Author | Lightnews

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 1d

(It also triggers a recursion limit bug in CC after an hour or two, but I've reported that 🙂)

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 1d

Do you have trouble getting Claude not to stop? I eventually created a stop hook that tells it (kindly) to keep going, and to ask sub-agents if it needs advice/help. Every hour or so, it tells it to ask subagents to review code and look for architecture/refactor opportunities. Seems to work ok…

1 1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 1d

My modest proposal for Democrats’ messaging in upcoming elections: “Joe Biden proved conclusively that even a dead president is better for the economy than Donald Trump”

2

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · 21d

@simonwillison.net suggests coding without actually typing the code

Honestly, I'm surprised that anyone with an unlimited token budget is *not* doing this. I've been coding since I was 12 (in 1987), but my job is emphatically no longer typing "if" "x" ">" "3" ":"

simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...

Coding without typing the code

Last year the most useful exercise for getting a feel for how good LLMs were at writing code was vibe coding (before that name had even been coined) - seeing …

simonwillison.net

7

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Oct 5

Oh, also, I am absolutely _not_ a frontend person.

Crazy times, my programmer friends, crazy times…

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Oct 5

I'm in the process of getting Claude to write an entire fake backend system for a fairly large React web-app by intercepting the network calls with service workers (package MSW).

It's amazing.

Now, I'm using browser-use Claude to find bugs, using a prompt/instructions written by the first Claude!

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Aug 31

Came downstairs from work on Friday, and all three of my brothers were sitting in the living room! They live in Toronto, Waco, and LA, and had conspired to fly in for my 50th… 😍

2

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Aug 18

The “Closing the Loop” images from the always-amazing @amygoodchild.bsky.social are absolutely gorgeous!

www.amygoodchild.com/blog/buildin...

Closing the Loop: Building Shapes with a Planar Graph — Amy Goodchild

There’s some fun computational geometry in my latest artwork, and in this article I’ll walk through how I take a scramble of disconnected paths and turn them into closed shapes, using half-edges and a...

www.amygoodchild.com

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Aug 18

Why is "I'd like to restrict outbound internet connections from my project to a small allowlist, but still be able to talk to all the normal AWS/GCP things I _have_ to talk to to operate" such an infuriatingly difficult thing? It can't be uncommon…

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Jul 10

That surprising feeling when your `terraform apply` actually works, without errors! So unexpected. And it only took 9 commits in my PR…

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Jun 28

Now I want to give Claudius sub-agents whose context is stuffed with apenwarr Google housing market simulation articles and can run simulations and report back. MBA in a box! 😂

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · Jun 21

Does it specify the tokenizer, or is everyone just using OpenAI's Byte Pair Encoding?

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 27

I should mention that it was (as always) a thoroughly fascinating episode!

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 27

If you have a chance to follow up, I've be very curious to hear what Josh thinks about Kotlin coroutines vs Java Lightweight Threads

He seemed bullish on both, but from what I've been able to gather, they don't love each other! At the very least, Kotlin *does* have (a bit of) function coloring…

1 1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 23

He did a pretty good job of appearing to ask a couple of tough questions while ensuring that the experience was completely friendly to Vance. Joe Rogan style!

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 21

Should I listen to the Ross Douthat JD Vance interview? I mean, I know I'm going to, but at the same time wondering why I would inflict that on myself.

Then again, this might be a good day for it: I've already seen the picture of “Sam and Jony” so perhaps I've already hit rock bottom?

1 3

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 20

Good news! As onsite/offsite budgets tighten, constant reorgs guarantee you'll still be able to see your coworkers!

a) "annual" team offsite
b) semi-annual reorg 2 months later
c) "clearly we need a post-reorg onsite"

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 14

If you like fantasy, and murder mysteries, The Tainted Cup, and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett are very good. It's been a while since I felt sad to end a book, wanting to hang out with the characters more. I'm glad I only found out about the series after there were already two!

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 14

“Big interviews tomorrow. I'll make sure I go to bed early so I'm well-rested.“

Brain: “I love your enthusiasm, and you always bring great ideas to the table… But I was thinking: how about we lie in bed half-awake until 4am instead?”

2

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 8

Based on my interactions with them as a job _seeker_, if you're a tech company not quite yet large enough to hire your own recruiter, you could do worse than to check out somatalent.com

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 8

No joke, nothing has made me think more about distributed, anonymous government-proof communication more than listening to the Martian Revolution, and thinking about what that level of control over information dissemination would mean 🙂

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 7

New "Projects" page on my website: zellyn.com/page/project...

(The old page listed things I _wanted_ to do, not things that were done or partly done.)

Projects

Zellyn's Website

zellyn.com

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 7

Us computer nerds are building some really cool stuff out there!

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 7

Interviewing is surprisingly fun. I should probably have been interviewing a little every month or two for the past decade, just to keep my hand in, and find out what interesting things people are working on. (It always felt a little dishonest to interview when not actually looking too…)

1

Zellyn Hunter @zellyn.com · May 7

So far, being in an interview is much more pleasant than waiting around between interviews.

Going well so far. Even getting to the point where I can type while being watched. Sort of.