Dustin Lyons

@garrytan My hack is to ask AI for text in Org format, which they seem to do a better job at. Then I can easily convert it back to Markdown.

Is there an LLM-powered AI text formatter that is the best in the world? Most chat UIs seem to lose bold/formatting etc.

@grhmc very nice. I use home assistant as a bridge into the Apple Home app (HomeKit), so now the garage door is part of our automated, nightly “turn the house off” routine. Security camera tells some running python if it’s already closed

@dustinhlyons fwiw I ended up making a little webserver that my Hubitat talks to, to make it usable via Carplay :)

Raspberry PI + simple relay + ChatGPT and I can now SSH into my garage door opener. The plan is to write simple software to detect if the door is open after hours (using a camera) and make sure it's always closed. Surprisingly easy to get going.

@grhmc I love Twitter where you can meet other fellow garage door hackers haha. Everything is a tech problem to be solved

@dustinhlyons Hell yeah! I put together the very same several years ago, and had the funny experience that nixos-rebuild switch would open (or close) my garage.

Posthog's new website is the best thing I've seen all month. Love that companies throw out the standard playbook for something a bit more risky... including employee feet pics??? posthog.com

Still can't leave magit tho

Zed is the first editor to pull me out of Emacs. Super easy to get going with out of the box LSP servers, insanely fast, and now native support for Claude Code.

Probably one of my favorite use cases for Claude Code is to resolve merge conflicts. Like, I'll never be doing that again. Rejoice.

@grhmc Hey coming from you that means a lot! Thanks Graham. Btw, I blew up my Nix install on macOS a few days ago and the Determinate macOS installer got me going almost instantly. Was super impressed!

@dustinhlyons It's such a good project =)

My Github project, a starter Nix configuration for macOS, hit 3k stars over the weekend. It's been fun seeing the feedback and helping other ppl find the magic in a declarative environment. I have some good ideas to improve on it, hopefully in 2025! github.com/dustinlyons/ni…

I was sorting through my tech closet earlier, and all of a sudden felt something extremely hot to the touch. A bag of batteries had a 9V so hot you couldn't hold it in your hand. Feels like we avoided a fire. PSA: Check your closets for exploding things.

@jspujji Deck

I bootstrapped Ampush to ~$30M in annual revenue with exactly one sales rep doing pure outbound. The wild part? That rep delivered the same 14-slide deck more than 800 times, word for word. I just dug the deck out of my Dropbox. It’s almost embarrassingly simple. And it flat-out worked. Want a copy? Comment DECK below and I’ll send you the slides that took us from $0 → $20M. *** PS … I shared this deck a few months ago and people loved it, I’d love to know what you think!!!

Copilot in terminal vim feels pretty neat. Something special about software you've been using most of your life still getting new superpowers. Also, of course with Nix I enabled it with only 12 characters: github.com/dustinlyons/ni…

@PeterKimFrank @iannuttall This. I've had the same success. Gave very small tasks at first and fired a few folks on the first day when it was obvious they weren't cutting it. So many candidates that it didn't take long before I found two highly qualified.

@iannuttall Have experienced the same but it’s not really a problem IMO Key for me has been to leverage more detailed screening questions, offer a paid assessment to top candidates, and start people on trials.

Made my first post on Upwork in a long time and every single reply is AI-generated garbage. Spent $250k+ on this platform but I'm not sure it's usable anymore...

GPT-4 to generate the code. Copilot to make edits. This is the way.

@mitchellh Before the Internet was a big thing, I loved going to my local bookseller and browsing the rows and rows of technical books. Now it's a small shelf. 😔 It's amazing what you learn when sitting down to cover the breadth of a technical topic. You don't know what you don't know?

I'm always flabbergasted when I re-realize people don't read manuals cover to cover being using a thing (not just technical things, but anything). I know that's like... most people, but I can't understand. 😨

@coreybgary @sweatystartup Yes, can concur. My trick is to use the scheduling feature to have lots of different apps displaying at different times so it feels fresh.

@sweatystartup Tidybyt’s LED screen. Cycles through weather, subway alerts, and sports scores. Big fan.

What is one item under $250 you’ve bought that has improved your life the most? How about $5,000?

@dhh @wfaler I 100% agree with the pair programmer analogy; but I still like GitHub Copilot to save me keystrokes. I use it for tab complete where it’s usually right (import statements, variable definitions, etc etc). Both together are great.

@wfaler I like the metaphor of the pair programmer better. You're still driving the keyboard, but the AI is there to unblock you, spot you, teach you. I never got all of that out of auto-completing IDEs or StackOverflow.

I haven't found much use for AI in full-on writing large bodies for code for me, but I continue to be astounded by its ability to be a superb pair programmer. It knows all the APIs, we never need to Google anything, and its suggestions are often delightful. A+.

Just don't think this works out for native yet. But for building anything on the web this is insane.

Need a large app? No problem. Just split your customers into their own database. It's just another file.

Sqlite on the edge is insane. If you need proof, check out Cloudflare's demo app: northwind.d1sql.com I can't see a future where there isn't more of this