have:

- Unit tests - End to End testing with Cucumber and Puppeteer (or Playwright these days) - Code Coverage analysis - Lint and formatting checks - Tools like knit to remove unused code - Security checking tools like Synk and Socket - Size checking

If you look at what those tools do, they automate aspects of reviewing PRs. The question then becomes - what still gets done manually, and are there ways to automate that.

Meditation is great, but there might also be other options available when it comes to dealing with the effects of context switching.

For me, I find the Pomodoro technique really effective, but there's a key caveat, which is that you try to focus on one thing at a time (which flies in the face of using multiple AI agents working on x number of things at the same time).

Another angle to explore is how much of the process of software development that we do manually can we automate, particularly the parts that still require human input (like code reviews). That may also help with reducing the cognitive load.

Update: Running this in the terminal works:

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1

And if you want to revert that, run this:

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0

I've just run into this issue. At first I thought that there was something wrong with the cable or the power, but now stumbled on this thread.

Laptop: 13" MacBook Pro, M1 processor, 2020 edition Display: Apple Studio Display

Once more onto the breach…

Actually, this would be amazing for distributing web games as apps for Steam or online purchase. I am going to give it a try.

Great game, loved taking a peak behind the scenes and seeing it was using HTML5 canvas.

Will buy the game later on, especially as it's only $5 - I guess that's a latte in the US these days?

Recently I got AI to help make a script to convert a CSV dump of trading activity on a trading platform for uploading into another stock trading analysis platform.

Later on, I managed to crunch the numbers in the script, and realised I could dump them out and display them in a dashboard alongside the trade activity. So I built that too,

An excel spreadsheet could have done the same job as the dashboard, but the script for conversion was greatly aided by the AI tool. The work otherwise would have been a bit of manual coding and back-and-forth testing.

I find it nuts that I can use Claude Code for $20pm - I imagine that won't last forever but have to say it is great value for money.

So when I see monthly budgets in the thousands for developers at some larger companies, I'm curious to learn how they are managing to spend that kind of figure: how much code/documentation are they feeding into their prompts, are they using agent orchestration systems to make the code factory run 24/7, and how much value is coming out the other end versus before?

And, if they are pouring thousands into LLMs per developer, have they considered looking at alternatives like having LLMs running locally on own hardware with their own agent harness?

Those are the kind of questions I'd love to ask - I just wonder how much stuff is truly cutting edge and how much might be wasteful?

I would say the first time I did “vibe coding”, when I tried Claude Code with Zed’s agent integration in January this year.

I wanted to see if I could build an image editor for isometric graphics using HTML5 canvas, Svelte, Vite, and the. Rather than do all of the skeleton code setup, I figured “why not try and see if Claude can build the app scaffolding?”.

I gave it a prompt and watched it produce the scaffold, along with a few features I outlined in the prompt.

When I booted the app and saw that the features worked and that there had been an element of design to the layout, that was my mind-blown moment. In a period of about 45 minutes, I added some features and had a basic MVP at the end. I walked back home stunned.

That app is available for free at https://babspixel.com

Anyone who deletes Microsoft Teams deserves a raise.

Looks like RedHat got compromised by a Black Hat…

The Financial Times' Unhedged Podcast covered the SpaceX IPO recently and highlighted the same issues that the Danish pension fund raised concerns about.

https://www.ft.com/content/a401b0c0-fcc0-4bae-9f57-e8d5c0957...

Another factor was that although both SimCity 3k and SimCity 4 both had a maximum of 256x256 tiles for their cities, the scale was different.

A SimCity 3000 tile edge was equivalent to 64m, whereas in SimCity 4 it was 16m. The scale of the city in SimCity 3000 was bigger as a result.

Hoping to test this principle of largest possible map sizes out soon.

Gold-plated booleans-as-a-service

CircleCI right now https://gifrific.com/mick-mccarthy-stares-at-camera-and-smil...

3 years ago they were touting NFTs as the next big thing.

Today, not a single mention in that email.

I can't help but feel that there is a superficial chasing of trends at play here (adopting the same playbook that Block used earlier).

Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?

This Claudemaxxing phenomenon is amusing as hell.

I've been able to get by with the $20pm Pro subscription and reap great value out of Claude Code.

I feel like it really is about:

- Don't feed it the works of Shakespeare into the context window if all it's working on is a few files. I actually don't have a Claude.md file in my projects.

- I write the prompt as if I was giving instructions to another developer or to myself on how I want to approach a specific coding, with a numbered step plan. I've actually been able to take the details written into a Jira ticket on a work project, feed it into Clade Code, and get really good results from it.

- If you are responsible for the output, then you need to review the output - that does put a natural constraint on the tool's usage, but ultimately it is you who uses the tool, not the other way around.

I feel like that's the thing - you have to find the right cadence, just like with running or driving a car - you need to find the level at which you control the car, at which you maintain a consistent pace, and at which you get code that does what you need it to do and meets the quality threshold you want.

What's an $8m mistake to a company like Uber? They made $9.8bn in profits in 2024.

Maybe declining might be a better choice of word than dying.

Threads apparently overtook X for DAUs last year according to SimilarWeb.

Why is this downvoted? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?

I have found that:

- If I ask Claude to go and build a product idea out for me from scratch, it can get quite far, but then I will hit quota limits on the pro plan ($20pm).

- I have not drunk the Kool-aid and tried to indulge in ClaudeMaxxing (Max plan at $200pm). I need to sleep and touch grass from time to time.

- I don't bother with a Claude.md in my projects. I just raw-dog context.

- If I have a big codebase, and I'm very clear about what code changes I want to make Claude do, I can easily get a lot of changes made without getting near my quota. It's like Mr Miyagi making precision edits to that Bonsai Tree in Karate Kid.

My last bit of advice - use the tool, but don't let the tool use you.

…and the Danes will tax it, just like they tax cow farts.

The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful.

Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who those people were.

With that data, you could work out:

- What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns - Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels - What potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer base - What tone of voice to use in your advertising - In some cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers were, better than they understood themselves.

One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant brand in the UK would see.

When we presented that to the client, they said “Why are there so many women in bikinis in this feed?”

The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the past had been very effective.

That was the power of Twitter’s data, and it is an absolute shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg once said that Twitter was like “watching a clown car driven into a gold mine”.

I’m pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have panned out since.

Hello throwaway150 and ThrowawayR2,

I wanted to share the demo to show what's possible with Claude Code in a short window of time (I only started building this on Friday evening, and I've spent probably no more than 6-7 hours in total this weekend on it).

Point taken on not doing a write-up on this. I think I will write a blog post about my approach and learnings and then share later. I'll let you know once it is up.

I thought it might be worth sharing that I'm a fullstack developer with about 20 years of industry experience, but I didn't study CS at university, I studied Management & Systems instead (Business Studies with Maths, learning about Linear Programming, Time-Series Forecasting, Critical Path Analysis, Monte-Carlo Simulations, and Systems Thinking).

I have a GitHub profile here so you can see all the open source software I've written over the years: https://github.com/paulbjensen.

I'm also the author of Manning Publications' "Cross Platform Desktop Applications", a book about Electron and NW.js. https://manning.com/jensen.

I still write code in my day job, but I'm having a lot of fun creating PoCs with Claude Code in my spare time.

And if that description about a category of HN users who only became software developers for the high pay was referring to me, I thought it would be worth mentioning that my friends at university in London back in 2006 went into Investment Banking as that had the high pay, but I took a different route and became a self-taught programmer.

I never did it for the high pay (it didn't exist in London back then). I did it because I grew up around computers (my dad was a software and hardware engineer), and I realised that I love creating things with them.

Yeah it's still a bit buggy on that front, will try and tweak it manually to get it right.

Fun bit, if you hit the ball against the billboard on desktop, it will open the link for the billboard advert and then bounce off.