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marwannon Not everything should cost a token: the case for deterministic AI

> Has everyone really become so stupid now?

I wouldn't mistake stupidity for ignorance. A lot of "tech-sensitive", yet non-technical people are using agents/vibe coding these days. Their level of understanding is very basic ("JSON is structured data", "I need to reformat this to fit my need"), but they wouldn't get that the best way of doing things does not necessitate burning tokens.

marwannon Not everything should cost a token: the case for deterministic AI

I believe many non-technical people are spinning up AI agents nowadays without having a basic understanding of what happens behind the scenes, and usually, with no interest in learning. They prompt, watch the agent work and see the magic, without questioning the structure even a little.

I don't think we should blame them, as they are non-technical, but either educate them or put guardrails at the system prompt level.

marwannon I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

My European stack: - OVH for object storage, domain names and simple Wordpress websites - Scalingo/3DS Outscale for PaaS (looking for alternatives here!) - Mailjet used to be EU but they've been acquired by Mailgun - don't know if that's an issue. Brevo is okay as an email service provider but they could be way better.

marwannon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

I am working on a document collection app called Superdocu (https://www.superdocu.com), currently adding automated validation features for specific document types.

marwannon Major roll out of LaSuite Meet in the French administration

Good to see Frenchies/Europeans innovate for more sovereignty

marwannon Purrtran – ᓚᘏᗢ – A Programming Language for Cat People

Very impurrtant work

marwannon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

https://www.superdocu.com

Trying to make document collection a breeze for the last 5 years. Still not quite there, although we're making progress.

marwannon Show HN: I made a site that easily lets you generate AI images using templates

Neat. You might want to either filter words or blur NSFW pictures that were generated :P

marwannon Show HN: Chrome/Firefox add-on that finds cheap flights from your home airport

I wanted to spend less time looking for my next trip and decided to create myself a Chrome Extension that shows me cheap flights at random dates from the nearest airport.

Finally decided to submit it on both Chrome and Firefox [1] extension stores. The app is made with Vanilla JS and jQuery and is currently translated into English and French.

I used Skyscanner's API for the flights, Google's Geocoding API to get the location, Lufthansa's API to get the nearest airport IATA code and Unsplash for the background pictures.

I'm pretty sure there is much to improve, so looking for feedback!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/your-next-tri...

marwannon Show HN: Everlook – Find and list remote job opportunities

Site is minimalist, which is something I like. I wish the search would accept synonyms for technologies/languages, like "js" or "node.js" would be accepted for respectively Javascript and Node.

marwannon Ask HN: What are some bad engineering decisions that screwed startups?

Thanks a bunch!

marwannon Ask HN: What are some bad engineering decisions that screwed startups?

Thanks. Do you know more about the actual flaws of the architecture in the early days?

As I recall, they used to be hosted on Akamai and in colocation centres, but I don't know much about the rest.

marwannon Faking your death

The border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous. When I read these comments by MBAs or any other type of "educated" people, I wonder what their student loans helped them with

marwannon Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

Just made a small calculation: for 3,000,000 subscribers, our costs are moving from 1,500$ to about 13,000$ if we go through Mailchimp. I don't understand why they're making us pay for only storing an email list.

marwannon Don't bother creating a mobile app

It's both about local laws and local accounting customs. They are so different depending on countries that you almost have to develop a separate system if you want to enter another country. Or you keep it so simple that the value added is close to none...

marwannon Don't bother creating a mobile app

I suggest you have a look at this article we wrote about Slack as a platform: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-sla...

marwannon Don't bother creating a mobile app

It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories.

But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.

marwannon Don't bother creating a mobile app

The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice

marwannon Don't bother creating a mobile app

Yes they do, and I think it's also because of the "emotional" factors. People talk to a bot and have this feeling they have a personal assistant guiding them through the process.

marwannon Don't bother creating a mobile app

If all of our users were like you, we would have kept it I guess, but figures showed batch uses once a month instead

marwannon Don't bother creating a mobile app

True that. Before moving to an "invisible app", we were developing integrations for such accounting software, and we had an email forwarding function as Uber was also a big part of the expenses filed on our app. Still, a SaaS like ours had a hard time living only on mobile, and through our own mobile app

marwannon Scientists are working on space-based solar panels

So this is basically how satellites already work, except the energy would be sent back to Earth through microwaves. What would be the room taken on Earth?

marwannon Clipboard.js: Modern Copy to Clipboard

I'd love to see the ability to paste without using the keyboard too. Is that something possible/on the roadmap?

marwannon Andrei Soroker on startups getting everything wrong

The part about distributed teams might help our company as well. I wished I spoke Russian now!

It's normal to check what the competition does, but in the case of a company performing really well, it's always of use to have the brightest people with you, not against; even when you know you can crush them with money & reputation..

I'll think about becoming an advisor, looks like a great way to have a better footprint on society.

marwannon Andrei Soroker on startups getting everything wrong

Interesting in many aspects.

I've set up an SMS alert that reminds me each morning to "pay it forward". Andrei is right, helping people without asking for anything in return is actually the best way to get something in return.

Also I like how Stewart Butterfield is kind of honest when trying kato. What I wonder is why he didn't try to hire the team for helping build Slack.

marwannon How much of your audience is fake?

CPM can drive your costs down on a highly targeted niche. Let's say you want to target a female tech journalist living in SF and using Slack, you'd rather use CPM than CPC as you're pretty sure there are only 20 people that match the criteria and even though you'd pay 50 USD per 1000 impressions, you'd only pay 5 dollars to ensure each person in this particular niche sees your ad 5 times!

marwannon How much of your audience is fake?

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

marwannon I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

True that :( I've worked in the industry during 3 years before figuring that out! The problem is mostly for platforms to find a way of identifying which reviews are real or fake, depending on IP, rate of reviews, recency of the user, etc.

marwannon I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

In France, an agency created a fake company selling kebap sandwich on Mars. They had 105.000 views on their video, 46k followers, 20k facebook fans...and orders.

What's scary isn't the fact people buy fake reviews/followers/etc. but the fact people actually believe in these vanity metrics and want to order afterwards.

marwannon A Slack Client with Built-In Task Management

I think the new feature allows you to do it one way : from emails to slack channels but that's all...