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a_c

1,771 karma · joined October 10, 2013

https://kmcheung12.github.io/
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a_c··on I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens
My own set of heuristics

1. Use less subagents. The act of using subagent already needs dumping adequate amount of context for subagent to work effectively

2. Refactor when file grows large. Reasonably scoped files is easier to understand, for both human and agents, and consume less tokens because less guessing which section of the file to read

3. More capable models for planning, learning. Cheap models for execution. Same for human teams, senior member for higher level planning while junior member more on the act of translation of idea into code

4. I wasn't doing any fancy stuff that opus can't handle

5. Consult a second opinion for things you are not sure. (I have made a skill specifically for that)

6. Audit how your habit correlates with token consumption. I found out a skill a use frequently is using a lot of context just so a subagent can get all the context. (made a tool to audit claude specifically)

a_c··on Decoy Font
A natural extension would be a reverse steganography that trips AI into see other things in images
a_c··on 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored
I’m also asking for my sons
a_c··on 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored
Slightly off topic, anyone know of any good dinosaur illustration, ideally a large collection?
a_c··on I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets
You are right! Completely missed the part mentioning specifically it was not claude code. Thanks!
a_c··on I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets
Off topic, you could write "127.0.0.1 evil.com" to your /etc/hosts and bypass all the cloudflare thing I believe
a_c··on The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
Many such examples with variations

- browser extensions where a bookmarklet will do (media speed control)

- tolerate-able UX where alternatives available (e.g LLM chat interface without a table of contents is a pain to me, vibe coding an extension took me less than 1 session worth of credit)

- buying bulk vs buying individually

- doomscrolling vs reading a book

- standing vs tip toeing (one I discovered only very recently that I can tip toe any time to train my toes for climbing, no need dedicated training sessions)

- getting angry/depressed online vs realising most thing on internet is about provoking emotion

a_c··on Punch yourself in the face with reality
I climb and I want one :)

> talking about climbing apps with fellow climbers is a great way to be outside.

Indeed. The climbers I met are very supportive. They helped me scan the gym, shared their own climbing footage, which is what I'm trying to do, visualize climbing in a 3D scene.

a_c··on Punch yourself in the face with reality
I find it highly similar between running agents and running human teams.

Clear goal, share context, delegate but verify. Running a team of engineers also inevitably generates pages and pages of material, design spec, code, test, review. Just that we now do that with agents and agents are way less trust worthy

a_c··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
There are surprising portion of population expect a dedicated app to perform a particular function
a_c··on Proof of Care in the Age of A.I
You got me.
a_c··on Punch yourself in the face with reality
Indeed it is. I’m very grateful to what LLM enables me.

The revelation to me was that I used to code what I know, now I could code what I don’t know. The common path is that when I face something I don’t know, which is quite often, to move forward I have to level up my understanding.

a_c··on Proof of Care in the Age of A.I
Text to handwriting in 3..2..
a_c··on Punch yourself in the face with reality
I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real progress was made when I actually dig into the documentation of colmap/OpenMVS (essential tools, which I had never used before, in my workflow).

The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.

a_c··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
3D model construction of climbing gym. There is so much detail a normal climbing video can't show. Wall angle, hip position. I'm hoping to overlay human model, taken from climbing video, onto the 3D wall to make climbing visualization easier.
a_c··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
The system behaviour is totally up to anthropic's discretion. Its current behaviour is verifiable. In claude code, spawn a subagent with

1. Agent("Test")

2. look at your token usage

3. Repeat a few times

I didn't check again as I type this message but am somewhat sure subagent doesn't cache system prompt as of maybe last week

a_c··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
Every subagent send the same ~30k system prompts. If you are using fable/opus, that's easily 30% of a 5-hour window for 7 subagent, before doing any work
a_c··on StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time
Last week I discovered apple's own photogrammetry library. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit/creatin...

I used it to reconstruct a 3D mesh of a bouldering wall. It worked perfectly. No gaussian splatting involved. I think the boundary between virtual and real world does get thinner by the day

a_c··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Will give it a try thanks for the heads up. Mind if I ask if you are referring to SendMessage? I was testing on Claude code 2.1.196. SendMessage was not available. Skimming through their change log didn’t seem to have anything related to SendMessage. There is “ Fixed SendMessage silently misrouting when a re-spawned agent reuses a previous agent’s name — the tool now detects the mismatch and asks the caller to retarget” from 2.1.199. Not sure if they are related
a_c··on The Making of Claude Code
Once you are popular, whatever said is automatically true
a_c··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Regarding the lack of vision part, if you are using Claude or opencode, I've made a skill[1] that let's you talk with any models in Claude/opencode mid-session. You ask "Have claude opus to look at this PDF for a second opinion" during a session of claude with GLM5.2 or opencode with GLM5.2

It doesn't need to pass whole conversation history as context (unlike /model), you can ask follow up to that forked model (which sub agents in claude doesn't support AFAIK), and you can ask models from opencode while using claude.

[1] https://github.com/kmcheung12/second-opinion

a_c··on Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
I heard from someone before. charge more - the most vocal customers are the most demanding ones.

Also I wonder people tried charging for escalation (that's what enterprise plan is for I suppose)

a_c··on Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
Off-topic, I don't get why people still use a www subdomain, especially so in this case, www.map. Conway's Law in action?
a_c··on The Safari MCP server for web developers
Sometimes I find myself wanting the other way round, instead of letting LLM tell browser what to do, I want what I did manually in the browser be visible to LLM. I made a MCP to cover that use case
a_c··on In the age of algorithms and AI, is traditional media democracy's defence?
Traditional media is running their own LLM before LLM even existed. They absorbed their own bubble of information and hallucinate their narrative. I don’t mean it in a bad way. That’s how our tribal brain works, come up with stories with limited exposure to the world.
a_c··on Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilot
Must be the system prompts. Ask copilot to dump its system prompt, and compare the system prompt with claude. It is not accurate but handy. I bet they are quite different
a_c··on Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilot
While LLM models are bad at games, they are perfectly capable of writing a RL agent to train on the game itself.
a_c··on Why I Stopped Arguing with People
Thinking human is rational is a highly irrational belief.
a_c··on Claude Sonnet 5
"Claude Sonnet 5 is available everywhere today at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, 2026. It then moves to standard pricing at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.2"

"Sonnet 5 is an upgrade to Sonnet 4.6, but it uses an updated tokenizer that changes how the model processes text to improve performance (this is similar to the tokenizer change we introduced with Claude Opus 4.7). The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens: roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. The introductory pricing is set so that the transition to Sonnet 5 is roughly cost-neutral."

If we trust them, then it is roughly the same as sonnet 4.6

a_c··on Claude Sonnet 5
I haven't. Thanks for the heads up will give it a try! I use opus to comment on code design quite often though. It became a pattern that I made a skill for me to ask for second opinions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733092 Would love to hear your feedback if you don't mind!
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