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mgw

935 karma · joined April 6, 2010

Founder of lumenfall.ai and podium.do

Get in touch at mike.wirth[at]Google's mail service.

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mgw··on Docker Agent
Congratulations on shipping! Really interesting ideas in there, especially the Doctrine.

We also open-sourced a similar system called https://github.com/madeinorbit/podium

We do have what you call Items and Shouts in the form of an agent communication system and a Linear style issue tracker that agents and humans use together.

In our case everything around orchestration is discussed with the agent itself and they take action for the user via our CLI. We found any UI to prescribe how teams of agents should coordinate too clunky. So in our case you just tell the agent: "every codex luna max implementer gets an opencode muse spark reviewer. when a subtree is done, review with opus high.". It then sets up the graph and the system enforces the rules.

It works really well for us.

mgw··on Claude Opus 5.5
They mention "the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family". Obviously that means Fable 5.5, but hopefully also a usable update to Sonnet and Haiku. Sonnet 5 hasn't really had a place in the line up for anyone I feel.

Maybe Anthropic finally felt the pressure from MiMo, DeepSeek, GLM Flash and Luna.

mgw··on AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator
For my workflow I need both, a permanent-ish VM and emphemeral sandboxes. Both have their place and pros and cons.

VMs are better for personal assistant work, GUI clicktesting, investigating bugs in your personal dogfooding dev instance and anything you haven‘t yet made repeatable and fast to set up.

Sandboxes are better when you need resource isolation or security and have a graph of tasks to work through. My agents often starve each other on one VM, so if they don‘t need any of the above it‘s just easier to isolate them.

Everyone is working in this area, including me [0], but either option really isn‘t that convenient to use yet. It‘s a bit of a „isn‘t Dropbox just FTP on a VM“ moment right now.

[0] https://github.com/madeinorbit/podium

mgw··on Cloudflare Quick Tunnels
Can anyone elaborate on what's new? This exact product has existed from Cloudflare for years. Is it just that they added a new marketing site for it?
mgw··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
https://github.com/madeinorbit/podium

A multi-harness orchestrator running agents on your VPS, with a built-in issue tracker (like Linear) and gas town like communication system.

Agents can split up big tasks themselves into subtasks, run each with a different harness and model and communicate so they keep running for days until everything is completed and integrated.

There's lots of tools in this space, but our combination of agent-focused issue tracker and agent-to-agent communication is quite unique and, for our use case, delivers an actually working software factory.

It's still a little rough around the edges but we'd be super happy for people to see if they get the same benefits out of it that we do. It's free and open-source.

mgw··on OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment
This field is super crowded, but we are still working on our own ADE called Podium and think we have something unique.

Features we are proud of are one click onboarding of new VPSs into the agent fleet. Agent orchestration across different machines and harnesses. As an example, a Codex coordinator on one machine can run a Grok implementer subagent on another machine and they can talk to each other.

It's not really ready for public consumption yet, but it's been our exclusive daily driver for the past month. We'd be happy for people to test drive it and provide feeback regardless: https://github.com/madeinorbit/podium

mgw··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
We are building an ADE (Agent Development Environment) called Podium: https://github.com/madeinorbit/podium

It's not really ready for public consumption yet, but it's been our exclusive daily driver for the past month.

There are so many projects like it popping up every day, but we believe we have something unique. Current standout features are one click onboarding of new VPSs into the agent fleet. Agent orchestration across all these machines and different harnesses. A Codex coordinator on one machine can run a Grok implementer subagent on another machine and they can talk to each other.

mgw··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Mainly https://lumenfall.ai, which is OpenRouter for media models, with mock generations for testing and judge models for production model performance monitoring. We also have our own arena where we benchmark image, video and svg models.

As a side project I‘m building a multi agent harness that works across desktop and mobile and solves the issue of drowning in too many agent sessions for my own workflow. Hopefully I’ll open source it soon. Reach out if you’d like to beta test it. (Email in my profile)

mgw··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
I‘m building a way to record and replay AI image and video generation API calls to any provider so that in testing, people can save money. This is part of our AI media model gateway https://lumenfall.ai
mgw··on Eden AI – European Alternative to OpenRouter
We have direct relationships with providers and get volume discounts.

Besides that, we‘ll introduce paid plans with additional features like observability soon.

mgw··on Eden AI – European Alternative to OpenRouter
Eden AI is a solid product and it’s good that there are alternatives to OpenRouter out there.

We don’t brand ourselves as such, but if you’re looking for a European OpenRouter alternative focusing on media models (image, video etc.), I‘ve built that with https://lumenfall.ai

mgw··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
We‘ve built an AI image and video model gateway called https://lumenfall.ai.

Right now I‘m working on adding a „simulation“ mode, that allows anyone to get free fake responses during development, instead of pricey real generations.

mgw··on StepFun 3.5 Flash is #1 cost-effective model for OpenClaw tasks (300 battles)
Missing from the comparison is MiMo V2 Flash (not Pro), which I think could put up a good fight against Step 3.5 Flash.

Pricing is essentially the same: MiMo V2 Flash: $0.09/M input, $0.29/M output Step 3.5 Flash: $0.10/M input, $0.30/M output

MiMo has 41 vs 38 for Step on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, but it's 49 vs 52 for Step on their Agentic Index.

mgw··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
https://lumenfall.ai

Right now we are "OpenRouter for Images", with video following this week.

Our north star is creating a broader developer platform for AI media generation that includes observability, with fine-tuned vision models as a judge to monitor production traffic.

We also have a model arena and showdown page that ranks models by task, so you can find the best model for e.g. photorealism: https://lumenfall.ai/leaderboard

Our stack is Rails for the dashboard and Cloudflare Workers (Typescript / Hono) for the engine.

mgw··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
https://lumenfall.ai

A developer platform for AI image generation that includes observability, with fine-tuned vision models as a judge to monitor production traffic. (Still working on the last part.)

We also have a model arena and showdown page that ranks models by task, so you can find the best model for e.g. making infographics: https://lumenfall.ai/leaderboard

We just launched the MVP. Tech stack is Rails for the dashboard and Cloudflare Workers (Typescript / Hono) for the gateway.

mgw··on Show HN: Gigacode – Use OpenCode's UI with Claude Code/Codex/Amp
This looks neat. Thank you!

How does this relate to the recent changes of not being able to use a Claude Code Max subscription outside of Claude Code anymore? I assume technically this would work with Gigacode but would still be against their ToS?

mgw··on ChatGPT Atlas
Very interesting that you can switch on having website content summarized locally. I wonder which model they are using for that.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12574142-chatgpt-atlas-d...

# Enable on-device summaries: Users on macOS 26 have the option to have web content summarized on their device, so that web contents are not sent to our servers.

mgw··on I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself
Another Google Maps request: Places I‘ve labelled used to at least sometimes (if inconsistently) show up in search. Now they never shop up, even when I type the exact name of the label.
mgw··on Infomaniak comes out in support of controversial Swiss encryption law
A combination of good pricing, sane behavior and an offering with many TLDs right now is https://www.netim.com, based in France. Their UI is quite outdated, but it works ok. I've switched here after leaving Gandi.

If you're fine with a US-based provider, https://porkbun.com/ also has good pricing and a tech oriented mindset. They don't support many ccTLDs though.

In general, https://tld-list.com/ is the best place to research domain registrars in my opinion.

mgw··on Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools
Where does the point of being disagreeable come from and what purpose does it serve in the business world, in your opinion or according to these books?
mgw··on Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview
This has also been my biggest gripe with Gemini 2.5 Pro. While it is fantastic at one-shotting major new features, when wanting to make smaller iterative changes, it always does big refactors at the same time. I haven't found a way to change that behavior through changes in my prompts.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is much more restrained and does smaller changes.

mgw··on How to Become a Registrar (2012)
One idea I‘ve been toying with is to set up a non-profit registrar funded by donations. It would just pass through the registration fees from the registries without markup. Similar to Let‘s Encrypt but for domains. Of course it would be more complicated because the entity would handle money, but nothing that couldn‘t be solved from what I can see.

Does anyone with experience in the field have any insights on what roadblocks would be encountered?

mgw··on Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor
I would recommend Adyen. It‘s a bit like a European Stripe.

https://www.adyen.com/

mgw··on Why do cloud providers keep building datacenters in Phoenix?
The Register misquotes itself by writing that “Google's datacenters in Dallas, Texas consumed more than a quarter of the city's water supply”.

Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_da...

mgw··on So I took a corporation to arbitration
Sounds like an interesting opportunity. Some ideas immediately come to mind. I'm a previous founder and CTO/CEO. Feel free to reach out if you're interested to discuss. You can find my email in my profile.
mgw··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)
Valora Digital | Senior Fullstack (F#), AI/ML, iOS, Android, PM, UI/UX | Full-time | Zurich, Switzerland | ONSITE or REMOTE (CET +- 2h)

Valora Digital[0] is the digital unit of Valora[1], a European retailer with 2700 stores across 5 countries. We are tackling interesting challenges in areas such as Autonomous Stores (think Amazon Go), E-commerce & Delivery, Loyalty, Payments and Process Improvement. For this purpose we are building up a development team from scratch. You will be one of the first engineers and will have a big part in shaping the culture as well as choosing our stack. We are looking to bring the startup ethos to the corporate world and get to combine the best of both worlds: ample funding, a huge customer base to deploy to and lots of freedom. I'm the head of this new unit and was previously a founder, CTO and CEO.

We are hiring in many roles, such as:

- Senior Software Engineer, Fullstack (F#) [2]

- Co-Founder / CTO for a Machine Learning Startup [3]

- Mobile Software Engineer, iOS (Swift) [4]

- Mobile Software Engineer, Android (Kotlin) [5]

- Product Manager [6]

- UI / UX Designer [7]

You can find the links to each job description below or on https://valora.digital.

[0]: https://valora.digital

[1]: https://valora.com

[2]: https://en.valora.career/job/zurich/senior-software-engineer...

[3]: https://en.valora.career/job/zurich/technical-co-founder-cto...

[4]: https://en.valora.career/job/zurich/senior-software-engineer...

[5]: https://en.valora.career/job/zurich/senior-software-engineer...

[6]: https://en.valora.career/job/zurich/founder-senior-product-m...

[7]: https://en.valora.career/job/zurich/product-designer-ui-ux/2...

mgw··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2020)
Valora Digital | Fullstack Senior & Mid-level, ML Engineer | Full-time | Zurich, Switzerland | ONSITE or REMOTE (CET +- 2h)

Valora Digital is the newly founded digital unit of Valora, a European retailer with 2700 stores across 5 countries. We are tackling interesting challenges in areas such as Autonomous Stores (think Amazon Go), Ecommerce & Delivery, Loyalty, Payments and Process Improvement. For this purpose we are building up a development team from the ground up. You will be one of the first engineers and will have a big part in shaping the culture as well as choosing our stack. We are looking to bring the startup ethos to the corporate world and get to combine the best of both worlds: ample funding, a huge customer base to deploy to and lots of freedom. I'm the head of this new unit and was previously a founder, CTO and CEO.

You can learn more and apply here https://valora.digital (bottom of the page) or on Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/302271/senior-software-engine.... For the ML position, please get in touch directly at michael.wirth@valora.com.

mgw··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2020)
Valora Digital | Fullstack Senior & Mid-level | Full-time | Zurich, Switzerland | ONSITE or REMOTE (CET +- 2h)

Valora Digital is the newly founded digital unit of Valora, a European retailer with 2700 stores across 5 countries. We are tackling interesting challenges in areas such as Autonomous Stores (think Amazon Go), Ecommerce & Delivery, Loyalty, Payments and Process Improvement. For this purpose we are building up a development team from the ground up. You will be one of the first engineers and will have a big part in shaping the culture as well as choosing our stack. We have brought the startup ethos to the corporate world and get to combine the best of both worlds: ample funding, a huge customer base to deploy to and lots of freedom. I'm the head of this new unit and was previously a founder, CTO and CEO.

You can learn more and apply here https://valora.digital (bottom of the page) or on Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/valora-digital

mgw··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2020)
Valora Digital | Fullstack Senior & Mid-level | Full-time | Zurich, Switzerland | ONSITE or REMOTE (CET +- 2h)

Valora Digital is the newly founded digital unit of Valora, a European retailer with 2700 stores across 5 countries. We are tackling interesting challenges in areas such as Autonomous Stores (think Amazon Go), Ecommerce & Delivery, Loyalty, Payments and Process Improvement. For this purpose we are building up a development team from the ground up. You will be one of the first engineers and will have a big part in shaping the culture as well as choosing our stack. We are looking to bring the startup ethos to the corporate world and get to combine the best of both worlds: ample funding, a huge customer base to deploy to and lots of freedom. I'm the head of this new unit and was previously a founder, CTO and CEO.

You can learn more and apply here https://valora.digital (bottom of the page) or on Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/302271/senior-software-engine....

mgw··on GitHub is now free for teams
One big differentiator that GitHub has vs GitLab is the availability of monthly pricing. This was a deal breaker against GitLab for us.
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