MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why are developers switching to CLI-based coding agents?
by just_human | 2025-09-03 13:09:33+00:00
In the last few months, most of the engineers I know have switched from Cursor to CLI-based agents (mostly Claude Code). I personally love anything CLI-based, but I've been surprised to see developers who almost never open a terminal now becoming Claude Code and terminal power users overnight.

Technically, there isn't a real need for agents to run in the terminal - an agent running in Cursor chat can use the shell as a tool and arguably has a nicer UI. The value you'd normally get from CLI tools (piping I/O, composability) doesn't really apply to how these agents are being used.

My theory is twofold. First, you get better value using CLI agents like Claude Code because you don't need to pay a "toll" to an IDE like Cursor. Second, there are some killer features in Claude Code like "plan mode" that wouldn't have been possible for Anthropic to build without controlling the experience. But curious to hear what others think, and whether CLI-based agents are here to stay?
by const_cast | 2025-09-03 13:09:34+00:00
No, it's very much related, although not guaranteed.

The reality is that many passkey implementations right now come with attestation and are closed off. That's simply not possible with passwords.

Passwords, as a concept, just can't be abused in that way. Because they're just strings of text. Passkeys, however, CAN be - and we're already seeing that happen.

It could reverse course, but then it would need to reverse course and stay reversed. Forever. Even though there's lots of money and control being left on the table.

That's a big problem.
by meltedmen | 2025-09-03 13:09:36+00:00
I built a lightweight SaaS to track competitor prices without spreadsheets.

How it works:

Paste a product link (marketplaces, brand stores, indie shops).

The app fetches the title, image, and current price automatically.

Group items into categories (e.g., smartphones, laptops, accessories).

Set your own price and currency to compare vs. market.

One-click refresh to pull the latest price.

Supports multiple languages (EN/UK/PL/CS/ET) and currencies.

Free plan: 1 category · 5 products. Full access: $3/month.

Would love feedback from people working in e-commerce, pricing, or marketplace sales.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-03 13:10:00+00:00
This does not mesh with my personal experience. I find that AI reduces task noise that prevents me from getting in the flow of high level creative/strategic thinking. I can just plan algorithms/models/architectures and very quickly validate, test, iterate and always work at a high level while the AI handles syntax and arcane build processes.

Maybe it's my natural ADHD tendencies, but having that implementation/process noise removed from my workflow has been transformational. I joke about having gone super saiyan, but it's for real. In the last month, I've gotten 3 papers in pre-print ready state, I'm working on a new model architecture that I'm about to test on ARC-AGI, and I've gotten ~20 projects to initial release or very close (several of which concretely advance SOTA).
by tomrod | 2025-09-03 13:10:46+00:00
> I would describe the study size and composition as a limitation, and a reason to pursue a larger and more diverse study for confirmation, rather than a reason to expect an "uphill battle" for replication and so forth.

Maybe. I believe we both agree it is a critical gap in the research as-is, but whether it is a neutral item or an albatross is an open question. Much of psychology and neuroscience research doesn't replicate, often because of the limited sample size / composition as well as unrealistic experimental design. Your approach of deepening and broadening the demographics would attack generalizability, but not necessarily replication.

My prior puts this on an uphill battle.
by WJW | 2025-09-03 13:10:52+00:00
I don't think that's correct. It only shows renewable sources, and of those solar and wind are (obviously) the vast majority here in NL. But it's not even possible to enable showing coal and nuclear on that site, even though you can't convince me that they are literally not operating at all on a relatively cloudy day like this.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be surprised if renewables were a majority of the grid these days. It's just that this dashboard contains insufficient information to conclude that.
by jodrellblank | 2025-09-03 13:11:11+00:00
> "The down-votes DO NOT invalidate anything. Or perhaps Bill's bots / fans are in play here"

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You half remember one blunt interaction that you conveniently can't find and you're dedicating your life to shitting on him and his project. How is that on-topic here?
by 010101010101 | 2025-09-03 13:11:20+00:00
Depends - sometimes with simple Jira boards, sometimes with other tools like Smartsheets or Air Table or a simple spreadsheet, sometimes with post-its and a white board, sometimes with no system formal or otherwise. My point is less about Jira specifically and more about tool/process dogma (although I do think Jira is the tool of choice for most “we must used the Agile Toolkit Scaled Enterprise Framework Productivity System MegaProcess for all things!” types than others, mostly because of having been around forever and because of Atlassian pitching organizations to use Jira workflows for compliance as if it were uniquely capable of tracking when someone clicked a button in a UI).
by j45 | 2025-09-03 13:11:24+00:00
The gap i see is the definition of "AI use" is not clearly delineated between passive (usage similar to consumption) vs active.

Passive AI use where you let something else think for your will obvious cause cognitive decline.

Active use of AI as a thought partner, and learning as you go yourself seem to feel different.

The issue with studying 18-22 year olds is their prefrontal cortex (a center of logic, will power, focus, reasoning, discipline) is not fully developed until 26. But that probably doesn't matter if the study is trying to make a point about technology.

The art of learning fake information from real could also increase cognitive capacity.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-09-03 13:12:12+00:00
Personally, I don't think you should ever allow the LLM to write for you or to modify / update anything you're writing. You can use it to get feedback when editing, to explore an idea-space, and to find any topical gaps. But write everything yourself! It's just too easy to give in and slowly let the LLM take over your brain.

This article is focused on essay writing, but I swear I've experienced cognitive decline when using AI tools a bit too much to help solve programming-related problems. When dealing with an unfamiliar programming ecosystem it feels so easy and magical to just keep copy / pasting error outputs until the problem is resolved. Previously solving the problem would've taken me longer but I would've also learned a lot more. Then again, LLMs also make it way easier to get started and feel like you're making significant progress, instead of getting stuck at the first hurdle. There's definitely a balance. It requires a lot of willpower to sit with a problem in order to try and work through it rather than praying to the LLM slot machine for an instant solution.
by throw0101d | 2025-09-03 13:12:19+00:00
For those in Ontario, Canada, see perhaps:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

* https://www.ieso.ca/market-data

The output for individual generators is available at:

* https://sygration.rodanenergy.com/gendata/today.html

(AIUI, historical data available for a fee.)
by JohnnyRebel | 2025-09-03 13:13:09+00:00
We’re tackling ingestion primarily through direct bank connections. Users connect their bank and financial accounts, and transactions flow into our system automatically. From there, we store the data in a structured database and normalize it into a consistent internal format so it can be aggregated and queried reliably.

Right now, the ingestion layer handles most of the heavy lifting—parsing the raw feeds, mapping fields into a standard schema, and ensuring consistency across institutions. Our next version will include layering AI to help with classification and enrichment (e.g. categorizing ambiguous transactions, detecting anomalies, and filling in context where the raw data is thin).

So it’s a mix: the ingestion pipeline makes the data uniform, while AI helps make it more useful and accurate for analysis. As we move toward our “agentic” roadmap, we see AI playing a bigger role in automating the messy parts of ingestion as well.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-03 13:13:28+00:00
Not in China:

https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/china-restricts-ai-...

"That’s because the Chinese Communist Party knows their youth learn less when they use artificial intelligence. Surely, President Xi Jinping is reveling in this leg up over American students, who are using AI as a crutch and missing out on valuable learning experiences as a result.

It’s just one of the ways China protects their youth, while we feed ours into the jaws of Big Tech in the name of progress."
by abirch | 2025-09-03 13:13:28+00:00
College was transformed from an apprentice style institution of the 1500s to mass produced thing of the early 2000s (where a professor can "teach" 500 students in a class).

I think a return to the apprentice style of institution where people try to create the best real world solution as possible with LLMs, 3D printers, etc. Then use recorded college courses like our grandparents used books.
by mnky9800n | 2025-09-03 13:13:35+00:00
I feel like saying papers pre peer review should be taken with a grain of salt should be stopped. Peer review is not some idealistic scientific endeavour it often leads to bullshit comments, slows down release, is free work for companies that have massive profit margins, etc. From my experience publishing 30+ papers I have received as many bad or useless comments as I have good ones. We should at least default to open peer review and editorial communication.

Science should become a marketplace of ideas. Your other criticisms are completely valid. Those should be what’s front and center. And I agree with you. The conclusions of the paper are premature and designed to grab headlines and get citations. Might as well be posting “first post” on slashdot. IMO we should not see the current standard of peer review as anything other than anachronistic.
by alias_neo | 2025-09-03 13:14:09+00:00
Interesting that the city I live in has basically nothing apart from a single, relatively small "battery".

I wonder, does residential solar with export count towards this sort of thing?

Presumably residential export is fairly small relative to everything else, but anecdotally, I export enough daily to run another home the size of mine.

EDIT: Clarify a sentence
by kridsdale1 | 2025-09-03 13:14:42+00:00
Check out visionOS 26’s Immersive Photo mode. Any photo in your iCloud library gets converted by an on device model to (I assume) a Gaussian Splat 3D scene that you can pan and dolly around in. It’s the killer feature that justifies the whole cost of Vision Pro. The better the source data the better it works.

I can literally walk in to scenes I shot on my Nikon D70 in 2007 and they, and the people, look real.
by ssousa666 | 2025-09-03 13:14:55+00:00
I recently joined a company that writes Python after working for a Kotlin shop for the past four years. I miss Java/Kotlin every single day. I have no gripes with Python itself and I enjoy writing it, but I've still never seen a large python codebase that remains as coherent, structured and understandable as the average large JVM language codebase. It's as if the structure of the language itself materially informs the structure of the codebase as it grows.
by dtagames | 2025-09-03 13:15:22+00:00
I disagree completely. Shadow DOM is a huge help and when combined with per-component CSS using the :host() and nesting pattern, makes for very small CSS files and very short CSS class names. In other words, as far away from Tailwind as you can get.

It's also possible to import shared CSS in a base class and add it with super.styles() so you don't lose anything.
by throw0101d | 2025-09-03 13:15:48+00:00
> If they cash in, they crash their own market, so while this is 100% corrupt and problematic... they aren't going to ever see that money.

If they cash in all at one that may happen. If they 'DCA' themselves out over a period of 2-3 years (before 2028) then a crash is less likely to occur.
by tallanvor | 2025-09-03 13:16:16+00:00
It's not historically done. Printed newspapers obviously didn't have links and neither did televised news. Even when the news media started publishing online, it's not like the courts were quick to post the decisions online.

And there's also the idea that you should be able to at least somewhat trust the people reporting the news so they don't have to provide all of their references. --You can certainly argue that not all reporters can or should be trusted anymore, but convincing all journalists to change how they work because of bad ones is always going to be hard.
by infecto | 2025-09-03 13:16:40+00:00
That’s one interpretation, but I think there’s a distinction between “asking more questions because I’ve forgotten things” and “asking more questions because I’m exploring further.”

When I use LLMs, it’s less about patching holes in my memory and more about taking an idea a few steps further than I otherwise might. For me it’s expanding the surface area of inquiry, not shrinking it. If the study’s thesis were true in my case, I’d expect to be less curious, not more.

Now that said I also have a healthy dose of skepticism for all output but I find for the general case I can at least explore my thoughts further than what I may have done in the past.
by SunlightEdge | 2025-09-03 13:16:42+00:00
I am wondering if the best way to interview IT people is:

1. Give them an IQ test

2. Have a coffee chat with them about their experience and ask a few technical questions

If people are smart, and decent communicators and broadly have worked in the role you are looking for (doesn't have to be same tool) they will likely be fine. I don't think testing for coding skills is needed - but that's just my opinion.
by angus-prune | 2025-09-03 13:16:52+00:00
What a great write up of a fascinating story.

I'm constantly impressed at the writing coming out of the emulation world. I can't think of any other technical niche that produces such consistently approachable writing about such esoteric technical subjects.

I don't understand hardware, I barely program. I don't even use emulators. Yet I will always read write ups like this and from the dolphin blog and elsewhere which give me a great understanding of reverse engineering, the community nuances, and the hacks and shortcuts that made the games possible on the limited hardware available at the time.
by matwood | 2025-09-03 13:17:39+00:00
I write all the time and couldn't quote anything off hand. What I can talk about are the ideas in the writing. I find LLMs useful as an editor. Here's what I want to say, is it clear or are there better words, etc... And then I never take the output blindly, and depending on how important the writing is I may go back and forth line by line.

The idea that I would say 'write an essay on X' and then never look at the output is kind of wild. I guess that's vibe writing instead of vibe coding.
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-03 13:17:40+00:00
If you are referencing The Time Machine, I remember reading a neat comic book version of the book when I was a kid. Sometimes I feel we are quite close to having Eloi and Murlocks evolving already.

>the gentle, childlike Eloi and the subterranean, predatory Morlocks.

Seems like a nice metaphor for the current two political parties we are provided with.
by Taek | 2025-09-03 13:17:48+00:00
Cognitive decline is a broad term, and a research paper could claim "decline" if even a single cognitive metric loses strength.

When writing was invented, societies started depending on long form memorization less, which is a cognitive "decline". When calculators were invented, societies started depending on mental math less, which is a cognitive "decline".

I'm sure LLMs are doing the same thing. People aren't getting dumber, they are just outsourcing tasks more, so that their brains spend more time on the tasks that can't be outsourced.
by infecto | 2025-09-03 13:17:58+00:00
Fair point, though I think there’s a difference between “questions out of confusion” and “questions out of curiosity.”

If I’m constantly asking “what does this mean again?” that would signal decline. But if I’m asking “what if I combine this with X?” or “what are the tradeoffs of Y?” that feels like the opposite: more engagement, not less.

That’s why I’m skeptical of blanket claims from one study, the lived experience doesn’t map so cleanly.
by valebearzotti | 2025-09-03 13:18:11+00:00
xmcp is a TypeScript-first framework for building MCP-compatible backends. It provides an opinionated project structure, automatic tool discovery, and a streamlined middleware layer for request/response processing. You can deploy an xmcp app to Vercel with zero configuration.

Check out Vercel's documentation on how to get started: https://vercel.com/docs/frameworks/backend/xmcp

Or bootstrap a new project from the template: https://vercel.com/templates/backend/xmcp-boilerplate
by tomrod | 2025-09-03 13:18:28+00:00
> I feel like saying papers pre peer review should be taken with a grain of salt should be stopped.

Absolutely not. I am an advocate for peer review, warts and all, and find that it has significant value. From a personal perspective, peer review has improved or shot down 100% of the papers that I have worked on -- which to me indicates its value to ensure good ideas with merit make it through. Papers I've reviewed are similarly improved -- no one knows everything and its helpful to have others with knowledge add their voice, even when the reviewers also add cranky items.[0] I would grant that it isn't a perfect process (some reviewers, editors are bad, some steal ideas) -- but that is why the marketplace of ideas exists across journals.

> Science should become a marketplace of ideas.

This already happens. The scholarly sphere is the savanna when it comes to resources -- it looks verdant and green but it is highly resource constrained. A shitty idea will get ripped apart unless it comes from an elephant -- and even then it can be torn to shreds.

That it happens behind paywalls is a huge problem, and the incentive structures need to be changed for that. But unless we want blatant charlatanism running rampant, you want quality checks.

[0] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/591280547898462209?lang=e... if a car were a manuscript
by PathOfEclipse | 2025-09-03 13:18:53+00:00
I think it was always a mistake to pretend hyperthreading doubles your core count. I always assumed it was just due to laziness; the operating system treats a hyperthreaded core as two "virtual cores" and schedules as two cores, so then every other piece of tooling sees double the number of actual cores. There's no good reason I know of that a CPU utilization tool shouldn't use real cores when calculating percentages. But, maybe that's hard to do given how the OS implements hyperthreading.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-03 13:18:55+00:00
> buy from companies that are lower-cost and less focused on selling you "enterprise support" (supermicro et al).

From past experience, vendors like SuperMicro aren't much cheaper at scale because Dell can give 80% discounts on volume, and most Dell server sales are done via Channel with an MSP who will manage and administer the system.

Ofc, this continues to reinforce my belief that the "AI boom" in it's current form (and once you remove the scooby doo monster mask) is basically a "Datacenter/Telecom Bubble" 2.0 like back in 2000-01. The multiples, messaging, vendors, and margins are almost the exact same.

During the Dot-com Boom, Telecom and hardware companies were also expanding DC and telecom capacity massively (to surf and host a website on the Internet, you kinda need Internet and web hosting), and when the Dotbomb happened, the Telco bubble collapsed subsequently as well (remember WorldCom/MCI?)

That's why the 2000s were horrible for anyone with a CS/CE/CSE/EE degree, because both software AND hardware industries collapsed. Imagine a world in the late 2020s where you cannot land a job as a Fullstack Engineer OR an ML Infra Engineer - that was the 2000s except with older stacks.

That's also why I'd be optimistic if a bust happens - the overcapacity in compute that arose from the Telecom and Dot-Com Busts both helped usher the Cloud, SaaS, E-Commerce, and Social Media boom because the infra has been laid and became cost effective. It is also in this context that Paul G's "cockroach" and "ramen profitability" essay came to the fore.
Show HN: Requesting Feedback: RealCustomAI – Personalized AI That Remembers You
by RealCustomAI | 2025-09-03 13:18:59+00:00
Supports Groq, Gemini, and GPT integrations.

This is a personalized AI service that automatically saves (encrypted) every conversation and injects past relevant context into each new message — so the AI can understand you better and respond more accurately.

You can upload past conversations to feel the improved quality immediately. And all saved data is fully viewable and deletable anytime you want. It’s a service designed so that your AI can keep remembering and evolving with you.

Guide

https://realcustomai.online/guide

Use in Custom GPT (GPT-4o & GPT-5 only, due to OpenAI policy)

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-689afc60d3d48191a72416390f9d713f-rea...

Use via browser extension in Groq, Gemini, and GPT web (optional, any model)

(Currently under Chrome Web Store review — will switch to Chrome extension as soon as approved.)

See the guide above for more details.
by rco8786 | 2025-09-03 13:19:01+00:00
I love this comment!

"use client" does NOT mean it only renders on the client! The initial render still happens on the server. Additionally, all imports and child components inherit the "use client" directive even when it's not explicitly added in those files. So you definitely cannot just look for "use client".

See what I mean now?

From the docs:

```

On the server, Next.js uses React's APIs to orchestrate rendering. The rendering work is split into chunks, by individual route segments (layouts and pages):

Server Components are rendered into a special data format called the React Server Component Payload (RSC Payload).

Client Components and the RSC Payload are used to prerender HTML.

```

HUH?

```

On the client (first load) Then, on the client:

HTML is used to immediately show a fast non-interactive preview of the route to the user. RSC Payload is used to reconcile the Client and Server Component trees.

```

HUH? What does it mean to reconcile the Client and Server Component trees? How does that affect how I write code or structure my app? No clue.

```

Subsequent Navigations On subsequent navigations:

The RSC Payload is prefetched and cached for instant navigation. Client Components are rendered entirely on the client, without the server-rendered HTML.

```

Ok...something something initial page load is (kind of?) rendered on the server, then some reconciliation (?) happens, then after that it's client rendered...except it's not it actually does prefetching and caching under the hood - surprise.

It's insanely hard to figure out and keep track of what is happening when, and on what machine it's actually happening on.