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sprobertson

742 karma · joined September 3, 2010

Front/back/deep-end developer

https://github.com/spro/

submissionscomments
sprobertson··on WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal
from the post:

Time is an input too. If nothing is pressed, the model gets a WAIT token with a duration instead of a key, which is how snake keeps moving on its own.

sprobertson··on Show HN: My Terminal Themes Web App
It would be nice to freeze the terminal preview after it generates the text for when you want to flip between color modes and color vision settings. Otherwise it gets annoying to wait for each one to complete the animation.
sprobertson··on Decisions API is in public beta
Wouldn't caching be in favor of lowest possible latency?
sprobertson··on Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
Much better than your current demo image! The default vignette is too obviously digital
sprobertson··on How Claude Code works in large codebases
or easier, open ~/.claude/projects/[project]/[session].jsonl (excluding the system prompt)
sprobertson··on NASA’s Artemis II Crew Launches to the Moon
The official one doesn't work for me on mobile but this does: https://artemistracker.com/
sprobertson··on The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode
it likes mentioning itself in commit messages, though you can just tell it not to.
sprobertson··on Ask HN: Is it actually possible to run multiple coding sessions in parallel?
Pretty much everyone saying worktrees but I lean heavily on hot-reloading of both backend and frontend (to actually see what I'm doing) so it's too annoying to deal with dependencies and ports when things are isolated. Instead I keep everything on the main branch and just make sure to keep tasks pretty separate in scope, e.g. add this API route vs. fix this layout issue, so they don't step on each other. When I consider something done I have the agent commit what it worked on and start a new one.
sprobertson··on Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right
yes:

> skip all the gratuitous affirmation and tell me when I'm wrong

sprobertson··on Show HN: Slop or not – can you tell AI writing from human in everyday contexts?
Yeah the UX itself is clearly slop
sprobertson··on Ask HN: Is GitHub getting less reliable, or is it just me?
You're certainly not alone, though it's not that much worse than usual over the last 5 years https://telliott.me/posts/is-github-getting-less-reliable/
sprobertson··on Microgpt
Sure, but use the tool for the job IMO. GPTs are much more complex so should demonstrate a much more complex task.
sprobertson··on Microgpt
This kind of thing is pretty easy to do with a much leaner model https://docs.pytorch.org/tutorials/intermediate/char_rnn_gen...
sprobertson··on Ask HN: Could you create a competitor to your company at 10% of the cost?
No - it costs $0 already
sprobertson··on Show HN: Open sourcing our ERP (Sold $500k contracts, 7k stars)
It seems like everyone commenting here is already part of the hivemind. So maybe someone can answer an important question that I'm not getting at all from the docs: what does this actually do?
sprobertson··on Bumble Berry Pi – A Cheap DIY Raspberry Pi Handheld Cyberdeck
I printed the casing just to see - it actually does fit in my levi pockets (front and back), but looks and feels a bit ridiculous to actually walk around with
sprobertson··on You should write an agent
> software dev is a job for me that needs to generate income

sir, this is a hackernews

sprobertson··on Cloudflare Sandbox SDK
Who's the designer? I assume the same as agents.cloudflare.com, finally something that looks creative and not based on purple gradients
sprobertson··on JSON River – Parse JSON incrementally as it streams in
not for the standard hosted APIs using structured output or function calling, best you can get is an array
sprobertson··on Top Programming Languages 2025
And #1 on the jobs chart
sprobertson··on Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
Here's the screen recording version of a long exposure (thanks for the nerd snipe) - https://gist.github.com/spro/7599415b0e47de65311557b3454771a...
sprobertson··on Purposeful animations
my first instinct was "the slow one is struggling so it must be doing some heavy work"
sprobertson··on Show HN: I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC)
Yeah good call, I missed that. I don't think there's a correct answer here, but it could be another step of the read or write. Either it would do another lookup of "my daughter" -> Name on read, or do a lookup on write if you already have a "my daughter is Name" memory. Whatever's less expensive in the long run. The graph memory someone else mentioned also seems like a good option there.
sprobertson··on Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?
It's been asked a few times, here are some links to get you started:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36370684

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30752540

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896369 (Python specific)

sprobertson··on Show HN: A simple open-source CLI tool for generating invoices from the terminal
You might want to put your actual username in those links. Would also be good to see an example PDF or at least screenshot in there.
sprobertson··on Show HN: I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC)
As a simplified example:

(memory) [2023-07-01] My daughter is 10

(memory) [2024-05-30] My daughter turned 11 today!

System prompt: Today is 2025-08-21

User prompt: How old is my daughter?

The vector DB does the work of fetching the daughter-age-related memories, your system decides (perhaps with another LLM) if the question needs time-based sorting or something else.

sprobertson··on Show HN: HackerNewsGames [Alpha]
FYI using pagination erases your filters

Would be good to have the "play" button above the fold on the detail page

sprobertson··on Programming with Natural Language Is Going to Work (2010)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1912530
sprobertson··on Show HN: Resume Vibe Check
for anonymization it would probably be a good idea to blank out links (linkedin/github/etc)
sprobertson··on Ask HN: How are you productively using Claude code?
simply tell it what command it should call to compile, or better yet add that info to Claude.md
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