jameshiew

I manage them as part of my dotfiles using chezmoi. A `.agents/skills/` directory + a symlink to there from `.claude/skills/`.

> Do you keep improving them over time?

In my global AGENTS.md I have a note to agents to explain any frustrations they had doing a task, and to suggest any skill/tool/AGENTS.md improvements. I am trying to keep AGENTS.md files small but still finding the balance.

Not usually but I've had periods where I've only been listening to AI-generated music (my own and others) instead of using Spotify. Suno is getting really good now.

This is my `mcp.json` in VS Code (requires `uvx` and `npx` to be available):

  {
   "servers": {
    "context7": {
     "command": "npx",
     "args": [
      "-y",
      "@upstash/context7-mcp"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "fetch": {
     "command": "uvx",
     "args": [
      "mcp-server-fetch"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "git": {
     "command": "uvx",
     "args": [
      "mcp-server-git"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "playwright": {
     "command": "npx",
     "args": [
      "@playwright/mcp@latest"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "brave-search": {
     "command": "npx",
     "args": [
      "-y",
      "@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search"
     ],
     "env": {
      "BRAVE_API_KEY": "${input:brave-api-key}"
     },
     "type": "stdio"
    }
   },
   "inputs": [
    {
     "type": "promptString",
     "id": "brave-api-key",
     "description": "Brave Data for AI API Key",
     "password": true
    }
   ]
  }

The Sonnet 4 agent usually defaults to using `fetch` for getting webpages, but I've seen it sometimes try playwright on it's own. It seems the brave-search MCP server is deprecated now, so actually it's probably not the best option as a search MCP (you also need to sign up for an API key), right now it works well though!

How do you find o3-pro for coding? I've also been taking the approach of hand building context and copying and pasting it in for complicated tasks where I want lots of reasoning, like bug/security audits.

I found o1-pro unbelievably good for coding, but when o3-pro was released, I saw the response length in ChatGPT was gimped severely compared to o1-pro, so didn't find it all that useful - it couldn't output long enough responses. I actually cancelled my ChatGPT subscription as it seemed like such a downgrade, though I'll probably try using again via OpenAI's API at some point, so long as the response length isn't capped. I'm tempted to try out Grok 4 Heavy.

I've barely tried Claude Code but looking to experiment with it as well after hearing a lot of good things about it. I've had good experiences with the GitHub Copilot agent in VS Code for working with Rust, specifically with Sonnet 4.

Refactoring duplicate code into a helper function should be achievable with current agents. To replace existing code with an external crate , you could try giving the agent access to a browser (e.g. playwright-mcp), and instructing it to browse the crate docs. For anything that involves using APIs that may be past the knowledge cutoff for the agent's model, it's definitely worthwhile to have some MCP tools on hand that'll let it browse for up-to-date info - the brave-search and context7 MCPs are good.

Yes, I've taken multiple - anywhere from a couple months to an entire year during COVID. Travelling, trying my hand at a business, others to just take a break and work on side projects or freelancing before fully jumping back in.

It's good to consider the financial impact seriously in balance with everything else - not only the income you won't earn, but also how that would have compounded across your lifetime.

To address your point about recruiter emails, I still get them. So long as you can provide value to a business at the end of your break it's not necessarily an issue, though you might have to work harder to demonstrate that - I think especially for the soft skills you'd otherwise be using day-to-day in a workplace as opposed to when you're just doing your own thing.

Very cool, hopefully VS Code eventually builds in native support for whatever functionality is missing that is part of the reason for these forks.

The new web search icon appeared for me straightaway in the ChatGPT macOS desktop app, within an in-progress conversation, without even having to restart. Before I'd even seen this official launch announcement. Very smooth!

Great but only so long as you want to use their nameservers. I had a domain with them that I wanted to use with AWS Route 53 nameservers which I was unable to - then I had to wait the standard ~60 days before I could transfer it out which caused a headache in the meantime.

Cloudflare is straightforward to use but watch out, they don’t let you use custom nameservers, which is very unusual for a domain registrar. As great as Cloudflare’s nameservers are, this was a dealbreaker for me and I eventually moved all my domains off of there.

I have noticed this as well sometimes, though never thought it might be intentional, I'd doubt it is. You can always hint to ChatGPT which language to use for the codeblock anyway though.

I'm involved in building a backend right now for which I chose to use AWS ECS with Fargate containers for deployment, over some managed Kubernetes service like AWS EKS which would have been my first choice. Using ECS has been dirt cheap (<$5pcm) whereas AWS EKS is ~$75pcm per cluster, before you even start running any containers. I'm not completely sure it was the right decision as it's involved having to spend time getting familiar with ECS, but it seems to work well enough and cheaply for something which isn't making money yet. I probably could have provisioned a Kubernetes cluster myself using something like kops but didn't want to deal with the headache.

Another one is using Heroku (~$7pcm) over Vercel (~$20pcm) for deploying a simple website/CMS for a business (and therefore not eligible for Vercel's free hobby tier). I initially wanted to use Vercel but Heroku is actually fantastic if you're developing solo and don't need all the bells and whistles Vercel provides.