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jondwillis

Chargeback with same evidence if you used a card.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026) on Monday September 14, 2026 @03:42PM (#49702777)
Remaking the Final Fantasy XI client. The idea is to have a ~0.9:1 faithful reimplementation of the retail client without a lot of the performance jank and cruft that the original has, and then layer optional improvements, QoL, graphical improvements, UI/UX improvements etc., on top with a plugin system and hackable source code for players across various private servers.

This approach allows people that just want to replace their familiar client with something slightly more modern/performant/cross-platform, all the way to entirely new experiences.

There's at least one other project, not yet open-sourced, which is going more in the direction of adding all of the enhancements by default.

https://github.com/jondwillis/kuluu-ffxi

Could’ve asked Claude to put this in your status line.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/statusline

Not that anyone is asking the question that you’re answering, but what’s amazing about their talented young team?
Re:AI Coding Without the Vibes on Sunday August 16, 2026 @03:15PM (#49322792)
If your harness has an “AskUserQuestion”-like tool, you can prompt it to use that, or, as I have done, add a stop hook that uses a smaller model to check if there was any similar prose that was output toward the end of the previous response.

Happy to share the implementation or package it up if anyone is interested.

Re: on Saturday August 15, 2026 @01:19AM (#49307877)
README is total slop, does not seem related to title… references videos in the first sentence… what videos???

There might be a “there” here but I think you need to put in more effort and thought about your audience, AI or not.

Re:Build Wide, Ship Narrow on Thursday August 13, 2026 @02:51AM (#49282529)
Trauma dump/sign of the frothy times:

I got fired back in June for protesting against trying to “design everything up front” (by adding more slop plan docs alongside the hundred of others that my tiny team was charged with producing per month) and instead opting to explore the problem space through code/experimentation. In actuality, I just asked to be remote again. I was burnt out and they were looking for an excuse to fire me.

Re:Why Did OpenAI's Head of Ethics Chloé Bakalar Leave? on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @10:44AM (#49259257)
In this article: no explanation of why she left.
Re:DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says on Friday August 07, 2026 @11:37AM (#49212110)
Accelerationism more like. Not just cutting aid to the poor.
https://maps.apple/p/0mZU6qFyXAEYRe

Yeah, Apple would never design a donut headquarters and make their employees live inside of it /s

Re:Lines of code. 1,596 BTC gone on Friday August 07, 2026 @12:36AM (#49205938)
Since this has become a thread about complaining about unreadable, brain-killing AI slop, I'll add mine:

>Six steps, no jargon. The note beside each one is the precise technical version, for anyone who wants to check the work.

I think this is called "concept leak" or "prompt leak" (please someone correct me, I can't recall at the moment.) It is one of my least-favorite failure modes. I notice it a lot when drafting landing pages, and it eats up a lot of time to edit away.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @06:14PM (#49175958)
Location: San Diego, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes, but not before November. Happy to go hybrid or onsite after that.

Technologies: TypeScript, Vercel AI SDK, Workflow SDK, MCP servers, Next.js, React, Node/Bun/Deno, NestJS, Postgres (Drizzle/Prisma/TypeORM), Redis, BullMQ, OpenTelemetry, Swift/SwiftUI, some Rust and Python.

Résumé/CV: https://jonwillis.dev/?utm_source=hn | https://github.com/jondwillis

Email: [email protected]

I'm an AI product engineer and sometimes-founder w/ 15+ years of experience across full stack web, native, mostly startups. I have been building agent systems and I have been at it long enough to know where they break, and I am a lifelong continual learner and striver.

Currently co-founder and CTO at Valara, bootstrapped and pre-revenue, where I built an AI-native orchestrated workflow product that reviews commercial and residential real estate appraisals for lenders. I turn my co-founder's and our design partners' experiences into product features.

Before that: a little more than two years at Uni Industries building AI, agent, and data plugins across two products, including an agent harness w/ structured tool use, skill systems, and eval pipelines.

In 2023 I shipped waggledance.ai, an open-source multi-agent system with DAG-based planning and parallel execution, before things like LangGraph or reasoning models existed. Earlier I was senior iOS at Curtsy (crash-free sessions from 99% to 99.9% at hundreds of thousands of MAU) and the first mobile engineer at Pluto TV, pre-seed through Series B, with the mobile/OTT team that I help lead there driving a lot of the early traction and growth, which eventually led to an exit in 2019.

---

I'm looking for a former-founder, senior, or staff IC role building AI products people actually use, or will use soon. Strongest on TypeScript, frontend, UX, agent architecture, and SDLC/ADLC.

I’ve found hooks to be really useful for correcting or inducing certain behaviors/outcomes that tend to occur during agentic development.

For example, I’m working on a project to remake the Final Fantasy XI client. My repository has a bunch of git submodules that reference other peoples’ related efforts, and an open source server. For example, despite including CLAUDE.md to suggest otherwise, Claude Code always ends up writing these insanely dense comments referring to specific files and lines of code in submodules. When those submodules update, now the comments are no longer correct.

So I added a hook to detect when comments are included. Then, for example, I have a deterministic heuristic and script involved to remove some kinds of comments, and another that asks Haiku to quickly LLM-as-a-judge whether or not to edit/remove the comment.

Similarly, I have a stop hook that reminds Claude to commit its code logically on main, noting that other changes may have been added by other concurrent sessions (I avoid worktrees and even branching for this particular project and stage of development.) It works well.

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2026) on Monday August 03, 2026 @07:27PM (#49162677)
FYI, I'm interested but trying to drill into any of the specific postings is reloading the `/open-positions` page for me (Safari, connected to a VPN.)

I'll go ahead and accept that `Staff Software Development Engineer in Test, Cloud Applications` role, thanks ;)

/frontend-design
Re:How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @11:42AM (#48908552)
A coworker started spamming this word in ~April while working on system design/architecture.
Thanks for the clarification. “Mode collapse” explains so much about how I have been experiencing output convergence and repetition for a while now.
Re:Australia is offering free daytime electricity on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @02:26AM (#48902959)
What is their fire suppression setup like??? Granted I guess they could be doing pumped hydro storage lol
lol I had started a “plugin compiler” that Claude also wanted to name after the Jacquard loom https://github.com/jondwillis/jacq

Fricking training distribution/same-y ness coming for us all… cool project though.

You should edit the article to suggest this point, it may not be obvious to everyone reading it.
Ah, I suffer from bruxism and TMJ. I’m sorry you’re dealing with this condition.
Unironic Paperclip Maximalism. Huh.

I propose that you don’t actually want cheap tokens. You want cheap tokens in service of some other goals. Are they worth the environmental cost?

Cmon tell us what it is
Yeah unironically just let an agent harness rip with full admin access without monitoring anything it does or using a VM. It’ll be fine, probably. “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the AgentDOS and Only Exfiltrate Secrets Occasionally”
I think GP is basically saying, bitter lesson applies here.
Low effort comment: reinventing things that Unix provides is the backbone of the entire western economy.
This ACP has been rolled into A2A (https://a2a-protocol.org/ ) and shouldn’t be confused (it’s happened multiple times for me, again just now) with Agent CLIENT Protocol https://agentclientprotocol.com/
Re:Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses on Thursday June 04, 2026 @04:17PM (#48404043)
I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that privacy regulation is coming with the current admin and weak “opposition”, and lack of capacity to care or understand the stakes by the populace. We need some very effective political organizing, yesterday. And normalized, cheap, scramble suits wouldn’t hurt either.
Re:First U.S. screwworm case confirmed in South Texas on Thursday June 04, 2026 @11:08AM (#48399831)
And that’s the entire point. Accelerate!
Halvings? I guess?

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