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aswinmohanmeon AI Is Turning Engineers into Farmers, Doctors and Gardeners

This is a blog post about how relying on coding agents are making software engineers who create every intricate function of a codebase, into farmers who grow codebases, doctors who make changes on these systems which they have not created and gardeners who try to the same process of farming to make the change.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Cycle - Integrated business banking, accounting and payroll

I am Aswin (https://aswinmohan.me) and I am building Cycle. It's an integrated financial platform that combines business banking, an inbuilt accounting ledger and payroll. By combining them together we get additional context which we can use to automate much of the grunt-work associated with managing finance.

You can try out the accounting system here with no sign-up at https://demo.joincycle.co. You can join the waitlist to use it when we launch with business banking.

I have built the platform in Elixir, Phoenix, Inertia JS and React. I had launched it initially as workbill.co, as a standalone accounting platform, but later pivoted to this.

aswinmohanmeon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

A modern QuickBooks, based on beancount, WorkBill (https://workbill.co). You can play with it at https://demo.workbill.co.

Unlike traditional accounting platforms we expose the ledger model directly which enables our customers to model complex transactions even when we do not have direct support for it.

Been working on this for a month, and it uses Elixir, Phoenix and InertiaJS with React.

aswinmohanmeon Making a font of my handwriting

warmed my heart, wishing you a great life together

aswinmohanmeon Making a watch from scratch

This blog started my love for mechanical watches. Love how intricate and cohesive the entire mechanism is.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Double-entry accounting based personal finance app

My bad. The design is based on https://fragment.dev/docs#design-your-ledger. They have detailed docs about designing proper ledgers.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Double-entry accounting based personal finance app

We use a proper ledger to track the flow of money. It was sizable technical investment to get the schema right, but it has made the subsequent implementations of features easier.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Double-entry accounting based personal finance app

You are right about missing the web part. It's substantial space that we miss out on mobile. But mobile lets you enter transactions on the go, and is always there when you need it. A web version is planned in the future.

I started Paper to bring the beancount + automated parsing with python stack to everyone. Double-entry is an objectively better way to manage your finances, when we build an automatic reconciliation engine that automatically categorizes the bank transactions we'll have the best personal finance tracker app.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Double-entry accounting based personal finance app

Automated transaction reconciliation will be a major feature in the future versions of the app. I have yet to use an app that reliably does automatic transaction registration and the dream is to build one.

India does have a decent open-banking system, used by https://fold.money

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Double-entry accounting based personal finance app

Thanks. Updated the data-collection section.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Double-entry accounting based personal finance app

It's a characteristic of double-entry accounting. Everything is an account and transactions move money between accounts. When you receive money from your salary in your bank account, the money is being debited from an Income account. We show the debit with the negative sign.

> Yes you can, it's called a split transaction. $1000 income: split into $700 to my savings and $300 to taxes.

Even though this would work, the money is still in your bank account, which makes your savings account balance to be reported wrong.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: Double-entry accounting based personal finance app

Thanks for the catch. Fixed and pushed.

aswinmohanmeon Would you use a government-issued ID to prove your identity online?

In India we use Aadhar, the associated phone number and a digi-locker app to verify our identity. Mostly used for governmental, financial and insurance verification. Works seamlessly most of the time.

aswinmohanmeon Mechanical Watch (2022)

I bought a mechanical watch after reading this blog post and it's been my daily driver since. It always brings a smile to look at it and see what fine craftsmanship and mechanical intelligence can achieve.

aswinmohanmeon SheepIt Render Farm

Does a system exist where we can train open source LLM models in this way? Maybe distribute it across a cluster of computers with credit points that can be later used for inference.

aswinmohanmeon Glove80 Ergonomic Keyboard

I use the Moonlander with a layout that doesn't deviate much from the standard Mac keyboard. Even though I sacrifice a little bit of single keypress magics that I can do on my Moonlander, it enables me to switch more easily to my laptop keyboard on the go.

aswinmohanmeon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

Mine is at https://aswinmohan.me

aswinmohanmeon Ask HN: Founders, how much automated tests do you write?

While working on my startup as a solo-founder I used to follow a TDD approach supported mostly by Integration tests. I mostly focused on the user happy paths with limited coverage outside the Integration tests.

The goal is to have the major functionality of the platform tested automatically so we can be confident that new features don’t introduce new bugs.

aswinmohanmeon Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

I have ported a backoffice app from Phoenix LiveView to a Retool(Frontend) + Vercel(Api) + Supabase(database) collection and it's holding out really great. The primitives of Retool (autoupdating queries, transformers, direct integration to the database, staging and production environments) makes feature development super fast. You guys are on to something great, keep going strong.

aswinmohanmeon The Internet from Rocks – A High Level Explanation of Computers and the Internet

https://julian.bearblog.dev/the-internet-from-rocks/

aswinmohanmeon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://aswinmohan.me

My blog is a collection of txt files. Here's a post about why I wrote it in text files https://aswinmohan.me/only.txt, here is another post about Phoenix LiveView https://aswinmohan.me/superfast-liveview.txt

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: I made my website plain text only

Out of curiosity I converted my blog and blog posts to a collection of text files. I thought first about making a simple HTML file, but then thought if I have HTML there is nothing stopping me from adding CSS and JS to it. I wanted a bare minimum way for my writing to exist on the web and work well on the command line.

Since we can't add links to text files, they follow the markdown format of links [link](url) where you have to manually copy paste the URL in the URL bar. The text is hard wrapped at 80 chars, and no indentation is used since it messes up the look on mobile. I love it, what do you people think ? Yeah or neh ?

aswinmohanmeon Building single-page-apps with PostgREST

I have a love and hate relationship with this stack. On one hand it makes sense to do everything in SQL and generate the data access patterns from it. On the other hand pushing business logic into the database has it's disadvantages

- Scaling Databases is hard, - It's easier to scale a stateless application server rather than a stateful database.

- SQL is still hard to maintain - Adding features using Postgres Functions means you have an additional language to maintain. The code might be spread across different migration files. Maintaining these functions long term has it's own issues.

aswinmohanmeon Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

Couldn't access Notion, so came to check HN, and boom here is the answer.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

Thanks for the support :D

I really liked your detailed write up on the publishing chain you have used, code is just text in it's essence and because of that programmers have access to superior tools for it's manipulation. But that power is hidden behind a steep learning curve. IndiePaper is just the collection of tools you have specified all integrated and wrapped up as a web app.

Regarding examples, I never thought this would blow up on HN, that's why it doesn't it even have an FAQ, I'm working on a new design that would bring published books of the platform front and center.

Technical books are and will be supported, even though technical authors have the know-how to setup up a publishing toolchain, most would love to write in a completely integrated platform. Since we control the entire editor, we can and will support code snippets, highlighting and comments by adding to the text-editor raw structure and processing it during typesetting phase.

IndiePaper was actually ideated with rich technical books from the start, features like code integration with Github were all thought of from the start. So IndiePaper will have first class support for technical books.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

That is already implemented. Still there might be race conditions with the current implementation, didn't wanted anyone to lose any data. It's frustrating as hell to rewrite something from memory.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

Thanks for the support!

I still haven't decided on what input format I should be using, most authors are familiar with a WYSIWYG style editor, but technical authors are more inclined to markdown like formats.

Authors are more inclined to switch with the writing tools they already own, so I think multiple import options and a single editor representation would be better. Upload a bunch of files of asciidoc or markdown and get it published.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

It's Cloudprinter - https://www.cloudprinter.com/

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

Thanks, the platform and the output looks dope. I haven't gotten to the LaTeX part yet, will ping you once I run into issues.

aswinmohanmeon Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

Hey, like I said, it's just the first preview version of the platform. Even though the editor auto saves every 200ms to the server, there is no local caching. So even if we lose data, it's going to be a couple words. But still it's unacceptable, that's why I put up the disclaimer.

- Once the typesetting engine is finished you can export the books and sell on your preferred platform.

- Uploading each chapter would be finished when I move the editor page to a SPA. That way we can get a more stable editor and a better authoring experience.