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madarco

141 karma · joined November 15, 2011

Maker, Developer, Founder - 3DRacers.com
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madarco··on Trying the software factory pattern
I've done the same but using Notion, and I've found really interesting to let the agents write a small "Dev Blog" post on a Notion page with what they built in the sessions, with screenshots, videos etc.

Also working with parallel sandboxes is a must: I use a manger session that read/write the issues from Notion and dispatch them to workers, it handles similar work to the same box to minimize merge conflicts.

PS: I'm using AgentBox for this (discl: I'm the author, free OSS): npm -g i @madarco/agentbox but now also Claude is releasing Projects (still rolling out) and Cursor had cloud agents for a while

madarco··on Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
nono is great but you'll still won't be able to run multiple dev servers, dbs or test in the browser...

the better alternative is using sandboxes, for TRUE isolation.

but most people skip them because it's harder to set up a dev environment in a sandbox, for this I built agentbox [1], a tool to teleport your files, skills, settings, claude/codex subscriptions etc in any of the popular sandboxes. eg:

agentbox e2b claude

or:

agentbox hetzner codex

each session is persistent, with a full VM, with a browser, webVNC screen sharing and local https tunnel for easy preview on *.localhost domains.

Also git credentials never leave your pc: when a box needs access it passes through the agentbox service running on your machine, which allows PR creations, comments but only on the box branch, no deletion etc.

[1] https://github.com/madarco/agentbox

madarco··on The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends
It had already been like this long before widespread LLM adoption: quality hiring was only really possible through manual candidate scouting on LinkedIn, at conferences, through word of mouth, and so on.

Sending a CV had already become mostly useless 3–4 years ago because of the huge amount of noise: candidates applying from all over the world, often even spoofing their actual location, FAANGs firing, flooding the market with (in theory) great candidates with great resumes.

The solution is the same one that has been successfully used forever: a trial period.

Luckily, a video interview with a senior developer is still enough to spot a good candidate.

Go through real code: add a bug to a branch of your codebase, have the candidate share their screen on TeamViewer, and let them debug and fix the issue. Ask questions live to understand how they reason about the system, how they would test whether the change works, and so on.

This will filter out 99% of candidates. But it is still possible to get lucky, which is why the trial period matters.

I’ve never had major issues and have always hired very strong engineers. I only had to terminate someone after the trial period twice.

madarco··on Soccer Arcade Games Through the Years
with the advent of NEOgeo everything changed, Super Side Kick, Goal Goal Goal and other wonderful games, often with a 4 players cabinet!
madarco··on Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow?
I do the same, and faced the issue that claude/codex loose context when doing subtasks (and subagent don't have plan mode).

So I've built Agentbox to be able to launch from claude/codex multiple VMs with claude/codex (can also mix). The parent agent watch for prompts and questions, enforce /review, /simplify, that the sub agents file a PR and wait for bugbot comments etc.

This way the parent agent running in a /goal don't loose context, enforce a good workflow, manage the backlog and parallelize/merge back the work on the main repo

https://github.com/madarco/agentbox MIT license

madarco··on Rift: Better Alternative to Git Worktrees
you are right, I've experimented with cp -a on macOS as well for https://github.com/madarco/agentbox and in the end found it's actually faster to use worktrees inside docker containers while mounting your .git repo inside them.

Then after the node_modules (or apt packages) are installed, take a docker commit snapshot.

Now I have truly isolated parallel workspaces in <10s.

Also the system was easy to adapt to cloud environments as well so now I have Hetzner, Vercel, Daytona as well (using their native snapshotting systems for fast boot after the initial setup)

madarco··on Why Ctrl+V won't paste images in Claude Code on WSL, with a fix
can't agree more, I now run my agents in parallel with "agentbox claude", "agentbox opencode" and it teleport my project and settings to an hetzner VPS

For those interested: https://github.com/madarco/agentbox

madarco··on Staged publishing and new install-time controls for npm
meanwhile pnpm 10.x by default won't donwload packages younger than a day
madarco··on Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers
Actually, the old Kindle had physical buttons, which I find more ergonomic when reading in bed
madarco··on Show HN: Feudle – a daily puzzle game built with AI
great idea! I've toyed too about a daily word challenge, and I've made Acro: daily word challenge: iOS https://apps.apple.com/br/app/acro-daily-word-challenge/id16... Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.madarco.ac...
madarco··on Russian family lived alone in the Siberian wilderness for 40 years (2013)
I'm not sure... several parts of this story seem unbelievable to be honest.
madarco··on Local TypeScript Super SDK to Call 200 LLMs
I think it's because the library calls directly the LLM AND saves any debug/trace info. While other tools let you use the standard (eg OpenAI) sdk and uses an https proxy to intercept the requests
madarco··on Show HN: A tool to analyze Hacker News sentiment on any term in seconds
I literally spent more time looking at the UI than playing with the tool itself, I really love this skeuomorphism!

If you remove the dark-gray border from the buttons it's even better!

madarco··on GPT-4o
Whisper, the STT model created by OpenAI can understand you whispering. You can try it with the ChatGPT mobile app to see it yourself
madarco··on Math problems with GPT-4o [video]
On the contrary. Unless some AI armageddon happens, humans will be nurtured by AIs like in the movie Wall-E. Totally dependent by it, but a true utopia.
madarco··on Math problems with GPT-4o [video]
oh god, of all the amazing problems to solve with this wonderful technology, you surely did pick the most useless. What's this obsession with interviews on HN? Hired a bunch of people in my career and 1 call was enough with a success ration of 98%
madarco··on RAG with PostgreSQL
Nice demo but its lacks one feature to make it practical: splitting the input documents in chunks. Without it the embeddings will be too broad, and when retrieved the docs will consume a lot of input tokens, making the request slower/expensive
madarco··on RAG with PostgreSQL
Sure, because this implementation won't work in practice. He's embedding the whole documents at once, without splitting, summarization, Q&A extraction etc.
madarco··on .ing TLD now generally available
any way to get the list and prices of all the "premium" domains that are not registered but have a custom (high) price to register/renew?
madarco··on Product Hunt cleans house with layoffs impacting 60% of staff
Actually in this case I don't think he's wrong. Even in Italy (highly regulated job market), Companies can restructure like this.

The only obligation is that if they need to hire a similar role in the next 1 year, they'll have to re-hire the former employees if still available.

madarco··on Show HN: Trigger.dev V2 – a Temporal alternative for TypeScript devs
Well done for being completely open source!

I'll suggest this to my employer and we'll probably choose the managed solution, but having the freedom to choose is a great bonus!

madarco··on Bambu Lab A1 Mini
copy on that! I often use the "print by object" feature, and it's super useful being able to print each object in a different color with no color changing
madarco··on Starlink quietly lost over $250M in burned satellites this summer
no because there are not enough clients
madarco··on Ask HN: Best WFH Purchases?
Totally agree on the fancy mics: even wireless hi-end bose headphones sucks.

Distance from mouth is the most important factor in voice quality, I've found that a cheap pair of headphones with buil-in stick mic sounded much better than a Yeti mic on the table.

It's quite easy to test yourself, but nobody does that: just record a test audio snippet using the OSX Notes app and listen to it yourself.

madarco··on TypeScript is surprisingly ok for compilers
PS: swc and esbuild aren't good example, because most of the speed improvements comes from the fact that they are just stripping TS-specific syntaxes to generate JS code.

Also tsc is slow, sure, but only for the first run. Enabling `incremental` flag or using watch mode with `--transpile-only` usually brings compile time under 100ms, Making it practically indistinguishable from SWC or ESBuild.

madarco··on Ts-morph – programmatically manipulate TypeScript source code with TypeScript
This can be easily solved by using https://github.com/cevek/ttypescript, which enables the use of transformers in tsc and allows them to be defined in the tsconfig.json file.
madarco··on Ts-morph – programmatically manipulate TypeScript source code with TypeScript
Totally agree, Hygen (https://www.hygen.io/docs/quick-start) is great and the best part is that everyone in the team can easily customize the generators
madarco··on Wing Commander IV
If you enjoyed the original Privateer game, I strongly recommend that you try Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. https://rebel-galaxy.com/

It's a nice homage to the original with improved graphics, more variety of ships and engaging space combat.

madarco··on Show HN: Retool Mobile
I'm evaluating Budibase for adoption at work, what is the main business model?

We'll see more and more features behind a paywall?

madarco··on Show HN: Retool Mobile
I really love the breadth of Internal Admin tools that are available today, however, I feel like none has an even minimal support to proper dev flows like dev/staging/production or a way to synchronize releases between our own Backend API and the admin pages.
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