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Bockit

725 karma · joined February 10, 2011

James Hiscock, I work at Block.
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Bockit··on Plan mode is dead
I don’t agree. I think the way maybe the author used planning to maintain an understanding of the changes is largely not necessary, but there are other good use cases.

For example, it’s a great hook in the process for agentic review.

Get a second agent to look at what will be implemented and check it for inconsistencies, check it against whatever decisions were made or provided previously in the chat, or against whatever technical rules you’ve written out for your project, before going ahead. It surfaces a large number of opportunities for refinement, and generally pushes the output closer to the direction you’re looking for.

Bockit··on OpenAI Agents API
You can use the harness sdks instead of the model APIs directly. Eg if you use Claude agent sdk you still can have plan mode, questions, todo lists, sub agents, background tasks, workflows, nearly everything that Claude code has and taking advantage of how it + anthropic models are complementary.
Bockit··on OpenAI Agents API
I cannot agree more. We all have our own needs, and it’s never been easier to make something that meets them exactly.

I have been running my own setup and evolving it since November as I come up with more ideas and needs. The nicest bit is not being tied to one provider or another. Anthropic decides to stop supporting Claude agent sdk with subs? Or astra outstrips other models? My harness now works with Claude/cursor/codex and soon ACP. It didn’t start that way, it was originally all in on Claude, but now all the things I built on top of Claude now work with the others too.

Bockit··on Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
Also, many energy retailers increased the daily 'connection service fee' to compensate. My dad's daily fee went up an extra 55c~, or +$200/year.
Bockit··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
I think it's more: AI assisted engineering is a new skill people are trying to develop and we're on this collective experimentation process, working out how to use AI for engineering with varying degrees of success.

If that's true, any statements defining what is necessary to do should be ignored in that context. I'm still interested in hearing about what people tried, what results they think they saw, and then trying to apply those findings to my own processes.

Which is to say I don't think the pontificating is pointless, but as statements of Real Truth, I agree they're likely wrong. We're too early in the game.

Bockit··on Coding agents could make free software matter again
I have a Mac mini and I put every device that needs access on Tailscale
Bockit··on Coding agents could make free software matter again
It’s such a fun time to have 1+ decade(s) of experience in software. Knowing what simple and good are (for me), and being able to articulate it has let me create so much personal software for myself and my family. It has really felt like turning ideas into reality, about as fast as I can think of them or they can suggest them. And adding specific features, just for our needs. The latest one was a slack canvas replacement, as we moved from slack to self-hosted matrix + element but missed the multiplayer, persistent monthly notes file we used. Even getting matrix set up in the first place was a breeze.

$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.

Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.

Bockit··on The three pillars of JavaScript bloat
I've been doing JS for nearly a couple decades now (both front and back) and I landed on the same approach a few years ago. Pick your absolutely minimal set of dependencies, and then just make what you need for everything else. Maybe counter-intuitive to some, I feel like I'm more comfortable maintaining a larger codebase with less people.

What's more, given the tools we have today, it fits really well with agentic engineering. It's even easier to create and understand a homegrown version of a dependency you may have used before.

Bockit··on What if you don't need MCP at all?
This is probably a semantics problem. You’re right. The models don’t know how to mcp. The harness they run in does though (Claude code, Claude desktop, etc), and dynamically exposes mcp tools as tool calls.
Bockit··on I can't use my number pad for 2FA codes
What’s special about front-end developers here?
Bockit··on Do you remember Ultima Online?
Taran's Sphere Scripting for Dummies was what taught me how to program as a 14-15 year old trying to do the same thing :)
Bockit··on Slab City reaches its boiling point
If it doesn’t load for you either: https://web.archive.org/web/20220813225258/https://bluedotli...
Bockit··on Show HN: HN Avatars in 357 bytes
Test post please ignore!
Bockit··on Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone
Essentially, you don’t.
Bockit··on Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
I have a very similar story. I spent many many evenings in my teens learning to “script” with Taran’s Sphere Scripting For Dummies website and .chm file for the Sphere Server UO emulator.

Best part is I didn’t even realise I was programming. In my mind I was just making the game do what I wanted.

Bockit··on 'Very, very pink' tap water in Alberta town
We used to gargle water mixed with potassium permanganate as children after cleaning our teeth to see if we did a good enough job. It would colour plaque pink, so it was very obvious if you hadn't cleaned properly!
Bockit··on Elixir 1.2.0 Released
It's the super terse anonymous function syntax. You could use the slightly more verbose version with named instead of positional params or put a named function in there instead.
Bockit··on ReactCSS – Bringing Classes to Inline Styles
More that I don't have to force everything into a single file. I think it's more flexible that way. Let's say one day I work static files into my build process I could chuck them into the same folder where they're relevant to the component.
Bockit··on ReactCSS – Bringing Classes to Inline Styles
I prefer to colocate into 1 folder. index.jsx, index[.css,.styl,.scss, etc.]

Just like my JS requires different JS files, my CSS imports various files too. The preprocessor turns that into 1 css file (or n, if you want).

Bockit··on What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?
I had a similar experience. Between the ages of 14-16 I tinkered on my own sphere shard with a friend of mine. I didn't realise what I was doing was programming until I took courses 16-17 and realised what I had been doing the whole time :)

There was one website, Taran's Scripting For Dummies, that was pretty much my bible.

Bockit··on The Unkillable Demon King
Just a quick comment on the spamfest side of things. Disclaimer that I never got into LoL. I've found over the years playing most of the different MOBAs that when I come into a new one I find it nearly impossible to delineate what is happening in a many-player fight. It only comes after some time playing the game that I'm able to recognise this shade of light in this pattern means this spell is being used, etc. After a point it becomes quite clear what is going on and looks a lot less like a spamfest.
Bockit··on PM of Singapore Shares His C++ Sudoku Solver Source Code
I think the distinction the grandparent made was they would be happy to see the trait in the leader of the country, not that seeing the trait makes a good leader.
Bockit··on Unit tests fail when run in Australia
If I recall correctly from the last time I had to deal with this, it's the first 3 towns on the Eyre highway in WA coming from the SA border. This[1] suggests there are actually 4.

[1]: http://www.postcodes-australia.com/timezones

Bockit··on Introduction to Facebook's Flux architecture
I can't speak for the OP, only my experience here. The docs on flux[1] recommend singletons for the dispatcher and stores. If your library is following that recommendation then things start breaking in a server-side environment as multiple requests start hitting, especially in parallel with asynchronous data retrieval.

[1]: https://facebook.github.io/flux/

Bockit··on PhantomJS 2
I've been using 2.0 for a couple months now because of webfont issues with 1.9, they work now.
Bockit··on No more JavaScript frameworks
The default included polyfills tend to cover most things in my experience. I haven't had to worry about if a feature exists in IE8 or if we're polyfillng it for a while now, it's great.
Bockit··on Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
Actually the markdown page on his site mentions exactly that as markdown's intention.

> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

Bockit··on Reverse engineering the binary data format for Star Wars: Yoda Stories
I'm stretching my memory a little but I think there was an Indiana Jones game using what I vaguely recognised at the time as the same engine, which I have equally fond memories of!
Bockit··on CSS One-Liners
> we can make the number of columns depend on the available space, so that a narrow screen will have one column, a wider screen will have two columns, etc. This is all it takes to specify that the optimal line length is 15em and for the number of columns to be calculated accordingly

It looks like the columns property can take a size value, which the browser will use to work out how many columns it can fit.

Bockit··on A Tipless Restaurant is a Well-Run Restaurant?
I think the counter argument is that in other places where tipping isn't mandatory or even common, reataurants are still able to do fine.
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