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bradgessler

7,747 karma · joined April 2, 2008

More at http://bradgessler.com
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bradgessler··on Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]
The constant has always been tools that maximize developer productivity. What's changed is that LLMs are now the best way for developers to tell machines what to do. We've all been given a much bigger lever we can use to spend our waking hours (and even sleeping hours if you run agents overnight) to move even bigger mountains.
bradgessler··on Dystopian Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality
The solution is legal and political, not technical.
bradgessler··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
I'm sure KYC is next.
bradgessler··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
When building web apps, I prompt humans and AI with “the best design is accessible design” and start from there.

It always ends up being faster, clearer, simpler, and better.

bradgessler··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
I asked Borris at an Anthropic event in SF this week why Opus 5 and Fable 5 seem to forget so much when I give it rapid fire tasks when I'm reviewing a UI or something. He told me to run in safe mode, which didn't help at all.

My tinfoil hat theory is Anthropic is trying to get their new models to take on higher-level longer-running tasks, which has a trade-off against rapid-fire tactical use of an LLM.

For these reasons, I've always found the 5 series models from Anthropic aren't great and use 4.8 for a lot of my work.

bradgessler··on Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents
I'd like to see real numbers that compare Docker Desktop for macOS before microVMs to post-microVMs.

I stopped using Docker on macOS because host file system performance was so slow, even with all of the caching hacks piled on top of it, that it made the whole thing effectively unusable for development.

Directionally the post shared sounds great, but it seems "too good to be true" that we'd have a performant microVM for macOS.

bradgessler··on GitHub Is Becoming a Giant AI Code Dump
Human Code Dump → AI Code Dump

Also, water is wet and the sky is blue.

bradgessler··on AWS North Virginia data center outage – recovery to take hours
What happens when the backup breaks?
bradgessler··on Claude Code is locking people out for hours
Reminds me of an “all you can eat” buffet I was at once where the owner told me, “that’s it, that’s all you can eat” and cut it off.
bradgessler··on Never buy a .online domain
I got og.plus that expands to OpenGraphPlus.com.

At first I was stoked to have a two letter domain, but then I looked into it and learned these companies will get you hooked with a low initial price, then jack up the prices as the domain becomes established.

Quite the grift. My plan is to tread lightly on that domain and be ready to back away from it when the rent seekers move in.

You’d think there would be some sort of rules to the neutrality of these TLD administrators, but nope.

The second time around I wised up and go ogplus.net for an API domain instead of ogplus.media. I’ll take neutrality over vanity any day.

bradgessler··on Show HN: ThinkingScript - Self-Improving AI Executables
I’m super early stages with this project and exploring what it would look like agents were just unix programs running securely along side other Unix programs. A big benefit of that is I can pipe one agents output into another agents input.

Another idea I’m exploring is having agents write code for simple tasks. First example, if you run “hello world” with agent script, the first time an agent reads the text file, understands its simple, then writes a static memory.js file. When the program runs again, it hits that file and never invokes the agent.

Where things get interesting are the cases where a script works for some cases, but not all. When that happens, the memory.js script can call agent.resume() during a static run so the agent can take over.

bradgessler··on YouTube's $60B revenue revealed amid paid subscriber push
I remember thinking Google paid an absurd and ridiculous sum of money when they acquired YouTube. I couldn’t have been more wrong, what an incredible acquisition.
bradgessler··on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
What time?
bradgessler··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
I’ve been working on https://og.plus, a service that creates unique Open Graph images per page on a website.

It does this by taking a screenshot of the page, but before it does that, you can modify what’s displayed in the screenshot with CSS, tailwind classes, meta tags, or HTML templates.

If you connect your website to it, the only thing you need to deploy to your web app are a few meta tags. The OG+ servers do the heavy lifting of processing the meta tags to setup the page, take a screenshot of it, and serve it up to the consumer.

The other cool thing it does is generate a different Open Graph images per social network so they all get an image for the exact size they works best in their previews. The CSS or HTML templates are aware of this too so you can display different content to specific social networks.

bradgessler··on Package management is a wicked problem
Today, sales and marketing are the two hardest problems in computer science.
bradgessler··on TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
I'm beginning to put together that party-lines are strictly about gaining and holding power at all costs. Irony disappears through that lens and the way people act makes much more sense.
bradgessler··on TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
Remember all the grievances about the previous executive administration's "Twitter Files" censorship? Rules for thee, but not for me.

To be clear, I think both censorship regimes are not good, but I can't say I'm surprised.

bradgessler··on Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
Any recommendations on sandboxing agents? Last time I asked folks recommended docker.
bradgessler··on San Francisco coyote swims to Alcatraz
For all we know the Coyote could have been from Oakland or Sausalito.
bradgessler··on Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
I shot the Phlex on Rails video course outside last summer with a glossy screen and barely notice reflections or glare, mainly because I setup shop under the shade of large oak trees. The bigger issue with direct sunlight is the glare off the chassis and heat, even when it’s 75F/24C outside.

I wrote about it at https://beautifulruby.com/articles/portable-workstation-iter... if you want to see the setup.

bradgessler··on Dead Internet Theory
What if AI is running RealOrAI to trick us into never quite knowing the truth?
bradgessler··on My Home Fibre Network Disintegrated
What’s the advantage of using fiber optics for home networking over 10Gbe Ethernet?
bradgessler··on It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
Yeah, software orgs ship their promotion structures.
bradgessler··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
https://terminalwire.com

It’s “Hotwire for command-line apps”, meaning you can ship a CLI in a Rails app without building an API. The dream is to make it work for all major web frameworks.

Terminalwire streams stdio, browser launch commands, and a few more things needs to ship a CLI for a SaaS quickly.

The best part is when you want to ship a feature for the CLI, you don’t have to worry about pushing out updates to clients and making sure it’s compatible with your API.

A more interesting development are companies that are using it as a replacement for MCP in AI stacks. They’re reporting less token usage and better overall results.

bradgessler··on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Dustin Curtis wrote about a similar incident at https://dcurt.is/apple-card-can-disable-your-icloud-account

Slightly different issue involving the Apple credit card, but it’s just as insane that there’s no separation between the different parts of Apple.

For that reason I will never have an Apple Card, and I guess I won’t be redeeming Apple gift cards with my Apple ID.

bradgessler··on How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house
If you run an Apple HomeKit stack and don’t need all the other stuff HA offers, I recommend checking out https://homebridge.io
bradgessler··on Claude Advanced Tool Use
A big problem with CLI tooling is it starts off seeming like it’s an easy problem to solve from a devs perspective. “I’ll just write a quick Go or Node app that consumes my web app’s API”

Fast forward 12-18 months, after several new features ship and several breaking API changes are made and teams that ship CLIs start to realize it’s actually a big undertaking to keep installed CLI software up-to-date with the API. It turns out there’s a lot of auto-updating infrastructure that has to be managed and even if the team gets that right, it can still be tricky managing which versions get deprecated vs not.

I built Terminalwire (https://terminalwire.com) to solve this problem. It replaces JSON APIs with a smaller API that streams stdio (kind of like ssh), and other commands that control browsers, security, and file access to the client.

It’s so weird to me how each company wants to ship their own CLI and auto-update infrastructure around it. It’s analogous to companies wanting to ship their own browser to consume their own website and deal with all the auto update infrastructure around that. It’s madness.

bradgessler··on Implications of AI to schools
I wrote a paper about building web applications in 10th grade a long time ago. When class was out the teacher asked me to stay for a minute after everybody left. He asked in disbelief, “did you really write that paper?”

I could see why he didn’t, so I wasn’t offended or defensive and started to tell him the steps required to build web apps and explained it in a manner he could understand using analogies. Towards the end of our conversation he could see I both knew about the topic and was enthusiastic about it. I think he was still a bit shocked that I wrote that paper, but he could tell from the way I talked about it that it was authentic.

It will be interesting to see how these situations evolve as AI gets even better. I suspect assessment will be more manual and in-person.

bradgessler··on MCP Apps: Extending servers with interactive user interfaces
I built https://terminalwire.com to make it easier for more web applications to ship CLIs like gh. Are there any web services like GH that you use in your workflow that don’t have decent AI integration that would benefit from a CLI interface?
bradgessler··on MCP Apps: Extending servers with interactive user interfaces
I built https://terminalwire.com around the idea that CLIs are a great way to interact with web applications.

Turns out the approach works well for integrating web apps with LLMs. I have a payroll company using it in their stack to replace MCP and they’re reporting lower token usage and a better end result.

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