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- Hacker News
- Something I've been thinking about a lot is that this new technology's primary UI is natural language. Human's are REALLY primed for natural language.
If it sounds good it must be good. The code this new model writes is incredible! It told me so!
- It did say it was an unusually clean codebase.
- It surprises me that this concept took as long as it did to gain traction in… hacker news. 15 years ago folks here were compiling kernels and gentoo distros. Lately it’s been “you should just pay the man, it’s cheaper than running these things yourself”by irishcoffee
- Rsync the dropbox, dude
- It's fairly easy (and cheap!) to run your own email server, but most people don't bother and just use gmail. And rightly so!by eru
- True, I see so many posts along the lines of 'I am a quasi programming god with no time on my hands (apart from time wasted here) so I will gladly pay $10,000 a month to Anthropic if it makes me 1% more effective than if I were to use GLM'by alpineman
- Rolling your own Linux is nearly free and could be done on any computer you had lying around. Dropping >$5k on a computer to run a local model (badly) doesn't really scratch my "hacker" itch. The author of this article works for an AI infrastructure company and ran Kimi K3 on their infrastructure - this post reads like marketing.by loire280
- this seems to be an advertisement for Modal. is it really your own infrastructure if the hardware is leased?by khimaros
- I love OpenCode and the blankness of it too. Clean, light, and manual. It's a good change of pace from what we are used to on the internet (very cool but slow). Also, can you hmu with that modal plan XDby sudo_cowsay
- Feel the same about HN :)by alpineman
- Pi Agent is even leaner feeling, it's worth a try.by roywiggins
- > The best way I can describe it is like opening vim after spinning a bunch of time in a big fancy editor.
Harness-aside, I get this feeling sometimes when I swap from a big frontier model to something more nimble like Composer.
I can get into a better thinking and q&a loop with fast models, similar to how I can flow through a file more easily with vim.
by wxw - Actually, if you break tasks down into small enough units, there's not much difference between open models and closed models. The only reason to use agents is the hope that they'll work with natural language input—but that's where the difficulty lies.
For example, if you modify things at the level of small functions, open models seem to perform just as wel
by jdw64 - Yup. Been using big expensive models like opus, gpt, or glm for planning, then switch to something like gpt-oss-120B on cerebras and watch it fly. Total cost will be less than $5 for even very large tasksby paradox460
- I think this is where they say "loop engineering" / orchestration comes in, though I would also include context/harness engineering in the toolboxby verdverm
- GLM 5.2 feels better than Opus and K3 is as good as Fable.
Now I can't wait for someone to distill K3 into a Qwen 3.6 27b or Poolside S 2.1 sized models for a proper fast local Composer 2.5 replacement.
by m_ke - This is an ad.
I know the author has a long history here and I'm sure the post is a genuine reflection. But how is posting "I used my own product and it felt really good" anything other than self promotion?
- Reminder, this post is also an ad:by amelius
- Classic HN. Usually people write longer blogs to hide the self-promotion/products promotion. Better hide the promotion into 2000 character mumble jumble.by u1hcw9nx
- I mean, many posts on HN are self promotion; whether they reach the front page discerns the interesting ones from the ones that are not. An interesting self promotion is still interesting.by Doch88
- So all the blog posts, every 10s on HN, shilling for Anthropic are not ads but this is?by witx
- It would be acceptable iff the author prefixed it with Show HN. My suggestion to mods if the post is worth keeping up is to do that.
- Why can't builders promote their products if it's truly good?by Alisaqqt
- Hello! It probably doesn’t make much of a difference now that the post is flagged (I assume that it has something to do with people thinking it’s an ad?) but just for the record, I really didn’t intend this as an “ad”. No one asked me to write this and I didn’t plan on writing it. It basically happened just how I described it - I went home, had some extra energy, wanted to build something that needed both 1) an LLM to help me build the thing and 2) an LLM to use within the thing I was building. So I decided to try the Modal endpoint bc it was top of mind and I didn’t want to upgrade my Claude account. Had I not thought it was cool I would not have written about it, but what made me write the thing wasn’t “Modal is cool”, it was the feeling I describe in the post. I was a little worried it might come across as an ad and considered removing the links but figured, “oh well”. It was a nice plus that it involved the company I’m at doing something cool, but that wasn’t really the point. In any case, I’m glad some people found it interesting, and maybe this was flagged for some other reason, but thought I might as well respond, even if I may not convince anyone :) Possibly even given the above it’s not HN-appropriate somehow but I thought that the sentiment might be appreciatedby msaltz
- To be honest, I am surprised by how good DeepSeek V4 Flash is. I use Claude Code and Codex on Claude 5 Opus and GPT-5.6 Sol most of the time, but when I use DS V4 Flash I don't feel like it's really that bad. And with oh-my-pi and just plain pi it's pretty good. To be honest the frontier models are much better at tool calling so in an assistant flow they're better but I did the dumb thing and optimized the harness for the model instead, rewriting the tools so they match what it guesses at, and DS V4 Flash does just fine.
The TTFT and tok/s are much higher on the small model so that makes it competitive for a bunch of things. It feels like what old Sonnet used to by the end of last year which is honestly damned good.
by arjie - I wrote my own OpenClaw one weekend and I am running it as my assistant through Matrix with DeepSeek v4 Flash (and Qwen). It probably costs me about 2 dollars a month and is even more useful than ChatGPT would be due to me having full control on what tools it has access to.
I can do things like take a photo of a doctor's note among add the appointment to my calendar, send a PDF to my archive tagged, OCR'd etc, search info from internet, look data from Google Maps.
I can even integrate this to home assistant and talk to my agent with my open source Alexa-like system.
by pimeys - This is only a thinly veiled ad. It's fine, I was curious about this exact setup, anyways.
What would be useful is a cost metric. I'm curious how much I'd be willing to spend as a premium to not have those companies piping my conversations directly to the NSA. Maybe only some conversations? Claude and OpenAI are heavily subsidized, by all accounts, so Kimi K3 on a private endpoint might end up costing more or less - that's what I want to know.
by loufe - I was curious about the cost angle too, i.e. how much "free" coding agent I can get for what cost. Here's the research by Fable if you're interested: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/2c9a5001-0b7e-4944-beb1-9...by mayank
- With OpenRouter this is pretty easy to see - each model page has various providers listed along with an icon marking providers with zero data retention, and the price. You can also set up an account-wide "guardrail" to prevent routing to non-ZDR providers.by aprilnya
- The reason Claude code is so popular is because it’s really good at taking super vague human prose “Claude build me a million dollar SaaS”-type prompts and spitting out thousands of lines of code which cover tons of surface-level edge cases, build in tons of functionality, etc
The smaller/open models are less good at that. But that’s not how software development is done. You don’t prompt a whole app and be done with it. If you’re using it as an aid to traditional software dev, iterating on small, targeted functions, GLM works as good if not better than Claude. Anthropic expects low quality prompts. If you rubber duck GLM, you get absolutely pristine output in most cases.
by wps