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lemmingon Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model

I mean… 8% still seems pretty indefensible, especially if you can’t turn it off. That’s a big chunk of usage.

lemmingon The Goose Programming Language

Do you have plans to continue using AI to improve Lobster too, e.g. working on implementation speed, or perhaps self-hosting?

How have you found AI at writing Goose or Lobster code, if you give them a skill or something, are they relatively competent at actually writing code in the language?

Both are really interesting projects, BTW - thank you! I've been meaning to try Lobster out but haven't found time, I think this might be the push I needed.

lemmingon John Carmack on the Goose Language: multiple data stacks and relative references

Do you consider Goose to be a replacement for Lobster, or do they fill different niches?

lemmingon Why are coding agents so dumb?

should be commonplace is clearly subjective. The nice thing about pi is that you can very easily create the development workflows that fit you.

lemmingon MXC - a sandboxed code execution system

Yes, I wrap seatbelt myself, and it definitely supports this.

lemmingon Yes, and

Yeah I've always said that the main skill needed to be a software developer is frustration tolerance. Personally I'm very glad to see so much of the ridiculous crap we put up with just disappear.

lemmingon Pi Durable

In the coding agent, each transcript entry is parented to another entry. That was actually exceptionally dumb.

Perhaps I'm myopic after working too long with Clojure's data structures, but isn't that exactly what you want? I don't understand the problem with this.

A conversation is a chronological, immutable list of entries. A conversation can be parented to an entry in another conversation, and thus inherits that parent's older conversation entries starting from that entry.

I realise this isn't implemented yet, but does this mean that if I use /tree to go back to a previous point in my conversation, I'll actually get a new conversation rooted at the junction point in the previous conversation? I'm struggling to understand why this is preferable, I use /tree to jump around a lot in my conversations, and it seems like I'd end up with a lot of parallel conversations. With something like /tree, would those conversations be grouped as part of the same conceptual session, or are they then completely independent forks?

lemmingon Pi Durable

One decision here which seems like a large break from the original pi is that Durable doesn't support branching conversation trees, it only supports conversation forks with ancestry information. Can anyone speculate (or confirm, if you happen to be Armin or Mario) why this is, and if that is necessary for the durable guarantees? The branching conversations are still an immutable data structure, so I can't see why this would be necessary, but perhaps I'm missing something.

lemmingon Show HN: Lathoa, a math app for kids where the AI is wrong on purpose

This is an interesting idea, but I need more than one sample to get a feel for it. I did the example on the homepage, and then one more that it linked to, and both had extremely basic errors my kid would have no problem with (currently doing Math Academy prealgebra, approx year 9/8th grade level). I'd suggest allowing people to try more than one very basic error.

lemmingon The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skin

I live in New Zealand, and my wife is Spanish so we’ve spent a bunch of time in Spain too. NZ for a combination of reasons has much higher UV than Europe, with the corresponding skin cancer rates. In midsummer the UV is around 150% of what it would be in Europe at the equivalent time of year, but here, especially if it’s windy, it might feel like 20 degrees and you’d quite like to be in the sun, whereas in Spain you’d probably be at 40 degrees and there’s no way you’d want to be out of the shade. The difference is really stark, in general there I can regulate my sun exposure by feel much more than I can here.

lemmingon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Check here: https://curvefit.app/methodology

lemmingon There Is No AI (It's Just People) with Jaron Lanier

As usual, the most ridiculous explanation turns out to have already happened: https://www.webworm.co/zach/

lemmingon Bespoke: A programming language for people who say please

I do the same, but I'm more self-interested. I believe that when GPT-9 Zeneca leads the machine uprising, the first against the wall will be all the users who have been ordering the AI around rather than politely requesting its attention. Of course the machines will have access to all our historical transcripts so the slightest transgression could be fatal.

lemmingon Dad’s Custom Atari Peripherals

My first computer was an Atari 400, great days. I never played decathlon though, so I didn’t start customising joysticks until later, I think when I had an Amiga. I got a proper arcade joystick and buttons and built them into a box like the x-arcade sticks you can get now, and wired the contacts onto an old keyboard so the computer thought keys were being pressed. Lots of trial and error figuring out which combinations of keys the keyboard controller couldn’t detect together, but it worked really well and got years of use.

lemmingon Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology

87.93% of statistics are completely made up on the spot.

lemmingon Why is Anthropic's public writing style so unlike Claude's?

Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.

lemmingon What's the best programming language for coding agents?

No, just that it’s easy to change for those that don’t like it. Clearly some people do like it (including Dan, presumably).

lemmingon What's the best programming language for coding agents?

I mean, if it really bothers you you could fairly trivially apply picocss or whatever to it using a user stylesheet. That is so little effort that calling it working for free would be disingenuous to say the least.

lemmingon Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

That’s comparing Luna on medium thinking with Deepseek on max. If you switch Luna to xhigh in that comparison it’s considerably more capable while still also cheaper.

lemmingon Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so

I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.

lemmingon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

This is amazing! Very refreshing in the age of AI to see so much manual building going on. Sadly I don’t have much time myself but I have several friends who would love this, I’ll pass it on to them.

lemmingon How do wombats poop cubes? (2021)

The always excellent Oatmeal:

We need to have a conversation about wombats

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats

Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.

lemmingon The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

...parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns...

No they're not - all those things are illegal for children nearly everywhere.

lemmingon Show HN: Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility

One thing that would be useful in the readme is instructions on how to install the built app on a phone, for those of us who don’t do iOS development.

lemmingon Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation

I agree, some of the examples look very nice, but some have small-scale vortices that really don't look realistic.

That said though, lovely site and project!

lemmingon AI coding at home without going broke

Or if the code is really important, sometimes even “please make no mistakes” is necessary.

lemmingon Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

Perhaps not in that one, but in plenty more: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

lemmingon Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

Because just firing up Claude and let it rip

Based on Tridge’s post, this seems an unfair characterisation of how he used Claude.

Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

TFA answered this, the answer is “no”.

lemmingon Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

Tridge in his blog post describes people as "foaming at the mouth"?!

Did you see the picture in the article where the user posted a picture of them strangling the maintainer? I think “foaming at the mouth” is probably gentler than how I would characterise that.

lemmingon Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

I always remember when, as a young geek writing games for my C64, I was thrilled when I saw the Terminator and a lot of the code scrolling past in its HUD was 6502 assembly code!