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I’ve been hacking on a single Anki extension for… the last three years now:

https://smart-notes.xyz

The idea is to make an extension that allows you to flexibly fill out fields on your cards with AI generated text, speech, and images. Think generating example sentences for your entire deck, or adding furigana to kanji (small phonetic characters with a very delicate syntax). It works just as well for language learners as it does for medical students, etc.

The secondary goal has been to make this the most well designed, intuitive, and stable Anki extension in the world. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s on its way. It’s been very interesting to try to work out a design that affords the flexibility to generate anything for whatever you’re studying but remains approachable and discoverable to your marginal Anki user, many of whom are younger and have varying levels of English ability. Many interesting technical challenges as well.

Slowly building towards the Show HN post, but need a few more features. Connecting with and chatting with dedicated users in countries around the world over the last few years has made this the most gratifying thing I’ve ever built! It’s still at the scale that receiving support emails is fun and I can build relationships with power users and long term subscribers.


Can we CRISPR it into humans? I volunteer. I’ve always wanted to improve my protein folding accuracy.


Plus your pants would fit like a glove.


Summer 2026 meta (well, mine):

Sol is for routine work, Opus for frontend/design, and Fable for more complex / ambiguous / architecture work. Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent.

Fable is the only one you can actually trust to not look at the code, but Sol is somehow still more pleasant to work with, especially in fast mode. Opus is the enemy, and it will make you insane if you talk to it for too long.


> Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent.

Curious what method you like for doing this? I've tried a few options and I haven't found one I'm happy with yet.


I'm using a slimmed down version of this skill:

https://github.com/steipete/agent-scripts/blob/main/skills/c...

The important bit I found is to explicitly remind Claude that Sol 5.6 is a very smart and good model; otherwise, Claude performs its normal condescension towards any non-Claude model behavior and insists on reading all the diffs in full and testing all of Sol's work, negating any token savings.


> The implications are clear: focus on the human-skills part of the job.

The implications are not clear. They are not clear for the security people, for the SWE people, for anybody in knowledge work whose jobs are impacted.

I wish people would stop with the “the solution is merely simply retool against the part the AI isn’t good at yet” cope and feel the enormity of the moment with humility.

When the dust settles these jobs may not exist, or the jobs that do exist will be unrecognizable from the ones today and perhaps so qualitatively different as to no longer be attractive.


Great writeup. The excessive function thing has always driven me crazy; I guard against this explicitly in Claude.md.

I have found that models are generally poor at managing refactors / complexity while also implementing new features. But I’ve had some success with a semi-lights-off approach where you decompose it and prompt the model adversarially in a second pass to look for new rough edges and areas of complexity or refactors that might simplify the codebase.

So I’d be very curious to see this benchmark but with something like a periodic “refactor turn” interleaved in.

Also eager to see Fable benchmarked; anecdotally that was the only model whose code I felt I could actually trust to not review closely.


> This is where OpenAI has an advantage over Anthropic. While its models are trailing Anthropic's in recent months, its investments in product, consumer experience, site publishing, voice, and hardware are all directions that have clearer moats.

I was with you up until this point. I don’t think OpenAI has any more of a substantial product moat than Anthropic; if anything, the Claude / mythos etc brand is a valuable asset that OpenAI lacks.

Yes, many of the elite HN engineer always online types have come to prefer Codex, and but if you actually talk to regular engineers in industry, agentic coding is simply still synonymous with Claude Code.

And for the non-engineering uses, Claude is so much more pleasant of a conversational companion than any of the GPT line, and I suspect is this baked deeply into the model, otherwise OpenAI would have closed this gap by now.


This one observation changes everything.


We’ve identified the shape of the problem.


PSA this is satire ;)

(if you have to say it, that’s how you know it’s good)



> (if you have to say it, that’s how you know it’s good)

Pet peeve, but no, it's the exact opposite. Good satire is immediately obvious; nobody had to ask whether Jonathan Swift was actually serious about solving poverty in Ireland by having the poor sell their children for meat to the rich. Subtle satire is bad satire by definition; if you have to be told that it's satire, that means it has completely failed to do its job, and is no better than intellectual masturbation.


Are you saying all satire should target the lowest common intelligence?


oh this is AMAZING, then!


The term that I saw once, and now constantly land back on, is “meaning shaped”

At a quick glance, it looks like a thing that should contain meaning and substance. At any closer inspection, it falls apart completely.


“Honestly” / “the honest answer is” are huge LLM tells.

Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.

That said I enjoyed the article!


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