subhobroto

"the future is changed now, so you can't change it again"

that's not what I said.

As technologists, we repeatedly change the future - that's what makes all the pain, sweat and tears worth it. 35 years ago, when I was getting serious about computers, buying them and encouraging others to use them, people would shake their fingers at me, saying how these bulky TVs that you can press buttons at were a passing fad, that it was an absolute waste of everyone's time even thinking one would sit in front of a TV and press at buttons for more than an hour a day, that there was no reasonable way it would translate into anything but extremely niche entertainment. They would lecture me on how I was a kid who didn't know any better, that I was wasting my time out of ignorance and that I should listen to the adults who had decades of life experience and focus my time and continue studying organic chemistry and become a doctor because who didn't need a doctor?

most vibe coded stuff doesn't seem to get maintained

even if this was true, cost of code consumption and generation has fallen so much, that anyone in a developed country can point their favorite agent to the "unmaintained vibe coded stuff" and then maintain it to their liking or rewrite it from scratch the way they wanted it to.

most token usage doesn't produce any artifacts to begin with

Your previous statement contradicts "doesn't produce any artifacts" directly. Given what you have told me, the shallowest but congruent argument that can be made is "most token usage produces unmaintained vibe coded stuff".

It looks like you don't necessarily like what LLMs are providing to society and I can see why one would like to hold that opinion. I don't agree with that at all, because it's literally untrue given the insane demand - both from an everyday Joe and from corps the world over. No one's burning $20+/mo every month of their own money in this economy just because they are not getting anything of value.

My personal AI spend is $350/mo and it has been that for the last year. My blockers are gone. Projects that had been a distant thought, only cosidered during a flight, a wait at an airport or for a bus or Uber is finished in a weekend. My QoL and those of my family has improved so much, that I am really grateful about the times I live in.

My 100 year old grandfather struggles to communicate and remember things. I cannot expect to give him a tablet and have him use it. We have spent years looking for apps that we could use to make his life better. None of us are mobile app devs. Solved in a week.

I had random headaches when I woke up really early, ever since I was a teenager. Tens of thousands of dollars spent chasing lab tests and doctors, no solution. Resolved in a month.

The most I can do is encourage you to set aside your current stance, and just for one day, consider what if you could use LLMs to improve your life. What would you do?

I love your project on many fronts. One, you're using Claude. Two, you used Python - but most importantly, you personally care about it.

I will be using this, and I will be making contributions to it as well.

I'm actually thinking of this for a commercial product feature

Would you consider writing down which features you would like to make commercial product features and how you would like to price them?

What is the alternative to microchips?

There are different ways to answer this. One person gave a literal answer - Vacuum Tubes. My, alternate answer is, humans. Computers are machines that automate human processes. If we didn't have a digital domain, we would just be doing what we were doing before it, printing and writing.

I'd bet 99% of overall token usage has nothing lasting to show for it, and of the 1% that actually compound into anything 99% are nothing like this

What you're betting with?

LLMs have changed to game on velocity of knowledge work. The future has changed and "nothing lasting to show for it" is a very limited take on the matter.

LLMs have democratized knowledge.

What do people use uncensored Grok for (like, real use cases) that they can't or won't use other LLMs for? Literally the only thing I can think of is generating bad porn of unconsenting people

untrue. There's a full thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837162 - but as much as I love Claude products, nothing's more aggravating than it refusing to help me diagnose a stack trace because it "violates Anthopic policy".

anyone who is willing to build on stolen property just so that we can accelerate enshittification and damage the environment

Others have made solid arguments(Stackoverflow, open weight models, and fully open source models) - but I encourage you to study the ecosystem post War II and the 1970's Silicon Valley, especially how the semiconductor companies "innovated".

The tiny little MOSFETs you're employing to read this are all built on stolen IP.

As someone famous said, good artists copy; great artists steal.

A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:

Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.

Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.

No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.

OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.

And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!

this doesn’t make sense to me

My hypothesis is that all the top providers realize that, lacking vendor lock in, all SOTA models in a year or so's time will be similar in capability. Also, open weights models are continuing to catch up in a year's time, sometimes less.

So they are trying to lure you in with differentiating, superior capabilities into their proprietary, non-open, non-standard agent harness.

It's the Hotel California playbook: These amazing capabilities are to attract you like moths to a flame and keep you warm and alive around the flame but waterboard and shock you if you attempt to move away from it. Like AWS Egress charges.

What would have been fantastic is if Cursor offered Grok 4.5 in the same usage tier as "Auto + Composer", than provide it as "double usage until July 12" under the API tier (which is what they're doing right now).

EDIT: After looking at my own usage stats - I stand corrected! It is under the "Auto + Composer" tier - brilliant!

I think we need to be explicit about the domains we're applying Composer 2.5 to in these discussions.

I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275) how poorly it handles my specific use cases. My coworkers in DevOps and frontend UI swear by its cost-effectiveness, whereas I strongly prefer the reasoning capabilities of Opus 4.8 and Fable 5.

Composer 2.5 seems to be SOTA for Helm charts and React/Vue, but, for my usecases it absolutely struggles spectacularly when tasked with rigid body dynamics or kinematic logic.

Are you in the U.S.? Which state?

You're trying to establish a chain of custody here. The only person who remotely cares about the forensic integrity of the message is the judge (and the jury if it's a jury trial) and it seems like an argument you would like to make is "this email came from Google's servers so we didn't tamper with it" - but the judge won't take your word for it, you will need Google to substantiate that and they won't unless it's a workspace account.

If it's a workspace account, then your org already has a retention policy.

So again, what problem are you trying to solve and in which jurisdiction?

Indeed. And re the image fingerprinting, it just checks the file names of "message parts", not content-type or content-disposition (even though imapflow exposes those)

Thank You for the explanation. This sheds some light on why the OP kept saying this tool works only on GMail while also saying this is IMAP based. An IMAP solution should be mostly provider agnostic but because of all of this GMail filter business, it's not.

I was monitoring this thread because of the comments. Unsure how I came across this post to begin with! (was it on the FP?)

You really handled all the feedback well and if you wouldn't mind answering (email works too), I had some followups:

1. Did you get a boost in sales from this post?

2. What's your typical customer like and do they email you questions/support?

3. If you had provided this as a hosted service and continued to use IMAP, would you have had to ask for the user's GMail password?

4. I see you had toyed with the idea of $5/yr - why did you withdraw it and go $30 flat rate?

5. Any idea how many customers you're leaving on the table with the $30 flat rate that would have converted at a lower price?

6. Did HN throttle your ability to respond to comments ("slow down...") during this episode?

I learned a lot from your thread - Thank You for keeping up with it

The details are interesting! How did you find all of this out? Did you download the tool in a VM and disasm it?

I assumed the OP was literally making throttled, batched, parallel IMAP FETCH calls with the BODYSTRUCTURE parameter to the mailbox, inspecting the `Content-Type` and/or `Content-Disposition` for image fingerprints and then grabbing the real payload.

However, from what you said here, it's a bit less sophisticated than that?

Watching this thread unfold over 24h was illuminating.

The biggest pushback seemed to be the price: people are upset it's priced at $30. Some suggested $3. A few suggested open sourcing it under MIT and moving on.

The primary argument was that there are already existing, free tools that can be chained together to do exactly what Mail Memories does. The secondary argument was that LLMs can already code this up, implying the OP was rentseeking.

IMHO, this comment (now dead) from the OP was on point and ironic:

My target audience isn't engineers who know how to parse maildirs, it's everyday people (and busy devs) who just want a secure, 1-click interface that downloads their family photos into a folder on their computer (without touching a terminal).

This is entirely true - this thread is strong indication that this tool wasn't appreciated by the HN crowd (lots of engineers and technical people)! I noticed most of OP's comment went gray and then dead in a matter of minutes. The OP must have had a real hard time even responding to comments before HN throttled them from responding, asking them to "slow down".

But this raises a question - what if I one-shot something that my non-technical parents and family members would find incredibly valuable and so I'm hoping yours does as well? If an LLM could absolutely one shot it, perfectly, should I never post it on HN at all, in fear of the wrath that would be unleashed?

Anyone here can slap together a breakfast sandwich for ~$3 in ingredients. Is it blasphemy that you can't buy the same from a McDonald's or your neighborhood Deli for less than $15?

it tends to leave big, dangerous holes hiding inside implementations unless babied

it's fascinating that I used these same exact words to express my distaste for Composer and my preference for Opus. I suspect, the domains and problems we are trying to solve need to be shared. I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275

Would love to reach out to discuss more, if you're ok with it, or absolutely feel free to do the same as my email's in the profile like yours!

True - I wrote my own comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766275

Didn't notice yours until now.

I'm not disputing what you're saying. The slowness of Opus in particular is pretty accurate but you should have been getting little popups in Cursor saying Opus is under load and to try switching to other models?

I mentioned my frustration with Composer in another thread and why I rely on Opus, but Opus, atleast via Cursor is practically unusable for me M-F 9-5 EST. As a result, I have modified my working schedule outside those hours when I use Opus. On weekends and nights, Opus via Cursor is at the same speed as Composer but vastly superior quality where it's not even comparable.

Composer is not 20% worse than Opus for me. Composer hands me a quickly put together college project that was started the night before it was due. Opus hands me a actual production ready deliverable that I can defend if I was sued in court.

Cursor's benchmark finds that Cursor's model (Composer 2.5) is basically as good as Opus 4.8 max and GPT-5.5 xhigh, but at a fraction of the price.

Your skepticism is well-founded IMHO. I have found that if you are one-shotting a Django/Next CRUD app, a typical React/Vue UI, shell scripts or GitHub Actions, Composer 2.5 is fantastic!

But for anything outside the median of the last decade's web development - like free-body physics, kinematics, or optimization - Composer is horribly unpredictable.

That's what makes it _dangerous_ IMHO.

It isn't universally trash! Rather, it confidently makes subtle, incorrect assumptions. It will hallucinate formulas that don't appear in your specification and design docs. Then write tests that pass it.

It inserts tiny footguns that require you to scrutinize every single token it generates. At that point, I would rather be coding by hand.

Opus 4.8 max, on the other hand, refuses to guess, atleast the way I have set it up. If there's any ambiguity about the implementation or how tests should be written, it stops and asks me for clarification. I actually trust the output without worrying about hidden disasters and ticking timebombs. I can confidently review the test suite, add a few edge cases on my own, spot check the code and be comfortable knowing there are no disastrous footguns lurking in the shadows only to come out in the darkness of production deployments.

Let me repeat - Opus 4.8 max stops and asks me for clarification. It writes the tests I would have written. It writes tests that fail, exposing gaps and errors, that then allows me to iterate.

Composer 2.5 OTOH will run with whatever it decides I meant and write something that steals productivity, not add to it.

Same harness (Cursor), same rules, same prompts, vastly different outcomes!

Yes, Opus is far more expensive, but it's worth it for the time saved on review and refactors, which are our current blockers.

The real friction is that Cursor's marketing is so aggressive that the people paying the bills look at my Opus usage and demand to know why I'm not using the cheaper alternative!

It's an impossible argument to win when the rest of the company's devs are happily building standard web apps on Composer without issue, blissfully unaware of how the model not only falls apart but is just unreliable on harder engineering problems.

Fable 5 is on a league on its own. If history in the LLM space is any predictor of the future, in ~6 months (Q1 2027) we should have open weight models that are competitive with Fable 5. Without considering what it will take to run such a thing, I would be extremely excited to have open access to such a capability. Great times ahead!

I have not used Windows for decades. With that context:

For $30 you should sign your binary so you don't have a UAC popup.

How much does it cost to be able to sign a binary so you can deploy it on Windows without a UAC popup? How arduous is it?

Also is it not doable with Google takeout ( with Gmail )?

It sure is. You do a takeout and iterate over the compressed mbox looking for media attachments. Then you write them out. The edge cases, and the actual value is ensuring you properly grab all the media dispositions.

I also have emails from people who like to zip up a bunch of pictures and then email them to me - my own script takes care of this detail but I wonder if most other tools, including this one does.

That's what they used to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708270

The OP had posted a detailed reply here as well, that they since deleted - I think because they didn't want to deal with all the pushback here.

Like, I just one-shot a script that does the same with Claude, after it listed 5 free projects that do the same, including one GUI. The whole thing took less time than writing this comment.

I'm assuming the author put in the effort to validate their program handles all kinds of pictures. With that assumption:

- how did *you* validate the one-shot script that Claude handed you works correctly?

- after all said and done, and getting it to work correctly, did you end up spending atleast $30 in time, effort and money?

I am curious how coding agents would affect the future of "micro apps" - apps/scripts that do one thing and just one thing very well.

I'm a huge fan of AliasVault https://github.com/aliasvault/aliasvault - the author is responsive, receptive. The whole ecosystem is opensource.

Bitwarden/Vaultwarden had a good run but if someone's going to self-host Vaultwarden, I would encourage people to look into AliasVault instead. It's a complete opensource ecosystem.

Vaultwarden is a very lean implementation of Bitwarden but if you want to look into an alternative to the Bitwarden ecosystem, I recommend - AliasVault https://github.com/aliasvault/aliasvault - check it out!

It seems Anthropic has taken an aggressive stance on their buffet, flat rate plans being used in any tool not created by them, where they immediately ban such accounts.

I believe they still allow API usage in this manner though.

In this case, the OP attempted to use Zed with Anthropic's $20/mo plan and was banned immediately. I imagine if they had went the API usage route, this wouldn't have transpired.

Surprisingly, I wonder if this will push more people to use Cursor because they allow you to use a variety of models, including SOTA. That, or manage your own API key subscriptions with a middleware like LiteLLM that also monitors usage so that your coding frenzy doesn't turn into a $20k bill. Or maybe OpenRouter where you manually top up the account.

IMHO PyInfra and Pulumi are complementary.

You can substitute Pulumi for Terraform, PyInfra for Ansible and google for sample projects that use Terraform and Ansible to get a good idea of their strengths and how they come together.

Then, you take that understanding and you realize using PyInfra and Pulumi, you can do all of that in just Python, using all of Python's rich ecosystem.

even EU politicians are beginning to see that they've over regulated their tech industry so much that it can't compete

Yes, it feels a bit weird to me that the HN crowd is a fan of regulation although much of the crowd works in the least regulated profession.

Maybe we need to have regulation that puts an automatic expiration on regulation and there's no way to bypass that. Existing regulation nearing expiration can only be extended by a democratic voting process. Just the burden of handling this should naturally filter out regulation that's unpopular or no longer relevant.

Nick, Yes Indeed! I sent you a fanmail Sun, Aug 3, 2025, 11:06 AM PST to your n..fizzadar.com email.

If you're reading this, I'll indulge and reask you the two questions:

- question 1: There's clearly a demand for a "Python as a DSL" for infrastructure projects - CDKTF/Python, CDK/Python, Pulumi, cdk8s etc are very popular. I would have imagined pyinfra to be way more popular and ubiquitous than it really is! Do you have thoughts on why pyinfra isn't more popular? How do people typically discover pyinfra? I would imagine any Python dev would intuitively grab pyinfra over Ansible?

- question 2: Do you have any thoughts about cdk8s? As you know well, Kubernetes has similar YAML "hell," and as someone who spends significant resources on pyinfra, I would guess you have given something like cdk8s thought?

I'm happy to engage either over email or here, don't have a preference.

Again, Thank You for building and sharing pyInfra.

Hi Felipe! Just point your agent at https://docs.dbos.dev/python/prompting and give it a go - you can really play around with it as much as you want and solve real problems you care about than me lecturing you about it :)

That said, DBOS really makes durable workflows accessible and approachable. Having already used Temporal, I think you're really appreciate how quickly you can get started with DBOS. I forget if they support SQLite but if you have a PostgreSQL server set up, you really don't need anything else to write your first few DBOS durable workflows (vs. needing a Temporal server or cluster)

Let me know if I got you interested to try it out. I first learned about Temporal from Mitchell Hashimoto as they were using it for Hashicorp Cloud. Eventually I discovered DBOS and now all my personal projects are on DBOS.

This is a good exercise but IMHO, when you really start using a workflow for production usecases, you need a a proper, turing-complete programming language as a DSL.

There used to be a project called Benthos (since acquired and rebranded by Redpanda in 2024) that was amazing, that you might want to gain some inspiration from.

However, durable workflows have also gained popular acceptance as functional design reaches a wider audience.

While Temporal is the most popular choice when it comes to durable workflows, DBOS (cofounded by the father of PostgreSQL) is my personal favorite.

At the moment, orchestration in DBOS has certain gaps - you might very well consider spending your effort on closing those gaps. The value there would be phenomenal!

Good points, but from a chemistry perspective, fast charging is detrimental to the battery. It would be more efficient to have two or three batteries standard charged to 70% that you can swap in as you go than have one that you need to repeatedly fast charge.

I argue that easier they make for user to swap batteries themselves, higher the demand for the batteries will be, thus lower their price.

The needed mechanism and the protective shell the replaceable battery needs definitely takes up space

This is true

The real problem I think is the hostility towards repair, glue everywhere, no spare parts, etc.

I think when a manufacturer isn't designing to allow a regular customer (the owner) to be able to replace the battery themselves, using glue and restricting spare parts is a natural consequence of financial realities: Most people are not going to take a $500 phone that has been used a few years to a shop that will need to charge $100+ in just labor to swap out a battery. So there's no incentive to have a bunch of spare batteries.

I'm a huge fan of user replaceable batteries because in addition of obvious benefits, you can also just remove the battery and power it simply off USB-C when running something heavy on the phone for extended periods of time. A battery used in that scenario wouldn't just overheat itself but stop the phone from cooling off too.