SatvikBeri

10 ms·

61.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
I use one Claude instance at a time, roughly fulltime (writes 90% of my code). Generally making small changes, nothing weird. According to ccusage, I spend about $20 of tokens a day, a bit less than 1 MTOK output tokens a way. So the exact
62.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
What made me feel old today: seeing a 36-year-old referred to as an older type
63.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
One thing to keep in mind is that the core of an LLM is basically a (non-deterministic) stateless function that takes text as input, and gives text as output. The chat and session interfaces obscure this, making it look more stateful than i
64.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
I pretty consistently heard people say Codex was much slower but produced better results, making it better for long-running work in the background, and worse for more interactive development.
65.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
I use Claude Code every day, and I'm not certain I could tell the difference between Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.0 if you gave me a blind test
66.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
I use jj workspaces, which are pretty similar to git worktrees. But 95% of the time I just use one Claude.
67.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
I noticed it get a lot better with the 4.5 models specifically. Before then, I would have to tell Claude "do a web search for the docs for jj, then do XYZ." Now I just tell it to "do XYZ using jj"
68.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
From the article: "So what's an old guy yelling at Claudes going to do? He's going to write his own coding agent harness and give it a name that's entirely un-Google-able, so there will never be any users. Which means th
69.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
Seems like there's a speed/autonomy spectrum where Cursor is the fastest, Codex is the best for long-running jobs, and Claude is somewhere in the middle. Personally, I found Cursor to be too inaccurate to be useful (possibly becau
70.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
I particularly liked Mario's point about using tmux for long-running commands. I've found models to be very good at reading from / writing to tmux, so I'll do things like spin up a session with a REPL, use Claude to prot
71.
What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent(mariozechner.at)
421 points by SatvikBeri 8mo ago|173 comments
72.
by SatvikBeri 8mo ago
For what it's worth, I've ported a lot of heavily optimized numpy code to Julia for work, and consistently gotten 10x-100x speedups, largely due to how much easier it is to control memory allocations and parallelize more effective
73.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
I mean, as I said, I literally had Claude prototype them, and then I rewrote the working one from scratch. I didn't commit any of the code written by Claude.
74.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
Just awscli
75.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
What...what conflict do you think I'm instigating, exactly? Whether the command line is a better interface than Excel?
76.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
I am really shocked at the response this trivial anecdote has gotten. I could state it much more generically: we had an annoying Excel sheet that took ~10 minutes a week, I vibe coded a command line tool that brought it down to ~1 minute a
77.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
Not technically a nanny, but not dissimilar. In this case, they do several types of work (house cleaning, watching 1-3 kids, daytime and overnights, taking kids out.) They are very competent – by far the best we've found in 3 years – a
78.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
I didn't choose the payment structure, and the point is that a CLI is not a high bar. Something that we used to spend ~10 minutes a week on with spreadsheets is now ~1 minute/week.
79.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
There are several different types of work they can do, each one of which has a different hourly rate. The time of day affects the rate as well, and so can things like overtime. It's definitely a bit of an unusual situation. It's n
80.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
I think that article was basically wrong. They asked the agent not to provide any commentary, then gave an unsolvable task, and wanted the agent to state that the task was impossible. So they were basically testing which instructions the ag
81.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
Sure, here are my own examples: * I came up with a list of 9 performance improvement ideas for an expensive pipeline. Most of these were really boring and tedious to implement (basically a lot of special cases) and I wasn't sure which
82.
by SatvikBeri 9mo ago
I usually use one instance, sometimes two. But this is a reasonable account of Chris Rackaukas using 32 instances at a time to do boilerplate maintenance across a bunch of open source repositories: https://www.stochasticlifestyle
83.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
> do wonder how hard it'd be to mask the default "marketing copywriter" tone of the LLM by asking it to assume some other tone in your prompt. Fairly easy, in my wife's experience. She repeatedly got accused of using
84.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
Setting up a new dev instance took 2+ hours with pip at my work. Switching to uv dropped the Python portion down to <1 minute, and the overall setup to 20 minutes. A similar, but less drastic speedup applied to docker images.
85.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
I handle our company's RDS instances, and probably spend closer to 2 hours a year than 2 hours a month over the last 8 years. It's definitely expensive, but it's not time-consuming.
86.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
That's why I give the LLM a readonly connection
87.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
This is pretty much it – when we had follow up interviews with the C++ devs, they had usually only had time to try one or two high-level approaches, and then do a bit of profiling & iteration. The Julia devs had time to try several appr
88.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
The closest publicly available problem I can think of is the 1 billion rows challenge. It's got a bigger dataset, but with somewhat simpler statistics – though the core engineering challenges are very similar. https://github
89.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
I posted my CLAUDE.md here, there's really not much to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262674
90.
by SatvikBeri 10mo ago
Are you aware that Julia is a compiled language with a heavy focus on performance? It is not in the same category as NumPy/MATLAB/R

More ›