196 karma · joined July 3, 2019
What worked for me was to ask Astra/Fable to include pseudo code in the design doc. which comes to 1-2 pages. Easy for me to skim and change the direction/approach. Rest all of the flowery language is for LLM giving context.
IMO Fable 5.1 ~ Astra > GPT 5.6 Sol > Opus.
Another thing i discovered is less is more (in case of skills as well)., don’t add lots of skills., keep them very handful - I’ve got 9 skills so far (many people have 100s installed from marketplaces and plugins)
I can see this becoming much more useful once the docs get heavier: large PDFs, XLSX files, images, etc. At that point you probably need embeddings, reranking etc. But I think agents are smart enough to write scripts to retrieve what they want if we run them on a sandbox(which we are trying to do currently). bookmarking this for now.
Good write-up though!
Is this equivalent of DAGs for sub agents inside claude code? Can i pause and resume/retry workflows? How stateful are they?
Really appreciate it someone claude code can throw more light on above. I’m trying to see if I can get langgraph equivalent DAGs here.
Similar sentiment shared with other startup founders- check on x about all VCs talking about moats against big labs.
After AI happened, I built an app (promptfunnels) to scratch my own itch and generate funnels (fancy name for landing pages with a purpose).
Then came the harder part: marketing it. Coming from a tech background, I knew nothing about marketing, so I started reading and came across the $100M Leads book. I realized codifying those principles together with funnels and marketing automation had a real market. My family, friends, and acquaintances became the first customers. A friend joined me as cofounder and we both quit our jobs to do this full time.
As we talked to other startup founders, they kept describing a tangential problem they called GTM. At the core it was the same thing we were solving: marketing for non-marketers. So we pivoted to RevMozi(https://revmozi.com/), which helps non-marketers do both inbound and outbound GTM.
We’re dogfooding the product and coming out of beta next month.
Wish us luck.
I feel hooks are integral part of your code harness, that’s only deterministic way to control coding agents.
TDD was never really my natural style, but LLMs are great at generating the obvious test cases quickly. That lets me spend more of my attention on the edge cases, the invariants, and the parts that actually need judgment.
Frontend is another area where they help a lot. It’s not my strongest side, so pairing an LLM with shadcn/ui gets me to a decent, responsive UI much faster than I would on my own. Same with deployment and infra glue work across Cloudflare, AWS, Hetzner, and similar platforms.
I’m basically a generalist with stronger instincts in backend work, data modeling, and system design. So the value for me is that I can lean into those strengths and use LLMs to cover more ground in the areas where I’m weaker.
That said, I do think this only works if you’re using them as leverage, not as a substitute for taste or judgment.
I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.
That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”
On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.
I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.
My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best
I had three side projects and kept struggling to get any real traction or traffic without becoming spammy across the internet. So I decided to approach it the same way I approach learning anything new: through books, courses, and solid foundational material.
HN had a few excellent suggestions. One of them was Founding Sales. Another, which I came across through a friend’s recommendation, was Alex Hormozi’s series. He seems to have something of a cult following, which made me a bit skeptical at first, so I decided to just read the first 100 pages before forming an opinion.
I ended up finding it genuinely useful, especially for understanding the psychology and mindset needed to sell something. I now highly recommend his book $100M Leads to technical friends who are trying to figure out how to sell what they’ve built.
I’m still learning, if you’ve any good recommendations, please drop them below
For people suggesting it’s a skill issue: I’ve been using Claude Code for the past 6 months and I genuinely want to make Codex work - it was highly recommended by peers and friends. I’ve tried different model settings, explicitly instructed it to plan first and only execute after my approval, tested it on both Python and TypeScript backend codebases. Results are consistently underwhelming compared to Claude Code.
Claude Code just works for me out of the box. My default workflow is plan mode - a few iterations to nail the approach, then Claude one-shots the implementation after I approve. Haven’t been able to replicate anything close to that with Codex
https://explained.ai/matrix-calculus/
khan academy - Multivariable Calculus course by Grant Sanderson(3b1b fame)
ANN-Benchmark exists but it’s algorithm-focused rather than full-stack database testing, so it doesn’t capture real-world ops like concurrent writes, filtering, or resource management under load.
Would be great to see something more comprehensive and vendor-neutral emerge, especially testing things like: tail latencies under concurrent load, index build times vs quality tradeoffs, memory/disk usage, and behavior during failures/recovery
Edit: I realised i watched Full metal alchemist: Brotherhood didn’t know two versions existed
Mandavya is not just any mortal; he is an enlightened sage. In Hinduism, enlightened beings are considered superior to gods. There’s another story about Sage Markandeya (one of the nine immortals, the Chiranjeevis) who caused the death of Yama, the God of Death. In Hindu cosmology, all the gods hold honorary responsibilities, and nothing is permanent - not even the position of Brahma, the Creator
> 2. If children are completely free from accountability, adults will form them into an army and convince them to commit crimes on their behalf, leading to an intolerable situation. This may already be a standard way of doing business in some parts of the world
I believe he introduced a juvenile law, which involves reduced sentences or milder punishments rather than granting complete immunity from consequences.
This reminds me of a story where Sage Mandavya established the first juvenile law in Hindu mythology.
<story starts>
Long ago, there lived a great sage named Mandavya who had taken a vow of silence and spent his days in deep meditation. One day, while he sat motionless beneath a tree with his arms raised in penance, a group of thieves being pursued by the king’s soldiers fled into his hermitage. They hid their stolen loot near the sage and escaped through the other side. When the king’s soldiers arrived, they found the stolen goods but the sage—deep in meditation and bound by his vow of silence—neither confirmed nor denied their presence. The soldiers arrested him and brought him before the king, accusing him of harboring criminals.
Despite his spiritual stature, the king ordered a severe punishment: Mandavya was to be impaled on a stake (shula)—a horrific execution where a wooden spike was driven through the body. However, due to his immense yogic powers and detachment from the physical world, the sage did not die. He remained alive on the stake, enduring the agony with superhuman patience. Eventually, other sages intervened, the king realized his grave error, and Mandavya was freed. But the damage was done. When the sage finally left his mortal body, he went directly to Yamaloka—the realm of Yama, the god of death and justice—to demand an explanation.
“Why did I have to suffer such a gruesome fate?” Sage Mandavya asked Lord Yama. “What terrible sin did I commit to deserve impalement?” Yama consulted his records and replied, “When you were a child, you caught a dragonfly and pierced it with a needle through its body, watching it suffer for your amusement. That act of cruelty resulted in your punishment - you experienced the same suffering you inflicted on that innocent creature.”
Sage Mandavya was furious. “That was when I was a child!” he protested. “I was too young to understand the difference between right and wrong, between sin and virtue. How can you punish an ignorant child with the same severity as a knowing adult?”
Yama tried to explain that karma operates impartially, but Mandavya would not accept this. In his righteous anger, the sage cursed Yama himself: “For this unjust judgment, you shall be born as a human on Earth and experience mortality yourself!” This curse led to Yama being born as Vidura, the wise and virtuous counselor in the Mahabharata - a human who, despite his wisdom and righteousness, had to endure the limitations and sufferings of mortal life.
But Mandavya didn’t stop there. Using his spiritual authority, he proclaimed a new divine law: “No sin committed by a child below the age of fourteen shall count toward their karmic debt equivalent to that of an adult. Children who do not yet understand dharma and adharma shall not be punished for their ignorant actions.” This became the first “juvenile law” in Hindu mythology—a recognition that children, in their innocence and ignorance, deserve compassion and correction rather than severe punishment.
<story ends>
When I was a child, I too wanted to catch a dragonfly and tie a thread to it so it would fly around like a little pet. But my mother stopped me. She told me this very story of Sage Mandavya, and it scared me for life. I never forgot it, and I never tried to catch and bind a dragonfly again.