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willchen

252 karma · joined March 24, 2015

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willchen··on TypeScript 7
really excited to see this release! i've been using TypeScript for several projects like https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad which is >250k lines of TypeScript and the speed-up makes things like running typescript check as a pre-commit hook painless

thanks DanRosenwasser and team for building such an awesome tool for so many years!

willchen··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
i think this underscores why having coding agents being open-source is a really good thing
willchen··on Google copybara: moving code between repositories
i used this tool when i was at google, extremely helpful in open-sourcing things from google3 to github. still, i'm glad to just directly develop on github now :)
willchen··on Launch HN: Relvy (YC F24) – On-call runbooks, automated
Interesting! tbh, we don't have any runbooks and pretty minimal telemetry set up (we're a very small team :), do you have any recommendations on which telemetry service to use to get started? right now, our services run on a combination GCP Cloud Run + Vercel
willchen··on Show HN: Clink – Bring your own CLI Agents, Ship instantly
thanks! we recently added MCP support so we're figuring out how to make it easier to find & add the right MCP tools for your use case :)
willchen··on Show HN: Clink – Bring your own CLI Agents, Ship instantly
Really interesting project! I tried it last week and ran into same errors and today I tried it again and it worked.

I'm curious how the Clink desktop app connects to the web app. Is it sending some kind of oauth token so you can use call Claude Code, etc, on behalf of the user?

FWIW, I created an open-source project in this space https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/ and it's great to see people trying different approaches :)

willchen··on Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)
neat! thanks for sharing
willchen··on Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)
yes! https://www.dyad.sh/docs/guides/ai-models/local-models
willchen··on Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)
very interesting - when we ship MCP support you should be able to use nia!
willchen··on Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)
we have an extensive system prompt to instruct the Supabase to follow RLS best practices: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/blob/de2cc2b48f2c8bfa401608c...

What you're describing as the fail-open behavior is from the Supabase platform (and not specific to any app builders): https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/postgres/row-level...

willchen··on Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)
we have features like manual context management https://www.dyad.sh/docs/guides/large-apps#manual-context-ma... which lets you select files to use in your context window
willchen··on Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)
Thanks! Check out our Prompt Library feature: this way you can create reusable prompts across your apps: https://www.dyad.sh/docs/releases/0.18.0
willchen··on Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)
I'm working on adding MCP support to Dyad soon! What's your favorite MCP servers? (trying to curate a list of recommended MCPs)
willchen··on Deepseek R1-0528
I love how Deepseek just casually drops new updates (that deliver big improvements) without fanfare.
willchen··on Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
I recently built an Electron app (http://dyad.sh/) and I looked at other options like Tauri, but Electron has such a mature ecosystem (e.g. https://www.electronforge.io/) that I was able to ship a cross-platform app in a couple weeks (Mac+Windows) and then adding Linux support was pretty trivial.

The only downside from my point of view is the large installer size for Electron apps, but it hasn't been a big issue for our users (because they will need to download quite a bit of other stuff like npm packages to actually build apps with dyad)

willchen··on Launch HN: Relace (YC W23) – Models for fast and reliable codegen
I tried sending an email to support@relace.ai (which was linked in the doc) and got:

Your message wasn't delivered to support@relace.ai because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail.

btw, I'm interested in trying out relace for my AI app generator tool: http://dyad.sh/

willchen··on Show HN: Dyad – free, local, open-source AI app builder (v0/lovable alternative)
thank you! agree there's still rough edges, making lots of improvements each week to make it better :)
willchen··on Show HN: Dyad – free, local, open-source AI app builder (v0/lovable alternative)
thank you!

I definitely want to support users who want to use cloud inference or local inference because you do need a pretty beefy machine to run the top open source models.

Right now Dyad supports React (vite), but i'm working on supporting more frameworks in the future! (other languages is probably further off)

I think practically, the nice part with Dyad is that all the code is on your computer, so if you want to switch back and forth with Cursor/VS Code, it's seamless.

willchen··on Ask HN: What's the best way to get started with LLM-assisted programing?
If you like chat interfaces, you might like this open-source tool I built, which is basically a chat UI but it saves you the hassle of copying and pasting files https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad

Basically it's running a chat UI locally on a Git repo and you can reference files like "#foo.py" and then if you want to edit a file, you hit "Apply code" for a markdown code block and then it shows you a code diff so you can review the changes before actually updating the files. I've found this makes it much easier to curb stray edits and keep the LLM edits focused on what you actually care about.

willchen··on Ask HN: What's the best way to get started with LLM-assisted programing?
If you're just getting started and want to keep using Pycharm, you can check out https://dyad.sh/ it's an open-source standalone AI pair programming tool so you don't need to switch IDEs. It's also focused on making it like you're pair programming with a real engineer, asking you clarifying questions and having you pick from different options when the request is unclear.

You can also check out the GitHub repo at: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad

(disclosure: I created Dyad)

willchen··on GitHub was down
I'm wondering why this isn't on the front page? It has a lot of points in 23 minutes.
willchen··on Comparison of Mesop with Streamlit and Gradio
Hey folks - I shared about Mesop on Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40567327) ~2 months ago and got a ton of really helpful feedback. For those unfamiliar, Mesop is a new open-source Python UI framework that enables you to rapidly build AI apps. We often get asked how Mesop differs from other Python UI frameworks like Streamlit and Gradio so we've created a comparison guide between Mesop and Streamlit and Gradio.

Home page: https://google.github.io/mesop/ GitHub: https://github.com/google/mesop

Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions about the comparison guide or Mesop in general. Thanks!

willchen··on Comparison of Mesop with Streamlit and Gradio
Hey folks - I shared about Mesop on Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40567327) ~2 months ago and got a ton of really helpful feedback. For those unfamiliar, Mesop is a new open-source Python UI framework that enables you to rapidly build AI apps.

We often get asked how Mesop differs from other Python UI frameworks like Streamlit and Gradio so we've created a comparison guide between Mesop and Streamlit and Gradio.

Home page: https://google.github.io/mesop/ GitHub: https://github.com/google/mesop

Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions about the comparison guide or Mesop in general. Thanks!

willchen··on Is Mesop and Web Components the cure to Front-end fatigue?
Any particular parts that you feel are inadequate with web components? Web components aren't a panacea but they have definitely come a long way in the past decade.
willchen··on Is Mesop and Web Components the cure to Front-end fatigue?
Thanks, yeah describing Mesop API as essentially a UI over RPC is a good analogy and is basically what's happening under the hood [1].

I guess one funny thing is that I actually identify as a FE developer more than a Python developer :) I've been doing FE for much longer than Python and agree that there's warts on both sides (and no language/ecosystem is perfect). For me, a lot of the FE fatigue comes from all the inherent challenges with developing client-side applications (e.g. the necessity of bundling/minifying for optimizing performance, transpiling for legacy browsers) so I don't say this to throw stones at the other side but simply to point out my own fatigue having dealt with this complexity for years.

Right now Mesop is definitely more focused on the demo use cases, but we're also trying to push the limits of the kinds of apps you can build in Python so it doesn't have to be something you throwaway when you want to deploy a scalable app.

[1] https://google.github.io/mesop/internal/architecture/#life-o...

willchen··on Is Mesop and Web Components the cure to Front-end fatigue?
We posted on Show HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40567327 ~a month ago and got a ton of great feedback.

Since then, we've made a lot of updates to Mesop, including adding support for web components which allows you to write custom JS and wrap existing JS libraries.

We've also fully re-designed our home page at https://google.github.io/mesop - with many more code examples and demo, which hopefully shows how Mesop is different than some of the other Python UI frameworks out there.

As always, appreciate any feedback about the project. Thanks!

willchen··on Show HN: Mesop – Open-source Python UI framework
Thanks! I've used Google's internal version of Bazel but it wasn't until this project where I had to spend a lot of effort getting Bazel working in a new project, which is honestly a lot of work and not very straightforward :(

What helped me the most was looking at other projects using Bazel with similar tech stacks and then assembling it together, e.g. :

- https://github.com/angular/components - https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorboard

Alex Eagle of https://www.aspect.build/ has a lot of great resources on using Bazel - both on YouTube and the aspect website.

willchen··on Show HN: Mesop – Open-source Python UI framework
Thanks! Yeah, a lot of innovation happening in this space.
willchen··on Show HN: Mesop – Open-source Python UI framework
Good point, we'll try to rephrase this to be clearer. Thanks for the feedback!
willchen··on Show HN: Mesop – Open-source Python UI framework
Thanks! Agree, we wanted to provide a high-degree of customizability with a CSS-like API https://google.github.io/mesop/components/style/ so you can create delightful demos.
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