wkirby

I'm not here to defend DHH --- but I think "AI" has materially changed since 2024. I think that it's entirely reasonable to have shifted perspective on the technology and its applications since 2024.

I've never written code by hand, I've always used a text editor on my laptop. I still design and develop software with my brain, and in conversation and collaboration with my team and stakeholders --- and these days frequently an LLM. Sometimes (often) I make edits by hand, but it has reached a point where generating code by prompt is so much faster that it allows me to allocate more time and brainpower to the actual bottlenecks.

I'm sure a lot of the signatories on this list feel the same.

There's a lot here I agree with and a lot I disagree with. If I'm doing any kind of serious data work I'm probably not reaching for a spreadsheet for things like processing, manipulation, statistical analysis. But if I'm presenting tabular data, or god forbid editing it? I'm using a spreadsheet --- and I've built a whole side project out of making working with CSVs as tabular data as pleasant as opening my favorite text editor.

> It doesn’t matter if you don’t use a note taker AI, if even one person on the call uses one

Yeah, but I'm unwilling to be that person.

I've got a suite of CSVs that represent both edge case and performance issues, and I script timing opening/common operations using Apple Scripting. It's not perfect, but it gives us a sense if we're introducing back-breaking regressions. I try for our large files to test specifically with real-world, large data dumps from US government sources; I feel these are representative of actual large-CSV workloads. You can see me popping off about it on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wyattkirby.com/post/3mnfvma4cgk2g

We're not necessarily aiming to be the fastest application in the world; find/replace is probably still faster to just do sed in the terminal. But if you're looking to do something like sort, filter, actually engage with the tabular data, then we can handle hundreds of thousands of rows --- files that excel won't even open.

I'll take a look at blackbear. One core difference I see is that we're a native app, fully offline. There is a single handshake with the licensing server on app start, but it's optional. License validation is handled fully locally, and missing network access is non-blocking for any features.

Wow, thanks!

Literally starting my monday weekly standup now, I'll run it and see what's up. Thanks!

My ideal use case is to pipe audio from both my microphone and capture system audio so things like our weekly team standup or my 1:1s with my devs can all have reliable, decent notes without taking me out of the flow of the conversation.

I think clearly the _leader_ in the space is granola, but I'm just not going to use a cloud provider for this.

Drafts have anything like that?

I'm very intrigued by AI note takers, but I'm absolutely unwilling to expose me or my clients to this exact problem.

The solution (theoretically) is a purely local note taker, but I haven't found one that's any good. Tried meetily and others in the same vein, including briefly rolling my own. The breakdown in the pipeline seems to be reliable local diarization and speaker identification; even if the transcription is good, when speakers aren't accurately identified and speech isn't well grouped, there's no rescuing it in the summary step.

The integrated SQL bench runs a full duckdb so it should be super accessible. Let me know what kind of licensing terms you'd need to make this work --- you can drop me a line at wyatt[at]apsis[dot]io.

Still plugging away on Cassava, a CSV editor that sits somewhere between sublime text and Excel: https://cassava.dev/. Our most recent releases added first-class xls/xlsx file opening and an autofill handle.

The project goals are simple:

* Treat CSV files like first-class spreadsheets; don't do anything that isn't supported by serializing to/from CSV files

* Be as performant as your favorite text editor while retaining the ergonomics of a tabular data editor

I hope you check us out.

Replying for the ~5 people who happened to download earlier this afternoon, the rc20 build that was uploaded earlier today was missing the update server URL. Re-downloading rc20 should have a corrected build that will notify you of any updates in the future.

Coming soon. Just need to figure out the build and deploy story.

I keep telling my team "it's CSV but with some As thrown in there."

Almost certainly not; it really depends on how iCloud handles the sync. Cassava supports (at the moment) CSV (and its variants TSV, etc.) and JSON files. If your sync mechanism works well for those files in a text editor like vscode or sublime, then it will work well with Cassava. If not, there's not much we can do on our end - that's really a problem with how the sync mechanism works.

Linux support is there and working, half my team uses arch btw. Windows is working, I just don't build for it right now.

Excel is cripplingly slow (thought more capable). I don't like using text editors for sheet data; it's simply not as ergonomic to browse a CSV as a text file.

I've spent the last 8 weeks or so building the spreadsheet tool I want to see in the world. CSVs as first-class citizens with the ergonomics and speed of my text editor. It's been a great opportunity to explore building GUIs in rust, and to really experiment with coding assistants.

I'm looking for alpha/beta users https://cassava.dev/.

My experience thus far is that the local models are a) pretty slow and b) prone to making broken tool calls. Because of (a) the iteration loop slows down enough to where I wander off to do other tasks, meaning that (b) is way more problematic because I don't see it for who knows how long.

This is, however, a major improvement from ~6 months ago when even a single token `hi` from an agentic CLI could take >3 minutes to generate a response. I suspect the parallel processing of LMStudio 0.4.x and some better tuning of the initial context payload is responsible.

6 months from now, who knows?

Make. A. Smaller. Phone.

I see this as the next great wave of work for me and my team. We sustained our business for a good 5–8 years on rescuing legacy code from offshore teams as small-to-medium sized companies re-shored their contract devs. We're currently in a demand lull as these same companies have started relying heavily on LLMs to "write" "code" --- but as long as we survive the next 18 months, I see a large opportunity as these businesses start to feel the weight of their accumulated tech debt accrued by trusting claude when it says "your code is now production ready."

Looking forward to trying this out. An early comment: I would love to be able to override tool descriptions and system prompts from a config. Especially when working with local models, context management is king and the tool descriptions can be a hidden source of uncontrollable context.

I'm not trying to start a fight, but fwiw I adore both typescript and rails.

I dream of building an apple watch case that adds a T9 bluetooth keyboard. Turn the standalone Apple Watch into the dumbphone I've always wanted.

It’s trying to convey that Sam Altman is a dweeb.

Like my co-founder said, we're a small company based in the US, and hiring in foreign jurisdictions is both expensive and time consuming. We're currently set up to hire in the US and Canada, and while we'd be willing to expand our footprint for the right candidate, the easiest thing for us is to look for candidates in our current operating jurisdictions.

Apsis Labs | Staff Frontend Engineer | REMOTE (US, Canada) | $132,000 | https://www.apsis.io

Seeking a skilled frontend-focused full-stack engineer who thrives on building beautiful and functional user interfaces, but still feels comfortable on the back-end.

While we’re looking for developers with strong technical skills we don’t typically hire for experience in a particular framework or technology. We’re mostly seeking generalists that enjoy working in new technical stacks and have exceptional communication skills; because we’re a small company, everyone here takes on a lot of roles, and strong relationships with our clients are essential to our success.

We offer a 20-hour work week, retirement and health benefits, a competitive salary, an unlimited vacation and parental leave policy. You can read more on our work philosophy here: https://www.apsis.io/mission.

If you're interested, please reach out to us with any questions or with your resume at contact@apsis.io.

I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that this represents a "hideous theft machine", but I think even if we discard that, this is still bad.

It's very clear that generative has abandoned the idea of creative; image production that just replicates the training data only serves to further flatten our idea of what the world should look like.

Absolutely love the sound design on this.

The bottleneck is not putting code on the hard drive, or turning my thoughts into code — the productivity bottleneck is thinking and frankly no LLM is thinking better than an average developer.

Even if that’s what they mean (and I agree, that’s plausible, though not obvious) it’s still an asinine statement in the context of their broader thesis: advancements in generative AI are going to power the rise of the solopreneur. In absolute terms, an individual developer may be more productive in 3 years than they are today, but in relative terms, they will still be underpowered when compared to large teams building complex software. It only makes sense if we also assume the consumer and quality bar of today as well — and I don’t think LLMs are expected to crack time travel.

There will still be successful solopreneurs, just as there are today, but the idea that tooling-based productivity gains for individual developers are going to drive a power shift towards solo development and away from team-based companies is stupid.