Hacker News Reader

fullstackchrison 2025: The Year in LLMs

I just use a couple of custom MCP tools with the standard claude desktop app:

https://chrisfrew.in/blog/two-of-my-favorite-mcp-tools-i-use...

IMO this is the best balance of getting agentic work done while having immediate access to anything else you may need with your development process.

fullstackchrison 2025: The Year in LLMs

I wrote an article complaining about the whole hype over a year ago:

https://chrisfrewin.medium.com/why-llms-will-never-be-agi-70...

Seems to be playing out that way.

fullstackchrison 2025: The Year in LLMs

Wasn't it basically revealed as a scam? I remember some article about their fancy demo video being sped up / unfairly cut and sliced etc.

fullstackchrison 2025: The Year in LLMs

> The reason I think MCP may be a one-year wonder is the stratospheric growth of coding agents. It appears that the best possible tool for any situation is Bash—if your agent can run arbitrary shell commands, it can do anything that can be done by typing commands into a terminal.

I push back strongly from this. In the case of the solo, one-machine coder, this is likely the case - if you're exposing workflows or fixed tools to customers / collegues / the web at large via API or similar, then MCP is still the best way to expose it IMO.

Think about a GitHub or Jira MCP server - commandline alone they are sure to make mistakes with REST requests, API schema etc. With MCP the proper known commands are already baked in. Remember always that LLMs will be better with natural language than code.

fullstackchrison Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

Reading some of these comments, it's clear very few in here have ever written a productive customer facing full stack app "javascript is really good for a single file app!!!" ok, maybe if you're rendering static HTML... -> these are not serious people

fullstackchrison Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN

Love it, fantastic work!

fullstackchrison Go ahead, self-host Postgres

this is basically supabase. their entire stack (and product) can be hosted as a series of something like 10+ docker containers:

https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting/docker

however, like always, 'complexity has to live somewhere'. I doubt even Opus 4.5 could handle this. as soon as you get into database records themselves, context is going to blow up and you're going to have a bad time

fullstackchrison Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

I have a variety of education (books, courses) and run fintech SaaS, which combined are finally providing around $2K/month in profits since around July this year (for a long time, was hovering around that $500 mark)

My first successful SaaS, The Wheel Screener, a screener optimized for selling options: https://wheelscreener.com

A sister spin-off LEAPS Screener, for buying LEAPS options: https://leapsscreener.com

And, just launched in November, but already profitable, VannaCharm, a dashboard to view and watch in real time dealer hedging metrics: https://vannacharm.com

Looking to launch 1-2 more SaaS in 2026, trying to get to the point where I can do this full-time, let's get it folks!

fullstackchrison “You should never build a CMS”

reading these comments - wow, absolutely nobody has an idea what a CMS is. if your going to "replace it with cursor" or "AI" you've completely lost the plot as a software engineer

you guys do realize that WordPress (as much as I hate its ubiquitous existence) is the CMS model?

and still something like 40% of all pages on the internet

fullstackchrison Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

it's a con job and strawman take. if we collectively think token generators can replace humans completely, well then we've already lost the plot as a global society

fullstackchrison Programming peaked

Agreed. If folks want to write java in elipse they are more than welcome to do so... dont understand these yelling at clouds posts really

fullstackchrison Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

uh... thats exactly why anthropic wouldnt want to be acquired? weird response to that comment IMO

fullstackchrison Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

Haha they updated their status page: "Identified - A global upstream provider is currently experiencing an outage which is impacting platform-level and project-level services"

A global upstream provider :)

fullstackchrison Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

They better not be using AI to fix this... especially if AI is what caused it! (looking at you, AWS)

fullstackchrison Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

Supabase is down bad too... need to work on my project!

fullstackchrison Just use a button

div onclick is an abomination that should be eliminated

fullstackchrison Make any TypeScript function durable

Just shows you how absolutely little people know about the web ecosystem - most people heard something once or twice from someone else and just assume its true - to make matters worse, you have the typical HN "vanilla html and js only!!!" bandwagon which, if you try to use for any serious web application will only lead you down a path of much pain and suffering. I've commented many times in many other threads that I just don't get it; I probably never will.

fullstackchrison Make any TypeScript function durable

I can almost with 100% certainty see this being one of those things that ultimately, after years of just blantantly ignoring something as simple as basic syntax rules, being redefined to something that is actually valid JavaScript / TypeScript.

fullstackchrison Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

I just read this seperately through Google Discover, and I don't quite get amazing newness of it - if anything, it feels to me like of an abstraction of MCP - there is nothing I see here that couldnt be replaced by a series of MCP tools - for example, the author mentions "a current trick" often used is including a markdown file with details / instructions around a task - this can be handled with an mcp server prompt (or even a 'tool' that just returns the desired text) If you've fooled around as much as I have, you realize in the prompt itself you can mention other available tools the LLM can use - defining a workflow, if you will, including tools for actual coding and validation like the author mentions they included in their skill.

Furthermore, with all the hype around MCP servers and simply the amount of servers now existing, do they just immediately come obsolete? its also a bit fuzzy to me just exactly how an LLM will choose an MCP tool over a skill and vice versa...

fullstackchrison You are the scariest monster in the woods

Has anyone else noticed that HN is starting to sound a lot like reddit / discussion of similar quality? Can't hang out anywhere now on the web... I used to be on here daily but with garbage like this its been reduced to 2-3 times per month... sad

fullstackchrison You are the scariest monster in the woods

you do understand this would require re-training billions of weights in realtime

and not even "trainingl really.... but a finished and stably functioning billion+ param model updating itself in real time...

good luck, see you in 2100

in short, what ive been shouting from a hilltop since about 2023: LLMs tech alone simply wont cut it; we need a new form of technology

fullstackchrison You are the scariest monster in the woods

but even as humans we still don't know what "aware" even means!

fullstackchrison You are the scariest monster in the woods

Of course it's possible. It's just DEFINITELY not possible using a large neural net, or basically a markov chain on steroids. C'mon, this should be very obvious by now in the world of agents / LLMs.

When is silicon valley gonna learn that token input and output =/= AGI?

fullstackchrison Claude Sonnet 4.5

azure vision / "cognitive services" can do this for literally a few bucks

am i even on hacker news? how do people not know there are optimized models for specific use cases? not everything (nor should it) has to run through an LLM

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...

fullstackchrison Claude Sonnet 4.5

In general, a good rule of thumb is only code "clean" enough so that you / your team / someone else can figure out what the hell you were doing at that particular area of the source code

fullstackchrison ChatGPT Pulse

Calm down bear we are not even 2% from the all time highs

fullstackchrison WASM 3.0 Completed

yep, ive still never understood the fetish of HN folks wanting to eliminate JS completely. you tell them to use TS, they say its overcomplicated... i've never heard a definitive or decent answer to "ok what language WOULD you use for manipulating the DOM?" its infuriating, though i suppose those complaining have probably built like one website once. yes, JS is not your strongly typed Rust / Go / .NET, get over it - go learn TypeScript and be happy

fullstackchrison Go is still not good

all these lame folks complaining about "what go could have been"... is this not HACKER news? cant you go and build your own, "better" language? but you won't, you'll just complain

fullstackchrison AI is different

> Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots

uh last time I checked, "markets" around the world are a few percent from all time highs

fullstackchrison Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/new/index.php

comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters