Thursday, 18 September 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: One prompt generates an app with its own database

Show HN: One prompt generates an app with its own database
7 by stopachka | 6 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, manyminiapps is the world first massively multiplayer online mini app builder (MMOMA) *Here’s what it does:* You load the page. You write 1 prompt and you get a mini app back in under 2 minutes. There’s no sign up, and you can see what everyone’s creating in real-time! Each mini app comes with it’s own database and backend, so you can build shareable apps that save data. *What’s different* There are a lot of app builders that promise you’ll build production software for others. But we think true production software can take a long time to get right. Even if you don’t need to program there’s a lot of work involved. What if we turned the promise around? Instead of “you vibe code software companies”, it’s “you build fun software for yourself”. If you cut the problem right, LLMs as they are today can already deliver personal software. manyminiapps is meant to be an experiment to demonstrate this. You may wonder: do you really need personal software? We’re not 100% sure, but it’s definitely an interesting question. Using manyminiapps so far has been surprising! We thought our friends would just try to build the common todo app, but instead we found them building wedding planners, chord progression helpers, inspiration lists, and retro games. *How it works* Instead of spinning up VMs or separate instances per app, we built a multi-tenant graph database on top of 1 large Postgres instance. All databases live under 1 table, on an EAV table (entity, attribute, value). This makes it so creating an “app” is as light as creating a new row. If you have heard of EAV tables before, you may know that most Postgres experts will tell you not to use them. Postgres needs to know statistics in order to make efficient query plans. But when you use EAV tables, Postgres can no longer get good statistics. This is usually a bad idea. But we thought it was worth solving to get a multi-tenant relational database. To solve this problem we started saving our own statistics in a custom table. We use count-min sketches to keep stats about each app’s columns. When a user writes a query, we figure out the indexes to use and get pg_hint_plan to tell Postgres what to do. *What we’ve learned so far* We’ve tried both GPT 5, Claude Opus, and Claude Sonnet for LLM providers. GPT 5 followed the instructions the best amongst the models. Even if you told it a completely nonsensical prompt (like “absda”, it would follow the system prompt and make an app for you. But GPT 5 was also the “most lazy”. The apps that came out tended to feel too simple, with little UI detail. Both Claude Opus and Sonnet were less good at following instructions. Even when we told them to return just the code, they wanted to returned markdown blocks. But, after parsing through those blocks, the resulting apps felt much better. To our surprise, we didn’t notice a difference in quality from Opus and Sonnet. Both models did well, with perhaps Sonnet following instructions more closely. To get good results we iterated on prompts. We initially tried giving point-by-point instructions, but found that a prompt with a full example tended to do better. Here’s what we landed on: https://gist.github.com/stopachka/a6b07e1e6daeb85fa7c9555d8f... Let us know what you think, and hope you have fun : )

New top story on Hacker News: OneDev – Self-hosted Git server with CI/CD, Kanban, and packages

OneDev – Self-hosted Git server with CI/CD, Kanban, and packages
17 by jcbhmr | 1 comments on Hacker News.


Monday, 15 September 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: AI-powered web service combining FastAPI, Pydantic-AI, and MCP servers

Show HN: AI-powered web service combining FastAPI, Pydantic-AI, and MCP servers
5 by Aherontas | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hey all! I recently gave a workshop talk at PyCon Greece 2025 about building production-ready agent systems. To check the workshop, I put together a demo repo: (I will add the slides too soon in my blog: https://ift.tt/uLm4DTl ) https://ift.tt/kmQHnLC... The idea was to show how multiple AI agents can collaborate using FastAPI + Pydantic-AI, with protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) for safe communication and orchestration. Features: - Multiple agents running in containers - MCP servers (Brave search, GitHub, filesystem, etc.) as tools - A2A communication between services - Minimal UI for experimentation for Tech Trend - repo analysis I built this repo because most agent frameworks look great in isolated demos, but fall apart when you try to glue agents together into a real application. My goal was to help people experiment with these patterns and move closer to real-world use cases. It’s not production-grade, but would love feedback, criticism, or war stories from anyone who’s tried building actual multi-agent systems. Big questions: Do you think agent-to-agent protocols like MCP/A2A will stick? Or will the future be mostly single powerful LLMs with plugin stacks? Thanks — excited to hear what the HN crowd thinks!

Friday, 5 September 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Open-sourcing our text-to-CAD app

Show HN: Open-sourcing our text-to-CAD app
4 by zachdive | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! I'm Zach from Adam ( https://adam.new/ ). We’re building an AI co-pilot for mechanical CAD software. As part of our broader research, we built a browser-based Text-to-CAD app ( https://ift.tt/xDnmoWG ) and are now open sourcing it. This is a React SPA with a Supabase backend. What it does: * Generates parametric 3D models from natural language descriptions, with support for both text prompts and image references * Outputs OpenSCAD code with automatically extracted parameters that surface as interactive sliders for instant dimension tweaking * Exports as .STL or .SCAD Under the hood: * Separate agents for conversation and code generation; simple parameter tweaks bypass AI entirely using deterministic regex-based updates * Runs fully in-browser by compiling OpenSCAD to WebAssembly and integrating Three.js with React Three Fiber for 3D rendering * Supports BOSL, BOSL2, MCAD libraries and custom font support (Geist) for text in models We’ve seen many developers trying to replicate this kind of functionality, so we’re releasing this to give the community a solid foundation to build on. Future improvements: * Expand geometry support - Move beyond CSG primitives to support curved surfaces, fillets, lofts, and constraint-driven modeling through CadQuery/Build123D * Better spatial context - UI for face/edge selection and viewport image integration to give LLMs spatial understanding * Enhanced capabilities - RAG on documentation and integration with more OpenSCAD libraries for features like proper threading You can clone the repo and run it locally! Contributions are welcome, and we’ll keep merging PRs as they come in.

New top story on Hacker News: Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves

Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves
9 by jaredwiener | 2 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: European Commission fines Google €2.95B over abusive ad tech practices

European Commission fines Google €2.95B over abusive ad tech practices
73 by ChrisArchitect | 34 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Type checking is a symptom, not a solution

Type checking is a symptom, not a solution
5 by mpweiher | 7 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday, 3 September 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Vector search on our codebase transformed our SDLC automation

Vector search on our codebase transformed our SDLC automation
9 by antonybrahin | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, In software development, the process of turning a user story into detailed documentation and actionable tasks is critical. However, this manual process can often be a source of inconsistency and a significant time investment. I was driven to see if I could streamline and elevate it. I know this is a hot space, with big players like GitHub and Atlassian building integrated AI, and startups offering specialized platforms. My goal wasn't to compete with them, but to see what was possible by building a custom, "glass box" solution using the best tools for each part of the job, without being locked into a single ecosystem. What makes this approach different is the flexibility and full control. Instead of a pre-packaged product, this is a resilient workflow built on Power Automate, which acts as the orchestrator for a sequence of API calls: Five calls to the Gemini API for the core generation steps (requirements, tech spec, test strategy, etc.). One call to an Azure OpenAI model to create vector embeddings of our codebase. One call to Azure AI Search to perform the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This was the key to getting context-aware, non-generic outputs. It reads our actual code to inform the technical spec and tasks. A bunch of direct calls to the Azure DevOps REST API (using a PAT) to create the wiki pages and work items, since the standard connectors were a bit limited. The biggest challenge was moving beyond simple prompts and engineering a resilient system. Forcing the final output into a rigid JSON schema instead of parsing text was a game-changer for reliability. The result is a system that saves us hours on every story and produces remarkably consistent, high-quality documentation and tasks. The full write-up with all the challenges, final prompts, and screenshots is in the linked blog post. I’m here to answer any questions. Would love to hear your feedback and ideas!