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lemmingon Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode

Obviously Anthropic are within their rights to do this, but I don’t think their moat is as big as they think it is. I’ve cancelled my max subscription and have gone over to ChatGPT pro, which is now explicitly supporting this use case.

lemmingon Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

Should be, yes - ACP is basically just a different way of invoking the agent, so you're still using Claude Code. It's alternative clients like OpenCode, the CharmBracelet one and pi which will be affected - they basically reimplement the agent part and just call the API directly.

lemmingon Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

This will piss a lot of people off, and seems like a strange move. I get that this was always a hack and against the ToS. But I've been paying Anthropic money every month to do exactly what I would have done with Claude Code, but in another harness that I like better. All they've achieved here is that I am no longer giving them money. Their per-token pricing is really expensive compared to OpenAI, and I like the results from the OpenAI models better too, they're just very slow.

Here's a good benchmark from the brokk team showing the performance per dollar, GPT-5.1 is around half the price of Opus 4.5 for the same performance, it just takes twice as long.

https://brokk.ai/power-ranking?dataset=openround&models=flas...

So as of today, my money is going to OpenAI instead of Anthropic. They probably don't care though, I suspect that not many users are sufficiently keen on alternative harnesses to make a difference to their finances. But by the same token (ha ha), why enforce this? I don't understand why it's so important to them that I'm using Claude Code instead of something else.

lemmingon Show HN: I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker

I'm curious, and in the spirit of a true MVP - does this need type, assignee, links or the parent relationship? Do you see the agent using them in practice? It seems like a minimal implementation could do without all of those, and I wonder if they're useful to the agent, or are just documentation for humans.

Since these seem more lightweight/ephemeral, it seems like it would be useful to search upwards for the nearest enclosing .tickets directory, so that subsystems could have separate issues.

lemmingon Show HN: I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker

Or at least move them to a .tickets-done directory, so if the agent is searching under .tickets it won't see them, but you retain some history.

lemmingon World's largest functioning musical instrument: Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia

This is not the largest in the world but it is enormous, and is also amazing for having been built by a 15-year old to answer the question: "When I was 14 I asked my piano teacher how long a bass a string would need to be if it had no copper on it at all".

I love this follow-up quote: "I think because I was so young I absolutely knew it was totally possible to do, I was fully determined and without consulting any professionals I had no barrier stopping me."

https://www.alexanderpiano.nz/page/the-alexander-piano

There's also something quintessentially New Zealand about the whole story - making it in a mate's garage, and then moving the project to a farm tractor shed when it got too big and the inaugural concert that looks like it's still in the same shed, the photo of the tractor moving it for the outdoor concert...

lemmingon Maybe the default settings are too high

Well done, when I was growing up we would always have some time in the evening when we would read a book out loud. When we were younger my parents would read and as we got older we would read sometimes too. I tried the same with my daughter but she stopped wanting to when she was around 10, but she’s in a better space now two years on so I’m going to try to resurrect the custom. It’s a really lovely thing to do as a family, but as the article suggests is quite strange these days and it can be difficult and require discipline to make the time.

lemmingon Maybe the default settings are too high

Really? I still love Winnie the Pooh, but I grew up with him so I’m somewhat biased. But I love the whimsy and musicality in the language.

lemmingon Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

In my first question, I'm referring to exposing functionality from the ACP client to the agent. Imagine an IDE ACP client which wants to expose language refactoring to the agent, for example - I can't think of a better example for something more like Toad. As far as I know the protocol doesn't expose a way to inject tools into the agent from the ACP client.

lemmingon Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

Toad looks really nice, I will definitely try it out. I have some ACP questions if you don't mind.

First, from my reading of the ACP doc, one thing that seems pretty janky is if the ACP client wants to expose a tool to the agent, e.g. if Toad wanted to add the ability for the agent to display pretty diffs. In the doc they recommend stdio to the ACP server, then stdio to an MCP server, and then some out of band network request back to the ACP client. Have you thought about this, or found a better solution working on Toad?

Similarly, it would be useful to be able to expose a tool which runs a subagent using ACP using a different agent, e.g. if I'm using Claude for coding but I'd like to invoke codex for code review. Have you thought about doing anything like this? Is it feasible over the protocol?

lemmingon Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

I wonder if, for instance, optimizing for speed may produce code that is faster but harder to understand and extend.

This is generally true for code optimised by humans, at least for the sort of mechanical low level optimisations that LLMs are likely to be good at, as opposed to more conceptual optimisations like using better algorithms. So I suspect the same will be true for LLM-optimised code too.

lemmingon GPT-5.2-Codex

Interesting, I have consistently found that Codex does much better code reviews than Claude. Claude will occasionally find real issues, but will frequently bike shed things I don't care about. Codex always finds things that I do actually care about and that clearly need fixing.

lemmingon Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

The instantaneous torque definitely helps, and EVs are often heavier which helps with stability. But if you're towing anything with significant air resistance (e.g. a boat, a caravan, a big trailer) it kills your range. The general rule of thumb is that it will cut your range in half, which depending on your original max range is ok for some use cases, but unacceptable for others.

lemmingon The highest quality codebase

I agree, I mostly use Claude for writing code, but I always get GPT5 to review it. Like you, I find it astonishingly consistent and useful, especially compared to Claude. I like to reset my context frequently, so I’ll often paste the problems from GPT into Claude, then get it to review those fixes (going around that loop a few times), then reset the context and get it to do a new full review. It’s very reassuring how consistent the results are.

lemmingon Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain

If this law pushes back against the idea that it's ok to make endless tech products which are essentially future rubbish as soon as you buy them, then I think that's a good thing. Perhaps products like this just shouldn't exist until we have better ways of dealing with the remains.

lemmingon Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

The same way that the law prevents kids drinking their parents’ alcohol - it doesn’t. But having it be illegal sends a signal, even though it’s possible to circumvent it, and also allows prosecution if warranted.

lemmingon Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

I'm very sorry to hear your story, and I'm really glad the medication has worked well for you and your family. It's early days, but it seems to be working well for ours too.

I also really admire the way you're dealing patiently with everyone in this thread arguing in bad faith, you have a lot more tolerance than I do! Hopefully it's not getting to you. Best wishes.

lemmingon Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

Do you have a plan to get her off, or is she on the maintenance drug for life?

It's too early to say. Obviously the idea is to get her off it if possible.

SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin.

That's a hell of a claim, which could use some evidence.

lemmingon Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

Our 11 year old daughter was seriously depressed recently. N=1, but fluoxetine was life changing (and potentially life saving) for her, at least.

lemmingon What if you don't need MCP at all?

Mario has some fantastic content, and has really shaped how I think about my interface to coding tools. I use a modified version of his LLM-as-crappy-state-machine model (https://github.com/badlogic/claude-commands) for nearly all my coding work now. It seems pretty clear these days that progressive discovery is the way forward (e.g. skills), and using CLI tools rather than MCP really facilitates that. I've gone pretty far down the road of writing complex LLM tooling, and the more I do that the more the simplicity and composability is appealing. He has a coding agent designed along the same principles, which I'm planning to try out (https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...).

lemmingon A Guide for WireGuard VPN Setup with Pi-Hole Adblock and Unbound DNS

Only to the domain level, not individual websites.

lemmingon Vibe engineering

While this is true, I definitely find that the style of the work changes a lot. It becomes much more managerial, and less technical. I feel much more like a mix of project and people manager, but without the people. I feel like the jury is still out on whether I’m overall more productive, but I do feel like I have less fun.

lemmingon ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team

The question is when in this timeline will you get arrested or at least detained for questioning for it? We’re already at the point where you might get fired or deported for it.

lemmingon Children and young people's reading in 2025

No, we just have the one daughter. But I was a boy, and I loved reading too. I don't remember needing books to mirror my experience, in fact I probably preferred books which didn't since I mostly found my own experience fairly boring!

Some recent-ish off-the-beaten track suggestions that our daughter really liked that might be appealing to boys:

1. The Unknown Adventurer books (https://www.theunknownadventurer.com): beautifully illustrated, Journey to the Last River is wonderful. We have the Lost Book of Adventure too, but our daughter didn't enjoy that one as much, I think that one would appeal more to boys. Looking at the page I see they have a third, I'll have to pick that up.

2. Almost anything by David Almond, although his young adult stuff tends to blend into his adult work and not all of it is appropriate/interesting depending on reading/maturity level. Plenty of male protagonists, mostly universal themes, some quite strange. I'd recommend reading them first to get an idea if they'd be good for your kid, I loved them. His first book Skellig is probably a good place to start just to see if you like the style or not, although they're all quite different from each other.

3. We really liked A Wish in the Dark, by Christina Soontornvat. Some social commentary but also a great story in an interesting world: https://soontornvat.com/books/a-wish-in-the-dark/. I also highly highly recommend All Thirteen, the non-fiction story of the Thai cave rescue, absolutely amazing story: https://soontornvat.com/books/all-thirteen/.

4. The Orphans of the Tide series by Struan Murray are great adventure/fantasy stories, if occasionally a little dark for younger kids. We got distracted before getting to the last one in the series, but the first two were good.

I can't help so much with stories specifically for boys, but generally I find that just focusing on high-quality, well written books of any stripe are a good bet. If you have a good bookshop nearby, go and find the helpful person - they can help steer you. And buy books from them so they stick around :-)

lemmingon Children and young people's reading in 2025

Our daughter is 11 and is a voracious reader. This isn’t my experience at all. We read daily to her until she didn’t want us to any more a year or so ago. But we never had any trouble finding good books, some new and some older.

I really love kids books of all sorts - especially the illustrated ones are real works of art.

lemmingon I'm absolutely right

Yeah, I want a feature which stops my agent as soon as it says anything even vaguely like: "let me try another approach". Right after that is when the wheels start falling off, tests get deleted, etc. That phrase is a sure sign the agent should (but never does) ask me for guidance.

lemmingon Tesla offers mammoth $1T pay package to Musk, sets lofty targets

I hear it's happening next year.

lemmingon Bear is now source-available

> if you went and volunteered for a highway cleanup, would you get mad if Bezos drove on the highway you cleaned?

No, but I would get mad if Bezos made a ton of money charging people to drive on a clean highway after I had cleaned it for free.

lemmingon Bear is now source-available

I don't know about you, but if I'm going to donate to/work for charity, I'd like to ensure it's for someone who actually needs it rather than the Amazons of the world. I don't feel a pressing need to donate any money or time to them.

lemmingon Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

For what it's worth, I don't need a Mac app for this, just to be able to edit the app I've (mostly) built with the tools I already have. I like the idea of being able to do the 90% on the phone, and iterate on it etc, but for the remaining part I'd prefer to use my existing tools.