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jryan49

1,339 karma · joined August 2, 2012

https://jryan.io https://intheofficetracker.com https://thingoboard.com email: jonathan.ryan at jryan.io
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jryan49··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
What's cool is that I created a protocol for the agent to talk to the game and move the mouse and monitor sim systems. So it's able to run the game and test manually for me and sanity check things as well as write tests.
jryan49··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
It caught lots of bugs like overflow in the sim, fields not spreading as you would expect, badly tweaked constants where the bus lanes were messing with the traffic sim too much. I've only play tested it for a bit, but it seems like it came out okay?
jryan49··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
it also created this pretty cool summary of how the systems interact:

https://claude.ai/artifact/YEVYhbPU8aq6Qne6bH9gyY

jryan49··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
I'm making a SimCity clone for fun, and I created a ton of tickets in my local Gitea instance describing the different systems I wanted implemented. The tickets were mostly two to three sentences, and then I asked Opus to fill out some of the details and come up with some ideas from SimCity and Cities: Skylines as inspiration. It created a plan off of all the tickets I marked and ordered them, then went through them over 33h.

It delegated everything to sub-agents and ran code reviews all automatically. I've play-tested it for an hour and it seems solid? I used Opus 5.5. I can share the build if you want to take a look at it.

Here is the prompt:

"You are a goal agent who will oversee the implementation of many system implementation issues. Look at the issues in gitea labeled 'systems' AND 'ready'. Create an order to do them in."

The plan it made:

Wave 1: cheap, and several later steps depend on them - Commute Time #140: publish the commute times traffic's commute search already works out, with a heatmap. Land value then uses them in place of its "jobs within 480 m as the crow flies" stand-in. - Population #143 step 1: age shares (children and seniors). Schools, health and deathcare all need these. Then step 2: wealth from land value, which already exists. - Pollution #141 steps 2–3: air pollution with wind, then ground pollution; each also adds its term to land value (#142). - Parks #150 step 1: one park kind and its field, read by land value.

Wave 2: services on the coverage kernel - Education #105 step 2: the other four school kinds (uses the age shares). Then step 3: the education stock in population. - Health #147 steps 1–2: health from air pollution, then clinics and hospitals. Clinics are also coverage step 4 (the second service, and searches shared between services). - Garbage #146 step 1: a landfill that is also a depot; the stock it fills. - Fire #149 steps 1–2: fire hazard, then stations as coverage.

Wave 3: utilities - Power #66 step 4: high and low voltage, so substations become required. - Water & Sewage #145 steps 1–4, then Pollution #141 step 4 (water pollution from the sewage outlets). Water and garbage then add their terms to health. - Garbage #146 step 2: incinerators (make power and air pollution) and recycling. - Money #80 steps 3–5: loans, then department sliders and condition, once there are enough departments for the sliders to matter.

Wave 4: climate and events - Climate #134: temperature and rain through the year. - Seasons #133: changes power demand and solar output. - Power #66 steps 5–6: wind, solar, batteries; line limits. - Drainage #47: runoff, storms driven by climate, drains. - Fire #149 step 3 (fire events and rebuilding) and Health #147 step 3 (deathcare). - Natural Disasters #135: needs climate, seasons, floods and fire events.

Wave 5: close-out - Ordinances #81: goes late because the modifiers need the systems they modify to exist. - Population #143 step 4 (happiness, the city rating), then close Land Value #142.

Blocked outside this set - Parks step 2 (edit mode and props) needs Custom Lots #64 step 4. - Land value step 3, and the demand half of education step 3, need Demand #103. - Garbage step 3 (moving garbage between facilities) needs Freight #151.

The UI is very AI slop feeling still, I imagine I'm going to have to tweak that myself.

jryan49··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
I just tested it over the weekend and I had a 33h claude session completely unattended, with minimal prompting. All the stuff it generated looks good too. It's crazy.
jryan49··on Ask HN: Is Opus 5.5 another step change?
I've been checking it and it's doing great I'm sure there are some bugs but it's doing a huge bulk of tedious simulation logic for my game. I was previous in the loop quite a bit but I found myself never having to redirect it so I tried the here a giant plan /loop until its done
jryan49··on Ask HN: Is Opus 5.5 another step change?
I have Opus 5.5 running subagents for the last 20h without any input from me after developing a plan and it seems to be going well somehow... but I will find out soon...
jryan49··on Ask HN: Should we still learn coding?
We all learn how to implement quicksort, but no one ever does it in practice. But if you don't know how to implement it, you don't really know how it works. So as long as you need to "know how it works", yes?
jryan49··on Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort (2022)
I can't imagine inference on an image could be faster that just a sort.
jryan49··on Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
Either I use GenAI when I feel like it, or I don't, so no.
jryan49··on Google Has Achieved RSI
Three options, they actually think we're reaching RSI or they are proposing we "slow down" because the models aren't getting better at the speed they expected and want an excuse for it. Or they want to make it illegal for other companies to build AI so they can corner the market.
jryan49··on Google Has Achieved RSI
What did they demonstrate can you share some links? I'm not on twitter.
jryan49··on What will our economic future look like?
It's probably a good idea to note that it cost them 10-15 million dollars in tokens to do so.
jryan49··on Apple Watch Ultra 4
I mean how often do you buy a watch? Compare with how much do you spend on groceries every month...
jryan49··on GPT-6 Astra
We created AGI so I don't have to click my mouse to change the background color of my slides.
jryan49··on Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
I wonder if people who are down-voting you actually have children. I even know someone who's kid just died in a pool when no one was watching... My kids almost drowned themselves multiple times when they were below 5 yr old and they are trained to swim... My brother fell into a pool when he was little, and had to be saved... the list goes on and on... edit: Apparently it's the leading cause of death for 1-4 year olds...
jryan49··on Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
I mean I wouldn't let me 5 year old cross busy streets by himself in my neighborhood... People drive while staring at their phones going 45 mph in a 25... Maybe we should start punishing people who make the roads so dangerous in the first place...
jryan49··on Ask HN: How do you guys stop coding agents from acting out of line?
Telling llms what not to do actually makes things worse. Frame things in positive language where possible, if not possible I don't mention it at all. The biggest fix for me is using better models. You can't rely on guardrails to make dumber models act smarter.
jryan49··on Ask HN: What's a Good Physical Printer?
https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates

Hopefully this actually works when (if) it comes out

jryan49··on Solving all open source tech debt with Codex
Cause it costs money?
jryan49··on Ask HN: Where else do you spend time on the internet other than HN?
Over the years I've used the internet less and less, HN is one of the few places I still spend my time.
jryan49··on Ask HN: Opus 5 is unusable for writing, even internal use. Alternatives/fix?
Unusable how..?
jryan49··on Ask HN: Will RAM / NVMe / Platter Drives ever come back down in price?
AI boom (probably) can't last forever, so yes.
jryan49··on Starbase, LA
A quick Google search will show you... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/nati...

You're just willfully ignorant

jryan49··on Starbase, LA
Here ya go https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...

Something like 25% cut in new grants. 50% cuts to NSF... You could have just as easily found the data...

jryan49··on Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
In this case they'd still have to go inside to go to the bathroom. :/
jryan49··on The August 17 outage
With all the software being written on github you'd think we were going though a software rennasance. Where are the results? Is it really just all slop?
jryan49··on Ask HN: How's Everyone Feeling Today?
Yeah I probably should just give up trying at this point lol
jryan49··on Ask HN: How's Everyone Feeling Today?
Kind of sick of people copy pasting my conversations in slack to AI, that just leads me to talking in circles.
jryan49··on AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest
It's sad because the ai one is at least one of the worse of the set...
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