MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: N.codes – Let users generated mini-apps in your app
by yungookim | 2026-01-19 01:37:56+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been working on n.codes, an open-source framework that lets end users generate their own UI within your app using natural language prompts.

The problem: Every SaaS team drowns in feature requests. Most aren't complicated—just different arrangements of existing data: "show me refunds over $500 that need approval," "export this report formatted for accounting," "bulk archive these records."

The backend can already do it. The bottleneck is exposing capabilities through UI.

How it works:

- Reads your components (React/Vue) to understand available UI primitives and styles

- Builds a capability map from your APIs, schemas, and docs

- When a user prompts, generate a sandboxed UI in your app that uses existing APIs and components

It's not for marketing pages or complex flows. It's for the 80% of internal tools that are just CRUD, dashboards, and workflows.

Current status: Early stage. The architecture is defined, core capability mapping works. Looking for feedback before building out the full runtime.

Looking for feedback on:

- Does this solve a real problem you've experienced?

- What would make you trust generated UI in a production app? (sandbox model, permissions, audit trails?)

- Similar approaches I should study?

GitHub: https://github.com/yungookim/n.codes
Site: https://n.codes
by throwaway2027 | 2026-01-19 01:38:20+00:00
Twitter/X incentivizes you to get engagements because with a blue checkmark you get paid for it, so people shill aggressively, post idiotic comments on purpose trying to ragebait you. It's like LinkedIn in for entrepreneurs. Reddit or it's power hungry moderators (shadow)bans people often. The amount of popular websites that people can shill their trash is dwindling, so it gets worse here as a result I assume too.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-01-19 01:38:21+00:00
This entire thing is like a smart crazy person building something that sounds useful but is also crazy. I am entirely out of the loop (by choice) of the whole Claude Code AI coding "buddies" so maybe I just don't know enough to see this as (genius | completely worthless | other). I don't think that Steve yegge, who I am mildly aware of, is actually insane so I assume this is either him trolling hard or just the result of using AI chatbots.

I'm not saying we're in Terry Davis literal schizophrenia territory but it doesn't seem "normal".
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-19 01:38:42+00:00
We found, especially with Opus and recent claude code that it is better/more precise at reading existing code for figuring out what the current status is than reading specs. It seems (for us) it is less precise at 'comprehending' the spec English than it is the code and that will sometimes reflect in wrong assumptions for new tasks which will result in incorrect implementations of those tasks. So we dropped this. Because of caching, it doesn't seem too bad on the tokens either.
by sroerick | 2026-01-19 01:38:45+00:00
Interesting - I just spent all day on this on an app which I'm using. My architecture is a little different (probably worse).

The app lives on a single OpenBSD server. All user data is stored in /srv/app/[user]. Authentication is done by accessing OpenBSD Auth helper functions.

Users can access their data through the UI normally. Or they can use a web based filesystem browser to edit their data files. Or, alternately, they can ssh into the server and have full access to their files with all the advantages this entails. Hopefully, this raises the ceiling a bit for what power users of the system can accomplish.

I wanted to unify the OS ecosystem and the web app ecosystem and play around with the idea of what happens if those things aren't separate. I'm sure I'm introducing all kinds of security concerns which I'm not currently aware of.

Another commenter brought up Perkeep, which I think is very interesting. Even though I love Plan 9 conceptually, I do sort of wonder if "everything is a file" was a bit of a wrong turn. If I had my druthers, I think building on top of an OS which had DB and blob storage as the primary concept would be interesting and perhaps better.

If anybody cares, it's POOh stack, Postgres, OCAML, OpenBSD, AND htmx
by rstuart4133 | 2026-01-19 01:38:51+00:00
Exactly. The fixes that would go some way to restore my trust are changed to the mechanisms surrounding the democratic process. Things like no more gerrymander, get rid of allowing corporations influencing the voting by flooding the system with money, somehow fix social media every ad is seen by everyone rather than allowing personalised lies be shown to specific voters, fix your electronic voting systems to a maintenance man with a screwdriver can't make new votes pop into existence (as happened once), stop disenfranchising voters - even to the extend of implementing compulsory voting. The distortions the USA allows now to the democratic process are beyond belief.

Oh, and a system that allows a politician to incite a mob to attack the sitting parliament, and get away without punishment, then pardon the perps is a joke.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-19 01:39:47+00:00
This is probably the hypervisor that Azure VMs run on, or perhaps Windows Server. Unlike Linux, (most) legacy apps (if they target NT) don't need VMs or containers; they run natively. You can compile for Windows 2000 on Windows 11 25H2 and run it natively on the host to test.
by stackskipton | 2026-01-19 01:40:07+00:00
Checks the bio Ahh, Zero Sysadmin experience so does not know about amount of legacy garbage being run at many companies and Enterprises.

Amount of software running on .Net Framework is mind boggling. If there is not 100% compatibility with .Net Framework on Windows running on Linux, forget it. I know of a company still using Visual FoxPro in 2020 and it was still being maintained.

Just like COBOL, across insane amount of businesses/enterprises/government, there are hordes of Windows machines, using technology that last saw updates in early 2000 computing away. Their last supported Windows Server was probably 2008 but somehow they still run on Windows Server 2019 and those licenses are not cheap.

Sure, Windows Desktop is clearly becoming "Whatever" by Microsoft but it's also pretty cheap. NT Kernel and UI work has to be done for server side and until that cash cow is dead, shoving slop into Windows Desktop is cheap revenue stream on work they have to do anyways.
by WCSTombs | 2026-01-19 01:41:12+00:00
On my own computers I typically have the two logins you mentioned, the user and the root account, since there's only one of me and only I use the computers. On the computer I recently had for work there were many accounts, since the sysadmins sometimes needed to SSH in. I also selectively added accounts for some of my coworkers as needed.

If I lived with any family, making non-sudoer accounts for them on at least some of the machines would seem like a pretty normal thing.
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 01:41:28+00:00
I think it's on open social apps to show that they're actually meaningfully better products, and that is possible because they're open. With luck, this may lead to an ecosystem where it's worth staying compatible and interoperable, and where users scoff if someone is trying to break it, and where users have an easy way to walk away. I know this sounds super idealistic but this did essentially happen with open source over a long time. At some point, people were just as skeptical of open source as we might be about open social.
by jcims | 2026-01-19 01:41:50+00:00
This is the best take I've seen in here.

I've been tinkering with it for the past two days. It's a very real system for coordinating work between a plurality of humans and agents. Someone likened it to kubernetes in that it's a complex system that is going to necessitate a lot of invention and opinions, the fact that it *looks* like a meme is immaterial, and might be an effort to avoid people taking it too seriously.

Who knows where it ends up, but we will see more of this and whatever it is will have lessons learned from Gas Town in it.
by tomhow | 2026-01-19 01:41:51+00:00
Please don't instigate flamewars about the relative badness of superpowers on HN. We're here for curious conversation, not political/ideological battle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670275 and marked it off topic.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-19 01:42:25+00:00
I've saved it to look at it in the future. I also remembered Kristina Tautanova's name (your editor). Looking up recent publications, she's done interesting work on analyzing pretraining mixtures.

https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1564/

Thanks to you both for two, interesting papers tonight. :)
by atleastoptimal | 2026-01-19 01:43:26+00:00
Knowing what users want and need is more the essence of a product manager, not a software engineer.

Software engineering is solving problems given a set of requirements, and determining the value, need and natural constraints of those requirements in a given system. Understanding users is a task interfaces with software engineering but is more on the "find any way to get this done" axis of value rather than the "here is how we will get it done" one.

I'd say what OP is referencing is that LLM's are increasingly adept at writing software that fulfills a set of requirements, with the prompter acting as a product manager. This devalues software engineers in that many somewhat difficult technical tasks, once the sole domain of SWEs is not commodified via agentic coding tools.
by topspin | 2026-01-19 01:43:33+00:00
Results compel expectations, and every "success" unlocks more latitude. A rational person cannot admire headlines that trumpet the wonderful achievements of digital dragnets in one case, and then suffer "concern" when more aggressive techniques are employed elsewhere: there are powerful incentives involved, as any thinking person should know. J6 was a big unlock for state surveillance; the results were met with gushing praise and no friction was incurred. Now new bounds are being pushed and the tools proliferate as the fine distinctions you wish were operative are blithely forgone.
by sublinear | 2026-01-19 01:43:34+00:00
I don't think anyone's job is copying "know-how". Knowing how goes a lot deeper than writing the code.

Especially in web, boilerplate/starters/generators that do exactly what you want with little to no code or familiarity has been the norm for at least a decade. This is the lifeblood of repos like npm.

What we have is better search for all this code and documentation that was already freely available and ready to go.
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 01:44:01+00:00
You can indeed backdate records. Since the application knows when it has first seen (i.e. indexed) your record, it can decide what to do with that information. If there's a difference, the Bluesky app, for example, shows its own indexing time, but also shows a separate panel saying the post is backdated to some other date. Other apps could choose to show something else.

It is possible to create links asserting a specific version by making a "strong ref" which includes content hash.
by rtpg | 2026-01-19 01:44:55+00:00
Not to argue too much against what you're saying but I thought that some EU gov't entities had moved off of Windows a while ago.

I know at least one university that doesn't put Windows on its machines either. While Uni requirements are not the same as "enterprise" requirements, it does feel close-ish.

Having said all this, I am very primed to believe that they have a Group Policy-sized hole in their systems. Just thinking they are doing ... something.
by parineum | 2026-01-19 01:45:00+00:00
Walmart employs a bunch of people in their stores and their profit margins (the money that leaves the community) are slim. That money is more than likely offset by their ability to offer lower prices than mom and pop places. Mom and pop places go out of business because they can't compete with economies of scale.

If Walmart was really extracting so much money from the communities they operate in, those communities would wither and the Walmart would eventually collapse as well. Walmarts rarely close.

> Why is this an issue?

Because customers prefer better service over worse service.

You're flipping the script on this criticism. Walmart offers better service (returns) and your saying it doesn't matter. Usually people argue that The mom and pop places offer better service but can't compete on price.
by ianburrell | 2026-01-19 01:45:10+00:00
Can Plan 9 do transactions? If so, it is unsuitable for being a database. It can run databases, because those can work without transactions. But can't do native writes without them. Can it do transactional reads? How would you represent isolation levels?

How do you do a join on Plan 9? I get the impression that these are coded in each client. But complicated queries need indexes and optimizer. SQL database has advantage that can feed it and it figures out the plan.
by epistasis | 2026-01-19 01:45:18+00:00
I don't find either truck a rational choice, but the car market can stay irrational longer than the climate can stay liquid.

The cultural irrationality of the truck/car market in the US crosses all ethnicities and class lines. If we are trying to evaluate the effectiveness of EVs, I think we need to compare the Rivian to the closest fossil fuel powered vehicle, even if it's something that causes me to disrespect the people making these choices.
by ryanSrich | 2026-01-19 01:45:20+00:00
> Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off

I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.

> or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it

Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it

> or they increase their pricing by 1000%

1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely

---

> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?

Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.

But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor
by aizk | 2026-01-19 01:46:13+00:00
Really the only thing that will move this is market share.
With Claude Code and other tools making it super easy to interact with a computer, and Microsoft repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot adding AI everywhere to Windows 11, I've seen a noticeable amount of people actually switch to Linux, despite every year being the year people switch to Linux - AI in your OS that you can't control seems to be the actual tipping point.
First it would start with the personal / hobbyists, then very slowly the corporate world (they will always play things safely and slowly), assuming Windows continues to decline, which it almost certainly will.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-19 01:47:11+00:00
I've been left wondering when is the world going to find out about Input Method Editor.

It lets users type all sorts of ‡s, (*´ڡ`●)s, 2026/01/19s, by name, on Windows, Mac, Linux, through pc101, standard dvorak, your custom qmk config, anywhere without much prior knowledge. All it takes is to have a little proto-AI that can range from floppy sizes to at most few hundred MBs in size, rewriting your input somewhere between the physical keyboard and text input API.

If I wanted em–dashes, I can do just that instantly – I'm on Windows and I don't know what are the key combinations. Doesn't matter. I say "emdash" and here be an em-dash. There should be the equivalent to this thing for everybody.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-19 01:49:20+00:00
People's worldviews determine their morality. People often share them to motivate others to act morally. Laws like copyright have more inconsistency among moral systems than physical theft. People might be confused about how to respond.

Our country's morality declined following self-, money-, and pleasure-centered worldviews. Following Christ can reverse all of that. AI is currently steeped in destructive worldviews, esp top suppliers, but some readers might be open to or have other views. If they adopt them, more good will happen.
by blackcatsec | 2026-01-19 01:49:52+00:00
The Intel thing is extremely true, but also equally true is the god awful Nvidia drivers that existed in the early days of Windows Vista. I don't even think Nvidia had a non-beta driver until 6 months after Windows Vista went gold. I think I recall seeing that Nvidia was responsible for something like 30% of crashes on Windows Vista.

Now, we could split hairs over where the failure was with that one--whether Microsoft not working enough with Nvidia, or whichever; but the point still stands.

Windows Vista walked so Windows 7 could run, essentially.
by bsdoubleya | 2026-01-19 01:50:07+00:00
Agreed on all counts. The post isn't arguing against AI infrastructure, just for more transparency about the current costs and more intentionality in how we use it while that clean baseload buildout happens.

The carbon-aware computing angle is actually in the full piece. It's one of the more promising near-term approaches since it doesn't require waiting for new plants to come online.

The irony of asking AI to solve its own energy problem isn't lost on me. Though to be fair, this post did use Claude for research, which I estimated at roughly 26 watt-hours and 8 gallons of water. Figured I should practice what I preach and disclose that.
by deepl_y | 2026-01-19 01:50:35+00:00
I'm not sure if this proves anything, but i saw this article of Opus playign pokemon, and here they were given actual screenshots, and it still says it navigated visual space pretty poorly despite the advancements https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6Lacc7wx4yYkBQ3r/insights-i...
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 01:50:40+00:00
Yeah, look for this part in the the article:

Lexicon validation works the same way. The com.tumblr in com.tumblr.post signals who designed the lexicon, but the records themselves could have been created by any app at all. This is why apps always treat records as untrusted input, similar to POST request bodies. When you generate type definitions from a lexicon, you also get a function that will do the validation for you. If some record passes the check, great—you get a typed object. If not, fine, ignore that record.

So, validate on read, just like files.
by sodafountan | 2026-01-19 01:51:26+00:00
I think stranger things have happened, but I don't really believe this is all that likely. Windows has sucked for 30 years now; tacking on another 15 probably won't change all that much about the current state of things.

Microsoft is an enterprise, and enterprises will continue to crank out enterprisey stuff. Linux is free and open source, developed by people with passion - some of it, I assume, is out of necessity. Unless the working world dramatically changes over the next 15 years, Microsoft is still going to Microsoft.

Windows sucks, Azure sucks, Office sucks. Microsoft is a corporation designed to make money, they have a deadlock on the market. From an investor's point of view, they're doing just fine. From a shareholder's point of view, uprooting the entire Windows base to make tech people happy isn't worth the investment. Microsoft hasn't been about making tech people happy since it went public. Microsoft makes money and employs people. People half-heartedly go to work to earn a living, they produce enterprise-grade software. Enterprise software makes money. That's all the investor cares about.

Actually, as a matter of fact, having Windows around to drive the continued development of Linux might be a good thing. I know Windows sucks, I know virtually anything technical is dramatically easier on Linux, but anything without competition eventually stagnates. Even if Windows exists simply as a "What not to do" in Linux, it's probably good that it remains around.

Currently typing this on a machine that dual-boots both Windows and Linux. Why? Because my laptop came installed with it.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-19 01:51:29+00:00
The definition of "militias" tends to depend on your political affiliation and the interpretation of that word is often a strong argument determined by how you felt about the 2nd amendment.

The framers certainly didn't think of militias either as the professional standing force that is the national guard nor could they probably even conceive of these little gun enthusiast wannabe paramilitary groups (or maybe if they wondered what if Don Quixote was an enormous asshole and also a small group instead of just a man)

But you get a group of people together, arm them, and give them the goal of being ready to use those arms for one purpose or another... that's a militia. It's a pretty broad term lots of folks want to shove into a pretty narrow definition.
by qingcharles | 2026-01-19 01:53:15+00:00
I moved into a commercial warehouse/workshop space in the center of Chicago in 2021 and was asked to install wired Internet for the building. The workshop that made up the other half of our building had Comcast. All the buildings across the street had Comcast.

Called Comcast. Sent a team out. Told me it would be $69,000 installation then minimum $800/month for gigabit. Complained up the chain. They sent another team out and apologized and told me the first team made a mistake on the price. The install would actually be $71,000.

AT&T was the only other wired option. Best they could offer was 1.5Mbps.

Ended up with a T-Mobile 5G router that gave us a solid 800Mbps down.
by 827a | 2026-01-19 01:53:33+00:00
I think you're critically misunderstanding a lot of this conversation, likely because you're thinking with emotion. I am not arguing that the current US administration is pursuing a coherent policy toward these ends. I am arguing that these are the ends, the only ends, and every policy action is only most-usefully interpreted through the frame of whether it increases or decreases the probability that the US arrives at that end in a good place. Many of the actions the US administration has taken are either irrelevant or negatively correlate with a positive outcome toward these ends. Some actions will have positive outcomes. I am not endorsing or expressing support for any political participant.

Your problem with MAGA is their disregard for reason, logic, and decency. Logic and Reason can only be assessed if you understand the full game that is being played. We, as citizens, certainly do not. As for decency; I would place high probability on decency being negatively correlated with the United States having a successful time in the next few decades. In times of chaos, decency is not something to hold in high regard.
by asdff | 2026-01-19 01:53:45+00:00
Screw teams. I had a meeting on teams for the first time ever so I decided to use safari, my designated un touched browser on my mac, to use teams in order to maximize compatibility. The thing kept shutting off my webcam every two seconds. I’d turn it on then it would shut off two seconds later. We switched to zoom for the remainder of the meeting.

Google’s offering isn’t much better either. I tried the same thing, going with safari, tested my connection, all was well. Then came time to share screen. No go! Kept complaining I need to enable permissions in safari for hangout that were already enabled.

Zoom just works on the other hand.