Darren Shepherd

Announcing: DISCOBOT🤖🎉 My personal coding agent session manager. I built this for myself so I can vibe code faster. Watch the video, link to the project thread below. I'll be live streaming today at 10AM PT to fully demo it and talk about why I built it.

@HotAisle No, the point I'm making is that if you look at dynamic language versus static languages. People make arguments why dynamic languages are better or why they like them, but typescript basically invalidates all those arguments.

@ibuildthecloud The comparison isn’t to typescript, it is to javascript… the thing that is actually run.

I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that frontend developers accept typescript. That means it's possible to build a better language for frontend. Everything frontend people have rejected about compiled and statically typed languages they have brought to JavaScript. So it's definitely possible to create a statically typed compiled language for frontend that would be ridiculously fast compared to typescript. It's a times like this I wish I didn't have a job.

@HotAisle Yeah, I know. What did I say contradictory to that?

@ibuildthecloud Eh? Types are stripped before runtime.

@RazaJamil89 Lol, you're really being that pedantic. Yes, of course I'm talking about JavaScript.

@ibuildthecloud It’s fast enough to do what it needs to, which is static analysis of your program after you’re done writing it. Are you confusing typescript with JavaScript?

@RazaJamil89 It's not fast enough. If you think it's fast you haven't worked with a compiled language. It's hard to build fluid experiences with JavaScript. The tricks you have to do are unbearable.

@ibuildthecloud Typescript is fast enough, what’s the problem? We have a million line codebase that can be typechecked in 1 min with 8 cores. Unless you can get that down to .5s so I can be evaluated on every keystroke it’s kinda pointless.

@sureshsankaran They are aren't they, the API supports it. I don't use codex.

@ibuildthecloud Why are they not inbuilt into codex 🤔

WebSearch and WebFetch are critical tools for agentic use. Make sense that OpenAI/Anthropic natively provide these tools. I stupidly wasn't using them before. Now I am. Sorry tavily.

@MythThrazz It's called youth.

@ibuildthecloud Short term and short sighted, nothing to worry about.

It's a sad reality that a lot of the "productivity" gains are just lack of sleep.

Oh, but if I wanted to. I think I could get people to use it. I think it's fun to understand the psychology of why people use things and I think I actually understand why. But I also realize the effort it takes, and that's not worth it to me unless I really, really believe in the idea.

@theozero Who said I wanted anyone to care? At this point in my career I just build things for fun.

Gosh darn it. I finally have a good reason to create a language. This is like a life long dream of mine but never justified. But I think I can actually build a better typescript.

Yeah. I thought the script kiddies hated types. Apparently types were never the problem. TypeScript is actually a technical miracle. The ability to infer to much type information and then erase it all at runtime is actually amazing. I've started to really dislike RTTI in languages as it doesn't really seem necessarily.

@ibuildthecloud @ThisIsJackEvans Ten years ago frontend devs invariably didn't know types. Now they do. The onboarding ramp is quite different.

Why does everyone immediately disregard the server? I feel like as soon as you say server in the JavaScript world people immediately shutdown the conversation with, "that will never work" Yet it provably works. But it doesn't mean 100% server. The browser and especially CSS is designed for dynamic/reactive experiences that are extremely fast and fluid. But the browser is not designed for data crunching and core application logic because it's fundamentally a render pipeline.

@devagrawal09 @ibuildthecloud Wasm no. Dom is the bottleneck. New runtime? Also no. Less runtime, not new. Like svelte kinda

@StatisticsFTW @devagrawal09 probably WASM, but to JS also. That's also the amazing thing is that the JavaScript has accepted transpiling. Normally you'd say that's a dead end. But apparently not.

@devagrawal09 @ibuildthecloud It could compile to JS too!

The typescript world has also completely accepted the idea of server. All development requires nodejs and the vast majority of prod deployments need a javascript runtime. The answer is a combination of a server and browser and just using the tech properly. When you look at things end to end we are processing to much data on the frontend. I'm not a frontend person, but I've been building APIs consumed by SPAs for over 10 years and it's way to hard to get all the data to the client. It doesn't make sense. GraphQL is a great example of pointing to the problem, but just a terrible solution.

@ibuildthecloud > statically typed compiled language for frontend that would be ridiculously fast compared to typescript how exactly? compile to wasm? or literally add a new runtime to browsers?

@MichaelArnaldi If you could convince my brain of that, that would be great. Thanks

@ibuildthecloud It’s easy not to have a job

@shadcn These are both great ideas!

I want the following in Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode... 1. Pinned Messages: Let me pin assistant messages to the sidebar for things I want to keep track of but am not ready to address yet. Render as a checklist & jump navigation. 2. Notes: Give me a scratchpad for thoughts while working.

I learn so much crap from LLMs. Also just observing the weird hacks they do to solve a problem. I'm smart enough to understand but I lack information and LLMs get the info to me so fast. Also I just ask it to explain it to me and the style is way better than most blogs or yt videos. Also helps I have enough experience to call BS when the LLM starts saying wrong things.

I understand the concern of skills atrophying when using agents. But so far I am not seeing it. Instead I have learned all sorts of dark secrets of linux networking I somehow didn’t learn before agents building a networking product.

@danjones Wait... You find MCP servers useful? Like which ones. I'm not kidding, I've yet to find a single MCP server I find useful for myself.

MetaMCP is handy as heck. Going through the motion of slowly setting it up as a central store of all the MCP servers I use. Then to try work out how to allow access to it from other servers outside of my home. Currently have all IP addresses blocked apart from my home IP via CF, but I need a more natural way of working this without weakening my security posture. exe dot dev for example comes up on various IPs. I'll crack it soon.

@yesadok @ImLunaHey At some point it's just cosplaying as an engineer and not actually solving a problem.

@ImLunaHey Newer versions trying too hard to be agents

opus 4.8 is somehow worse than 4.7 ive seen it make countless mistakes and take 10x as long to do a simple task because it's trying to do more than it should in a single tool call.

@ThisIsJackEvans Just because things have failed doesn't mean it's not worth trying again. If there's a problem, try to fix it.

@ibuildthecloud Didn't we already try this as an industry with stuff like Elm and Rescript and nobody cared. Typescript dominated because it fit right into your existing JS code, you could gradually adapt it.