MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Seeking feedback on the architecture of a local-first, self-coding AI assistant
by kentedwin | 2025-08-16 20:00:31+00:00
I'm working on a prototype for a fully offline, voice-first assistant that can safely modify its own code using Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) editing. The goal is to create a private, extensible, and self-maintaining tool for developers.

The code isn't public yet (it's a 1-week prototype), but I'd love this community's feedback on the concept, architecture, and potential pitfalls.

My main questions are:

Viability: Any obvious dead-ends with using AST for safe, programmatic self-improvement?

Features: What critical developer-focused feature is missing?

Appeal: Is a local-first, self-refactoring agent a tool you would actually use?

Project Summary: Nerion

Nerion is an innovative local assistant designed to operate entirely offline, prioritizing user privacy and control. Its key feature is the ability to safely improve and modify its own code through AST editing, ensuring robust and secure self-coding. It's a modular platform that runs independently of cloud services.

Core Features

Offline & Private: Voice-first interaction (STT/TTS) and all logic runs 100% locally.

AST-Based Self-Coding Engine: Programmatically modifies code structure, not just text. This is the core of its refactoring and self-improvement capabilities.

Natural Language Planner: Translates instructions like "add logging to all functions in core/" into AST action plans.

Proactive Self-Improvement: Uses static analysis (pylint, flake8, radon) to find code issues and automatically generates AST plans to fix them.

Automated Testing & Refactoring: Includes CLI tools for multi-file batch operations, advanced code renaming/refactoring, and automatically generating/running unit tests from a plan.

Safety & Reliability

Safety & Rollback Guard: Automatically snapshots the codebase before applying any changes. If a post-change healthcheck fails, it automatically rolls back.

AutoTest Guard: Ensures that any newly generated unit tests pass before changes are finalized.

Self-Aware Coverage: Integrates coverage.py to ensure that code modifications don't decrease test coverage.

Interface

Voice & Chat: Supports Push-to-Talk (PTT) and Voice Activity Detection (VAD) modes. Also has an integrated terminal chat input for non-voice interaction.

Developer-Focused CLI: A comprehensive command-line interface for managing every aspect of the system, from running healthchecks to applying code modifications. All tools support JSON output for scripting.

Example Commands

Translate a natural language request into an AST plan and apply it $ nerion plan -i "add a try/except wrapper to all service functions" --apply

Scan the codebase, find issues, and generate a plan to fix them $ nerion self-improve scan --paths app core $ nerion self-improve plan out/analysis_reports/report.json

Safely refactor an attribute name across the entire project $ nerion rename --root src/ --old old.mod.thing --new new.mod.widget --apply
by YZF | 2025-08-16 20:01:40+00:00
It seems that there is no appreciation of a good architecture/system design any more. Nobody cares.

Leadership can't tell the difference. If anything the worse designs seem more impressive. Engineers often enjoy a bad design because it creates more work and job security. When there's a lot of work it seems like you're getting things done. Managers enjoy a bad design because it helps empire building, now that there is more work we need to hire more people and do more manager-y things. There are also a lot of inexperienced engineers in the work force who have never seen a well designed system.

In an organization running these badly designed system it's a political suicide to argue the design is bad. If the business is successful even more so because everyone will assume that a successful business means well designed software. A successful business will directly reward a bad design.
by jsnell | 2025-08-16 20:01:53+00:00
The 9% number comes from dividing by the number of IPv4 hosts reported by Censys, who do a portscan of the entire IPv4 space.

But obviously most clients will not have any ports open, and wouldn't be visible to the scan. It's not at all correct to treat that as the number of actively used IPv4 addresses.
by jama211 | 2025-08-16 20:02:15+00:00
Avoiding cloud dependency seems like a huge amount of effort to make life harder for yourself, just to end up with a situation where you have to rely on other parts of the cloud to do any other part of your work or business anyway. I mean, why stop there? Unplug yourself from the grid so you don’t have to depend on water or electricity just in case the companies that provide it stop working.

Yeah, you could do that, but honestly the only world where you’re able to live off grid safely without being attacked and looted is a world where the rest of society hasn’t broken down and still has a grid to connect to. Similarly, the only world where you could succeed as a software developer is one where the cloud generally still functions so you may as well use cloud services that are convenient and right there.

You’re not the military with military secrets, you don’t have anything to gain from being independent from the cloud.

Interesting as a thought experiment, though.
by tstrimple | 2025-08-16 20:03:48+00:00
I don't know what you're talking about. That is the current reality in the US. We have no recourse.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/disastrous-figures-show-poverty-i...

> Runoff and soil erosion continually pour dangerous chemicals into bodies of water statewide. The pollution starves fish of oxygen. It causes organic material to grow that threatens to sicken humans unless drinking water providers spend huge sums on decontamination. It similarly makes water unsafe for recreation. This spring’s heavy rainfall ended years of drought — and it also, as predicted, led to levels of nitrates in rivers above or near the highest on record.
by coffeeling | 2025-08-16 20:03:52+00:00
J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this.

There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system.

This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.
by vunderba | 2025-08-16 20:04:05+00:00
Only tangentially related, but during the height of the Covid crisis I remember Taiwan's response was particularly efficient. The vice president of Taiwan from 2016-2020 was Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) - a man with a DOCTORATE in epidemiology.

The last time the United States had a presidential figure with any kind of STEM background was probably Jimmy Carter (bachelors of science and served as a navy nuclear engineer) - nearly 50 years ago.
by dkdcio | 2025-08-16 20:04:52+00:00
> Another useful property of the model is interpretability.

Is this true? my understanding is the hard part about interpreting neural networks is that there are many many neurons, with many many interconnections, not that the activation function itself is not explainable. even with an explainable classifier, how do you explain trillions of them with deep layers of nested connections
by tfourb | 2025-08-16 20:06:09+00:00
I'm not defining liberties as privileges, I'm merely pointing out that your right to liberty ends where it infringes on somebody else's (and vice versa). Reasonable people can debate where exactly that line can be drawn and whose interests outweigh the other's (and this is what constitutional courts do on a daily basis). What I'm cautioning against is the narrative that just because it can be defined as "liberty" it must therefore be sacrosanct. This is doubly true for anything related to money, where most invocations of liberty on closer inspection just boil down to "don't tax the millionaires and billionaires".

"In pretty much every EU member state, you'll have to assume that random people on the street carry guns. Not everyone, not most, but some, none visibly. Would it make you more or less comfortable if the same number of people openly carried the same guns?"

You could search 10,000 random people going about their daily business in a major German city and with the exception of members of police and security services, you won't find a firearm. While a private gun ownership permit is reasonably simple to obtain, public open/concealed carry permits are not. And while criminal use of guns certainly exists, actual gun violence is so rare outside interactions between criminals that for any interaction with other members of society in public, the risk of a gun coming into it in any way is so small that in practice it can be ignored.

I've also travelled extensively in the EU and lived in several countries and I haven't seen a single firearm in public with the exception of members of police and security services (though I admit that armed private security services are not uncommon in some countries). Even if concealed carry were the main practice for private gun owners, I doubt that I wouldn't have spotted a gun at some point if it were at all common in a country (I've been in countries outside the EU where gun ownership is much more widespread and where I did see both open and concealed carry).
by dgfitz | 2025-08-16 20:06:17+00:00
As do I.

Because I’m a cynical person, I view LLMs like I’ve viewed rust for years: a neat tool that makes a small subset of people happy and a touch more productive.

The evangelical defense of either topic is very off-putting, to say the least.

@infogulch really nailed it with the comment about how the rust community wants influence/power, and ignores the responsibility that comes with said influence/power.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-16 20:07:09+00:00
Payment processors successfully got OnlyFans to ban sexually explicit content in 2021. The policy was just reversed before it ever went into effect - presumably the announcement generated some compelling data on how much less money everyone would make if the policy went through. (I don't know if this is also related to their transition away from Stripe for the NSFW-est content.)
by wrp | 2025-08-16 20:07:12+00:00
In South Korea, educational inequality due to inability to afford educational materials has been an issue for many years.

The argument against piracy is that people have the right to be compensated for their work. Consider this argument in the context of medical services. The extreme pirate position is equivalent to expecting doctors to provide cosmetic surgery for free. The extreme industry position is equivalent to saying doctors should let patients die on the sidewalk if they can't pay.

I'm torn on the issue of sharing files, because I've watched its rise over the past 25 years and seen how tremendously it has improved educational opportunities for poorer peoples.
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-16 20:08:24+00:00
I wonder why the author views CQRS negatively and then later gives this classic CQRS advice:

>What this means in practice is having one service that knows about the state - i.e. it talks to a database - and other services that do stateless things. Avoid having five different services all write to the same table. Instead, have four of them send API requests (or emit events) to the first service, and keep the writing logic in that one service.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-16 20:08:35+00:00
That one isn't an example of this. It is actually a Windows Subsystem (at least WSL1) that exposes Linux syscalls, so is for Linux userspace programs. There is also the Windows Subsystem for Win32 and there used to be a Windows Subsystem for Unix.

Linux Subsystem would be completely wrong, because it is a Subsystem of Windows not of Linux.
by philwelch | 2025-08-16 20:11:15+00:00
Any VTOL/STOVL jet has to trade off other performance qualities for VTOL/STOVL capability. Likewise, the Gripen still needs a longer runway, which limits the use of “improvised” airfields.

In practice the main benefit of STOVL has been in naval aviation. CATOBAR carriers are expensive and challenging to build, especially if you don’t have the economy of scale of building a dozen of the same class instead of just the 1-2 most countries can actually afford. A STOVL jet can also operate from an amphibious assault ship. The feasibility of the “improvised airfield” concept with modern jets is unproven and controversial, while STOVL naval aviation has been successfully done for decades.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-16 20:11:36+00:00
Wealth taxes may become a necessity as AI eliminates opportunities for employment. But it still feels wrong, since it is basically a retroactive tax on what people have worked for and earned already. The rates and thresholds really matter for it to be fair.

> The rate starts at 1.7% for those with net wealth of €3m, rising to 3.5% for fortunes over €10m. It is payable on worldwide assets.

An almost 2% rate on wealth of less than 10M feels wrong to me. These are mostly people who have worked hard to become rich and it is taking away what they deserve IMO, after they already worked for it under one set of rules. I feel like the thresholds should be more like 100M and above. Also it doesn’t seem appropriate to tax worldwide assets. Why should Spain have any claim to someone’s assets in some other location entirely, especially for this type of retroactive wealth tax?
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-16 20:12:11+00:00
What is your definition of "stochastic parrot"? Mine is something along the lines of "produces probabilistic completions of language/tokens without having any meaningful internal representation of the concepts underlying the language/tokens."

Early LLMs were like that. That's not what they are now. An LLM got Gold on the Mathematical Olympiad - very difficult math problems that it hadn't seen in advance. You don't do that without some kind of working internal model of mathematics. There is just no way you can get to the right answer by spouting out plausible-sounding sentence completions without understanding what they mean. (If you don't believe me, have a look at the questions.)
by jakelazaroff | 2025-08-16 20:12:33+00:00
Not sure why parent is being downvoted here. Even without getting into whether it's possible for technology to be apolitical, many AI companies have explicitly political goals.

For example, OpenAI's charter is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". They go on to list more specific political goals downstream from that: https://openai.com/charter/
by czhu12 | 2025-08-16 20:12:36+00:00
Just a personal story:

I built and ran a site that allowed users to upload a stable diffusion model and generate images with them. I originally received money via stripe, and then promptly got kicked off after about 9 months. They threatened (via a clearly automated message), that the fines could be as high as 400k, ended up paying a 4k fine and getting off ASAP.

While we were on stripe though, the charge back rate was probably ~2-3%, which, I think is probably fine.

Moved over to Coinbase commerce and sales dropped from ~5k / month to 1k / month.
by vunderba | 2025-08-16 20:13:03+00:00
Grab a classroom of children and ask them all to draw a nine-pointed star. EVERY SINGLE child, irrespective of their artistic proficiency, will have zero issues.

Those children also didn't need millions of training samples/data of stars with nine points on them. They didn't need to run in a REPL, look at the picture, and say, "Oh darn the luck, it seems I've drawn a star with 8 points. I apologize, you're absolutely right, let me try again!", and lock themselves in a continuous feedback loop until they got it correct either which incidentally is a script that I put together to help improve the prompt adherence of even the SOTA models like Imagen4 and gpt-image-1. (painfully slow and expensive)
by buildsjets | 2025-08-16 20:13:12+00:00
I make fresh Pico de Gallo twice a week so I chop a lot of onions. Besides an even dice, I’m interested in not dicing my fingertips. Radial slicing a 180 segment or adding horizontal slices is too unstable.

My method is to cut in quarters, give a quarter a vertical dice, rotate 90, do another vertical dice, then go longitudinal.
by tux3 | 2025-08-16 20:13:21+00:00
It is important to note that authors are not compensated when you buy access to an academic article in a journal.

In fact, since the authors both do the work of creating the content and peer-reviewing submissions, they must also pay the journal in exchange for doing this work.

Think of it like the patient paying the hospital, the doctor paying the hospital, and in exchange the doctor can do their work at a prestigious hospital, which is all very lucrative (for the hospital)
by pablo-chacon | 2025-08-16 20:13:32+00:00
I just released UrbanOS-PoC, a fully open-source system that uses real-time data to optimize public transport flow, without surveillance, black-box models, or cloud lock-in.

It runs on general-purpose hardware (Docker + Postgres + Python), uses MQTT for live data ingestion, and processes anonymized geospatial behavior to produce real-time routing and schedule predictions, without needing any personal identifiers.

I built this system solo over the last few years while raising two kids. I kept it closed for a while, hoping it might help our situation, but since it doesn’t rely on buzzwords, the attention was limited. So now it’s free for anyone who wants to work on urban planning, public mobility, or smart cities, without compromising privacy.

No prompts No user tracking No centralized platform Just logic, movement, and open AI for cities

You can simulate live data, inspect all modules, and spin it up locally on a laptop. Whitepaper, API docs, and demo setup included.

Repo: https://github.com/pablo-chacon/UrbanOS-POC Whitepaper: GitHub Wiki
by NikolaNovak | 2025-08-16 20:14:14+00:00
I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.

I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-16 20:14:17+00:00
I don't think I quite agree with the power/responsibility analogy. To me, "power" the way its used in the quote implies some kind of control over something/someone else. That's not really the kind of relationship I see between a programming language and the software that uses it - if I write a program in C++ I don't really view the C++ committee as having "power" over my program. In addition, it's not something a spec really does anything to address - you can be plenty irresponsible with your (hypothetical) power with or without a spec

I'm not sure I'd agree that a programming language has a duty to produce a spec either, whether it's for foundational software or not. Outside of legal/regulatory requirements, I think a hypothetical "perfect" low-level/systems language would be used no matter whether it had a spec or not simply because it was the best tool for the job. In that sense the language devs' "responsibility" would simply to make the language as suitable as possible for users' software. Of course, legal/regulatory requirements throw a wrench into that thought experiment, but hopefully the point made it across.

None of that is to say that asking for a spec is unreasonable, especially if you're required to have one to use the language. I'm just more on the skeptical side as to its overall importance.
by Lerc | 2025-08-16 20:14:52+00:00
>You'd have to commit yourself to believing a massive amount of implausible things in order to address the remote possibility that AI consciousness is plausible.

We have a few data points. We generally accept that human consciousness exists. Thus we accept that there can be conscious things. We can either accept or deny that the human brain operates entirely by cause and effect. If we deny it then we are arguing that some required part of it's nature is uncaused. Any uncaused thing must be random because anything you can observe that enables you to discern a pattern of behaviour is, by definition, a cause. I have not seen a compelling argument to say that this randomness could in any way give rise to intention. The other path is sometimes called neurophysiological-determanism. While acknowledging that there are elements of quantum randomness in existence, it considers them to play no part in the cause and effect chain of human consciousness other than providing noise. A decision can be made to follow the result of the noise as one might flip a coin, but the determination to do so must be causal in nature otherwise you are left with nothing but randomness.

In short, we make decisions based upon what is. not what isn't. If we accept that human consciousness is as a result of causal effects, by what means can we declare the impossibility of a machine that processes things in a causal nature incapable of doing the same.

The easy out is to invoke magic. Say we have a soul, God did it or any manner of, by definition, unprovable influences that make it just so. Doing that does require you to declare that the mechanism for consciousness is unprovable and it is an article of faith that computers are incapable of thinking. As soon as you can prove it, it ceases being magic and becomes a real world cause.

I don't claim to know that any computer exists that has an experience comparable to a humans, but I find it very hard to accept that it could never be the case.
by jrm4 | 2025-08-16 20:15:33+00:00
As someone who is 48 and could stand to do a bit more of this myself; I find myself alarmed and shocked at the extent to which younger folks appear to have normalized "social fear."

I remember being younger in college and me and friends were talking about dating and whatnot, and I'm just like -- look, you'll have a much better time, you just gotta get over your fear of rejection. And I was surprised then to the extent that people looked at me and got genuinely offended, like "how dare you not take how TRAUMATIC this can be seriously."

And this generation feels a lot like that. Most of those friends ended up agreeing with me, and I do get that it FEELS bad to, e.g. look stupid or whatever in such a situation -- but the fact that it's an "intense feeling" doesn't mean I'm at all wrong here -- if better socialization is what you actually want.*

*edit, and so I suppose what might be useful is to better hit this head on in our public discussions? Love this article for that.
by eth0up | 2025-08-16 20:15:37+00:00
I appreciate the info, but it honestly seems this person is blabbering, barely presenting even anecdotal evidence and literally just saying it's bad because she thinks maybe it is, because, hey look at my friend over here who nods. Definitely makes me wonder if the "Dr" in her handle is more than text.

That said, I'm not surprised people argue against it. But my teeth haven't "crumbled" after more than a decade of regular apatite use, and that's under various impacts and hard use. If there's any validity to her concerns about it, she should actually discuss them, instead of talking about charcoal and her friend.