dbuxton
dbuxton on Hacker News
It’s not a very good way of doing that though. Rather than constraining the callback url to pre-registered partners, you just need to enter “Claude Code” as your product name and it lets you in.
You can install the mcp by creating an api app without being a partner.
Do they mean Opus 5.5 or Opus 5?
Would have been better if they had been frozen
https://triptruth.appAll the travel apps out there are built for the instagram generation but dinosaurs like me still use TripIt for travel tracking and itinerary sharing. But its parsing hasn’t changed since Concur bought it 15 years (!) ago and I thought it would be nice to have LLMs read the cancellation minutiae for trips and put in a simple timeline for sharing.
Many runways have something called PAPI (precision approach path indicator) which does something similar. Basically you have four (or two sometimes for less precise version) lights which appear either red or white depending on whether you are high or low on the glidepath and you aim to get two reds and two whites - more whites means too high, more reds too low.
I can see that this would be not very intuitive for left/right guidance but are similar systems used in ship navigation?
Well I just rent so no idea. Not sure they will end up lower as presumably it will all need to be conducted by a FAA double-starred technician who is not just vibe coding it
27 mins endurance (?) for $5 of power. Not bad. I rent a 172 and have been paying a $5/h fuel surcharge for the past few months due war in Iran - but at UK avgas prices 27 mins in my plane would be $55ish. Haven’t looked into the details but kind of crazy impact on economics of aviation if this size plane (10x 172 MTOW) can actually do useful short haul
There's no such thing as a "timeless" translation - if you read something written by Victorians you'll get all sorts of overlaid assumptions and biases, just ones that are unfamiliar
At the moment a lot of companies thinking of it like speculative capex - we can just stop doing it if we don’t get results, or we can easily optimize.
My concern is that with all the bundling that the model labs are doing the lock-in becomes harder than anticipated to unwind
It is just extremely difficult in most companies to draw a line between a specific feature and an amount of revenue. A lot of engineering has a stochastic type of impact.
(It’s often easier to see what a feature does to reduce costs though)
As well as cost-per-task I think it's worth thinking about speed, especially in non-coding contexts that benchmark less cleanly
We've started trying to do some comparison videos to capture more of the UX vs speed vs cost stuff e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7479891... which one of my team did for my LinkedIn account (disclaimer: marketing)
(In this particular case Deepseek was way slower than GPT 5.5 but I think that's because it installed Libreoffice half-way through the task!)
It's genuinely depressing.
The problem with this is that you have a consistency problem if you want to take action. The only way of making your agents read-write rather than read-only in practice is to use the underlying systems rather than try and pool information in a data lake.
But that does make it more complex to build simple information retrieval use cases.
I would encourage anyone who hasn’t to try and see a glassblowing demonstration. It’s about as different from programming as any creative process could be - real time, intuitive, working with an unstable material - but something in it really spoke to me.
The Chrysler museum in Norfolk VA has amazing free demonstrations almost every day which are amazing if anyone happens to find themselves in Southern Virginia.
We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some easy pre-bake recipes that wake them from their dogmatic slumber
Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.
I had the same experience with chatbots, but we shipped a chatbot module a year ago that helps with complex config questions by reading and answering based on a Salesforce Experience site.
I was skeptical but it gets a 68 NPS from users, even if we do get the occasional "why are you investing in AI I hate it" coming through the feedback channel.
As ever, the issue is "what problem are you solving". If it's that you want more people to put their hand up and talk to you/order something, chatbots seem like a bad solution. If it's that you have a ton of complex docs that people have to read in order to implement and use your product, it's not the solution but it's probably part of a solution.
From the comments looks like lots of people looking at this problem from different angles.
We (harriethq.com) also have a somewhat similar insight, which is that setting up connectors is a drag for non-technical users, and a lot of systems don't support per-user connectivity so need an API shim.
The thing I like about this (Agent Vault) approach is that it's more extensible than what we're offering, which is a full managed service. But we've found that some features (e.g. ephemeral sandboxes to execute arbitrary e.g. uvx/npx based mcps) are just a big pain to self-deploy so it's easier for us to provide a service that just works out of the box.
Kudos to the team, this looks great and I'm looking forward to playing with it
Posted by
dbuxton on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @11:37AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://github.com/dbuxton/google-docs-mcp
Hi! Everyone I've shown this to has been confused that it didn't exist already, so thought I'd share with the wider community.All the Google Docs MCPs out there seem to be broken in annoying ways so I thought I'd make one. For instance they do character-offset-based editing and LLMs are reliably terrible at counting characters.This one just works. (It uses the similar pattern-matching search...
I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to just a dumb data layer which is easily swappable.
Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved.
Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.
I played this in my head a few times and don’t get it.
I assume we are talking
- China
- maybe South Korea?
- US (or is US not one of the 4?)
- Russia (ok this is explicit)
I think there might be an interesting idea in here but there is some confusion that’s stopping it coming out
Can someone enlighten me?
The flip side of this is that if model capabilities are extremely strong such that they are able to saturate the benchmarks, the differentiation and defensibility of a wrapper solution built on top are significantly reduced.
IANAL but e.g. Claude Cowork is already good enough that it's hard to see how the legal tech startups are going to differentiate except around access controls, visual presentation of workflows, etc. And that's in a heavily enterprise/compliance-aware/security-focused context.
Don't get me wrong, that's still a big "except" - big enough for massive companies to be built. Personally the anxiety of being so close to being squashed by the foundation models would make me unhappy as an entrepreneur but looking at the market it seems like many people have a higher risk tolerance.
Of all the challenges you face as a startup, the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential. Just choose a jurisdiction where investors understand how the legals work (Delaware C-corp, UK Ltd is OK too) and there's a finite administrative burden and/or commoditized tooling in place to help you handle it.
Now, that may not work in all jurisdictions for reasons of local taxation etc (and you'll have to work out payroll tax, benefits etc) but that's almost never anything to do with the legal entity type!
> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.
How is that different from trust erosion?
Loved “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” by Herman Wouk - middlebrow from the 70s but no less good for that.
Re-read “The Art of Not Being Governed” by James C Scott which is really mind-expanding stuff.
I have played with this but been underwhelmed. However I do think probably on the right track.
I know the ecosystem not-at-all (sum total knowledge of the CAD ecosystem is that my kids got a Bambu printer for Hanukkah) but it feels to me that current LLMs should be able to generate specs for something like https://partcad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which can then be sliced etc.
Curious to know what others think? I come at this from the position of zero interest in developing the fine design skills needed to master but wanting to be able to build and tweak basic functional designs.
I used to love Heroku review apps!