Private pilot; interested in home renovations; lover of food; I write code; founder of Checkout51.com (exited in 2015); currently working on ListingAI.com; I have a rescue Blue Tick Beagle named Elvis (Instagram: @elvisrufflife)
andrewjohnmcgrath at gmail dot com; Instagram: @andrewjmcgrath
Near and around Toronto or Haliburton, Ontario most of the time.
Fuck Trump.
- This is fascinating. I really appreciate the length reply.
How do you handle versioning/updates when datasets change? Do the MCPs break or do you have some abstraction layer?
What's your hit rate on researchers actually converting LLM explorations into permanent artifacts vs just using it as a one-off?
Makes sense for research workflows. Do you think this pattern (LLM exploration > traditional tools) generalizes outside domains with high uncertainty? Or is it specifically valuable where 'deciding what to do' is the hard part?
Someone else mentioned using Chrome dev tools + Cursor, I'm going to try that one out as a way to convince myself here. I want to make this work but I just feel like I'm missing something. The problem is clearly me, so I guess i need to put in some time here.
- OK this is super practical, thanks for sharing! I'm going to try this out!
- I believe you, but can you elaborate? What exactly does MCP give you in this context? How do you use it? I always get high level answers and I'm yet to be convinced, but i would love this to be one of those experiences where i walk away being wrong and learning something new.
- Yes this 100%. Every person i speak with who is excited about MCP is some LinkedIn Guru or product expert. I'm yet to encounter a seriously technical person excited by any of this.
- When the inexperienced move to become rare and on the frontier, sure they get an advantage but the field doesn’t get the benefit, they do. This is why the early days of Node were awful. So many jr devs (that’s being generous, mostly designers with a base knowledge of js) were jumping from writing front ends to entire stacks. They won, the stacks lost.
Experience matters and it’s an advantage, that’s not a reason for new people not to compete but rather one to understand that context and use it to help them grow.
- Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!)
In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I’d go month on month of great execution and all I’d hear would be complaints, but as soon as i “fixed” a major issue, i was a hero.
I’ve learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest part of building an effective organization.
- Honestly I wish i knew. I find the battery really gets substantially worse after 12-18 months, and eventually I'm living with it plugged in to avoid getting caught with it low when I'm out.
Recently I dropped my phone (while in a case) and now there's a black spot on the screen.
Stuff like this. I live a life between a lot of DIY work and software dev, so I'm physically probably rougher on it than most, but also a heavy user of the technology too.
- You forget, the camera gets better every year!
I've had an iphone for 15 years. I mean, it's fine...i just wish there was incentive for durability and sustainability v's replace it every 12-24 months. I guess sustainability concerns at Apple ends at ensuring their stock price is sustainable.
- That’s wild. I fell off my garage roof almost 2 weeks back. My wife called the ambulance, they arrived within 20 minutes. We are in rural Ontario, 30 minutes from the nearest hospital, on a dirt road that is privately owned and maintained. I expected over an hour.
I plan to make a trip in to the ambulance hall and fire hall this week and say thanks. I am ok, fractured vertebrae, but honestly i just am so grateful for the public service they provide.
- Growing up in Australia 1 cent pieces were gone before i knew what money was. Coming to Canada in 2009 on a trip, i was shocked to see them. They were annoying and instantly drove me crazy, but i felt bad throwing them out. I threw them out anyway, helping reduce inflation
- Sadly i find most software I am building on top of is pretty awful...but i'm working in the real estate world right now, so that is unavoidable.
- I tried to escape this world as quickly as possible, realizing how horrible it was, but the largest issue I ran into was around IO. Creating an environment that was highly tolerant to fault while having little to no replication delay meant checking in on the master database frequently. Keeping in mind this was around 2010 I found that the IO load on these databases was substantially larger than any database that i had ever worked on before. Things like available file handlers and other related performance problems came up more frequently than I’ve ever experienced before and frankly more frequently than I’ve ever experienced since.
If I was to summarize it, I would just say the performance characteristics were not something I was used to experiencing and often they would surprise me when they occurred, which meant having a good quality of a while for running this application was very challenging.
- I’ve been criticized for this by my coworkers in the past, but I strongly believe that this is generally true and has been for quite a while. Developers, myself included, like to think their code is special, set in stone and going to last forever. Most the code we write struggles to live a few years yet we treat all of it like it’s going to last forever. I’ve been an advocate for flipping that and treating it like our code will not last long, and when we identify the components that will, going back and optimizing them.
I’m pretty confident that most developers, again including myself, just really enjoy knowing something is done well. Being able to separate yourself from the code and fixate solely on the outcomes can sometimes get me past this.
- Interesting, i always see attempts to make these types of database tools as super interesting but then I think about all the undocumented edge cases that can come up and they scare me off.
Many many years ago I worked on a monitoring tool that itself needed to be highly available, and we needed a solution like this. Ever since that time I've done everything in my power to avoid it.
What are the real world cases you built this for? And how can someone like me who has been bruised by past experiences get comfortable with it?
- Yeah, 3.5 was good when it came out but frankly anyone reviewing AI for coding not using sonnet 4.1, GPT-5 or equivalent is really not aware of what they've missed out on.
- The second point is more incentive than AI capability i'd argue. Your point presumes that Open Source === Good. I'm not sure that's how all of society feels, unfortunately, so even if AI can do it at some point...it might not choose to.
- Everyone talks about 4o so positively but I’ve never consistently relied on it in a production environment. I’ve found it to be inconsistent in json generation and often it’s writing and following of the system prompt was very poor. In fact it was a huge part of what got me looking closer at anthropics models.
I’m really curious what people did with it because while it’s cool it didn’t compare well in my real world use cases.
- Feels like this would be great for fake skylights…
Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.
Winter is coming.