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mmcclure

4,503 karma · joined January 21, 2013

Co-founder of Mux (YC W16). Software developer and organizer of video community things (Demuxed, SF Video Technology). You can find me on Twitter @matt_mcclure

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mmcc; my proof: https://keybase.io/mmcc/sigs/2TecG4FqAN88M5UaETYwdA4JegapEYa3ojaIrONVVDo ]

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mmcclure··on Somebody please stop the spam texts
I don't know what happened, but this got INTENSELY worse for me in the last ~6 months. I never respond to them and mark as spam and move on, but I get multiple calls and texts from unknown numbers every day. Sometimes it's the "hey, I'm sorry to hear about that thing that happened to you" kind of bait, but lately a vast majority of them are trying to offer me business funds or loans or whatever.

I have no idea if my number made its way onto new lists or if the problem just got worse in general, but it's making my phone borderline unusable. I miss any calls from legitimate unknown numbers because of it (delivery people, etc). I've also had my phone number for > 20 years at this point and I can't stand the thought of changing it.

mmcclure··on Show HN: I wrote an email app that accepts only one sender per inbox
This is what I do, and my usage is very similar pattern to the posted project.

Everything gets {service}@{type}.mydomain.com, so, for example, twitter@social.mydomain.com. I really only use the subdomain for some automated tagging, but it's come in handy.

mmcclure··on Show HN: CleverCrow: give tokens to your favorite projects
God damn it, Donut.
mmcclure··on 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York
The policies around blanket ambiguity for rejections is to avoid any kind of messaging that could lead to potential legal retaliation. Frustrating, absolutely, but most employers just aren't willing to flirt with the risk.
mmcclure··on Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
As a kid I didn't get carsick at all. I could work on my laptop, read, whatever while my parents drove. As an adult, at some point I started to barely be able to do anything but keep my eyes on the road without feeling bad.

Turned these on recently, and they work bizarrely well...unfortunately. Downside is that I feel like I lost an excuse to avoid devices for a few minutes while traveling.

mmcclure··on Why I email complete strangers
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but I've been blown away by the thoughtful responses I've gotten from dang. They don't always come quickly, but I would expect that given how crazy I assume that inbox is.
mmcclure··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
I've been using mise as a pure version manager for a pretty long time, and I had no idea you could use it for general tools like this.
mmcclure··on Show HN: Claw Patrol, a security firewall for agents
The product looks great and I'm really interested in trying it out. Very cool, congrats on shipping! Also...as a parent of young kids: this name made me laugh out loud. The OG image on the marketing site is a fun easter egg.

For those here without young kids in their life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paw_Patrol

mmcclure··on Anthropic acquires Stainless
The new owner's plan is...to sunset the paid product immediately and give customers access to tooling to be able to continue generating SDKs on their own. From Stainless's post:

    As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.

    If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish. 
As a customer, all-in-all, we were pretty pleased with the outcome. Stainless was a great partner to us, even in "the end," and I'm really happy for the team.
mmcclure··on MoQ Boy
MoQ is “Media over QUIC,” although I suspect it’ll eventually go the npm path and just end up being MoQ means MoQ.

Depending on the use case you could think of it as an alternative to WebRTC with lower level control, but honestly it’s a lot more open ended than that.

mmcclure··on Figma's woes compound with Claude Design
I was extremely confused before realizing I think that link is for the wrong Pencil. You probably meant to reference this one: https://www.pencil.dev/
mmcclure··on Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller
Ah...you're scratching at some scabs with this totally reasonable question.

We learned some tough lessons with media-chrome[1] and Mux Player, where we tried to just write web components. The React side of things was a bit of a thorn, so we created React shims that provided a more idiomatic React experience and rendered the web components...which was mostly fine, but created a new set of issues. The reason we chose web components was to not have to write framework-specific code, and then we found ourselves doing both anyway.

With VJS 10 I think we've landed on a pretty reasonable middle ground. The core library is "headless," and then the rendering layer sits on top of it. Benefit is true React components and nice web components.

[1] https://github.com/muxinc/media-chrome

mmcclure··on NanoClaw Adopts OneCLI Agent Vault
I'm a little shocked that someone like 1Password hasn't released a vault access + approvals model. There are a lot of little menial tasks that I'd love for an agent to take care of ("book me a hair appointment next week when my calendar says I'm free"). Agent has access to a locally synced calendar and can see the existence of a password for the booking portal in my vault, asks to use it, I get a push notification and can approve.

These kinds of things aren't common enough for me to want to set up a programmatic policy, and are also low sensitivity enough that I don't mind giving access to complete the task. If it later asks to log into my bank, I decline.

I know the devil's in the details for how to actually do this well, but I would love if someone figured it out.

mmcclure··on OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent
Big +1 to Pi[1]. The simplicity makes it really easy to extend yourself too, so at this point I have a pretty nice little setup that's very specific to my personal workflows. The monorepo for the project also has other nice utilities like a solid agent SDK. I also use other tools like Claude Code for "serious" work, but I do find myself reaching for Pi more consistently as I've gotten more confident with my setup.

[1] https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...

mmcclure··on Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

    generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn.
For a long-running game like this, that's a pretty clever little twist to keep the group engaged. I have extremely low confidence I could convince enough friends to do it with me for long enough to get through a game, but this seems like such a fun idea.
mmcclure··on The wild six weeks for NanoClaw's creator that led to a deal with Docker
Definitely a sign of the times that (pre-edit) I thought, "oh this person's thinking of the wrong claw, IronClaw is the Rust one"
mmcclure··on What we learned from a 22-Day storage bug (and how we fixed it)
We don't use New Relic or Datadog (and never have, afaik), so I'm not sure what post you could be referring to for those two? We have talked publicly about our Grafana use, though, and going from an in-house stack to their cloud product. Actual OP can probably hop in later with a better answer, but it was hitting rate limits on the logging agent, not the logging system.
mmcclure··on Show HN: Jido 2.0, Elixir Agent Framework
I went down this path a bit the other night, curious what OP's answer is. My mental model was that they could be complimentary? Jido for agent lifecycle, supervision, state management, etc, LangChain for the LLM interactions, prompt chains, RAG, etc. Looks like you could do everything in Jido 2.0, but if you like/are familiar with LangChain it seems like they could work well together.
mmcclure··on Show HN: Jido 2.0, Elixir Agent Framework
I haven't used Jido for anything yet, but it's one of those projects I check in on once a month or so. BEAM does seem like a perfect fit for an agent framework, but the ecosystem seeming limited has held me back from going too far down that path. Excited to see 2.0!

Just a heads up, some of your code samples seem to be having an issue with entity escaping.

    name: "my_agent",
    description: "A simple agent",
mmcclure··on Packaging a Gleam app into a single executable (2025)
This is an interesting writeup, albeit not quite what I was hoping for. I love Elixir and have been following Gleam for a while now, so I clicked through hoping this was talking about Gleam baking this into their ecosystem a bit better. I was a little disappointed to see it's ultimately talking about how to build a Gleam project and then use the resulting build ecosystem to create a binary (Gleam -> JS -> JS build tool, or Gleam -> escript -> elixir-burrito).

It would have been interesting to see some high level commentary from the author on the results of each one on top of the general workflow. Build time, binary size, startup time, whatever.

mmcclure··on Block spent $68M on a company offsite in September 2025
It's on the high side, but...honestly not absurd? "Party" implies one night rager, but the source says "in-person company event." That seems more like a multi-day company onsite to me, and the total bill per person there probably includes travel, accommodations, food on top of any overall event costs.

Bringing a remote employee to SF just to work out of an office for a few days can easily cost a few grand.

mmcclure··on Layoffs at Block
Square is still a much, much bigger portion of the business than CashApp.

    Square’s ecosystem is expected to contribute $1.77 billion, while Cash App is expected to provide $58.3 million to transaction revenues.
mmcclure··on Show HN: Echo, an iOS SSH+mosh client built on Ghostty
Very cool! I've been using Termius for a while. Overall positive, but my one complaint is that the interactions can be pretty tedious using it with TUIs like Claude Code. I like the gesture-based movement, excited to try that in practice.

I use Tailscale SSH, so one very small bit of feedback is that it took me a second to realize I just needed to put a dummy password in to actually get to the connection.

mmcclure··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
Ah I see the confusion. I should have been clearer that I was talking about the creator of the actual OpenClaw project. He wants nothing to do with the token(s), and at least when I joined a month or so ago the discord rules included a ban for anyone that mentioned them.
mmcclure··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
Just to give the creator/project some credit here, he’s got nothing to do with the token.

    To all crypto folks: 
    Please stop pinging me, stop harassing me. 
    I will never do a coin.
    Any project that lists me as coin owner is a SCAM.
    No, I will not accept fees.
    You are actively damanging the project.
https://x.com/steipete/status/2016072109601001611?s=20
mmcclure··on Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
Oh really? I was looking at the Agent SDK for an idea and the docs seemed to imply that wasn't the case.

    Unless previously approved, we do not allow third party developers to offer Claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
I didn't dig deeper, but I'd pick it back up for a little personal project if I could just use my current subscription. Does it just use your local CC session out of the box?
mmcclure··on Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model.

I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.

mmcclure··on What you need to know before touching a video file
Shameless plug for anyone that wants to go deeper on specific video topics: I've been organizing a conference for video devs for 11 years now and there's a wealth of info in the recordings. A talk from the most recent one on hacking a Sega Genesis to stream video might not seem that practical, but there were some fascinating bits on compression (or, rather, not being able to use actual compression). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZdxdpw-3nI

If folks want to get involved, there's also a chat community that's pretty active: https://video-dev.org.

mmcclure··on Exe.dev
This is very cool, but goodness I wish they'd give an option for a password-based login after the initial verification. In ~10 minutes of playing with it I had to go through 4 email confirmation steps.

I'm very much into the product itself, but that would get extremely tiresome if I was trying to use it consistently. I assume I have to be using it wrong in some way for there to be that much friction...

mmcclure··on Don't Download Apps
I switched to using PWAs for social media apps for similar reasons the author outlines. A pleasant, but somewhat unintended consequence is that I just use them a lot less because the experience is pretty bad. It makes me a little sad because I’ve always believed in the PWA dream, but the reality is that they’re bad because companies certainly don’t want to make an experience that rivals the app they really want you to download.

Expected, but just leads to reinforcing the idea that PWAs won’t ever be as good when every one people try from someone with a popular app is so awful.

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