Evidence-first research

Ask HN: Remember N8n? Anyone?

Wonder what happened to all their hype and agentic connector workflow? Did Claude/GPT ate that market for good?

Show HN: Seal – Letters and passwords that open for your family after you die

I'm a CS undergrad who has developed an interest in hardware keys ever since I used them for a school project a few years ago. I made a little chat app that only allows users to chat if they registered a key, nothing else. The backstory of how I came to work on Seal (this project): was that I was generating ideas with Claude to come up with an idea that only hardware keys could make into software. I was thinking about physical house keys and what you could do with those, but in software. I was already making iOS apps with Claude, and I came up with this idea and it sounded good. I had already worked on a few projects involving hardware keys and I already loved them. Today I submitted my latest app, Seal, for review in the app store. Seal is an iOS app for iPhone and iPad that lets you write an Envelope (an encrypted bundle of passwords, photos, voice memos, etc...) for all of your loved ones when you're gone. You can register hardware keys and assign identities for each person. Then you can create Envelopes and assign them to the key that you want to distribute. They plug in the key to their phone and are ready to receive an Envelope from you. If you don't log into the app for months, one of your designated key holders can start the process of opening the Sealed Envelope. You, as the writer of the letters, get weeks of warnings to check in at least once before the letters open. After 90 days of countdown, 21 days of warnings, and 14 days of grace, the envelope opens for each

[Update] Purge: the open-source Mac cleaner, now with an app uninstaller and leftover detection, and over 25k downloads

I posted here a while back about Purge, a free & open-source mac app I built to clear out cache files. Since then it's picked up close to 650 stars on GitHub and iIve added a good bit, so here's where it's at. What it does: it scans your mac for files you don't need. Mostly stuff apps leave behind while they run, so caches, old logs, leftovers from coding tools. It shows you what it found and how big each thing is, and everything it clears goes to the trash. Nothing gets deleted outright, so if it takes something you wanted, you drag it back. New since the last post: App uninstaller: Dragging an app to the trash leaves its settings, caches and support folders sitting around. Purge shows you the app plus everything it left behind, and clears the lot together. Exclude from scans: If there's a folder you never want it looking at, mark it once and it stays off the list. Leftover detection: If you have uninstalled an app and it has left its data on your system, Purge can now detect that and help you get rid of that. The rules haven't changed. Everything the app is allowed to touch sits on a fixed list you can read in the source. Nothing is permanently deleted. There's no tracking, no account, no paid version. Each item is marked either safe to clean or check first, so you know what you're agreeing to before you hit the button. Free and open source, works on macos 13 and up. You can grab the dmg from the releases page or install it with homebrew. brew install jithin-sabu/tap/purge

Accessibility is now "Device Control and Data Access". Which apps do you still give it to?

macOS 27 renamed the Accessibility permission to Device Control and Data Access. Nothing changed underneath, same toggle, but the new name finally says what it is: an app with it can read window contents and text fields of every other app and send keystrokes and clicks anywhere. Closer to "full control of the Mac" than to anything about accessibility. And almost every utility this sub loves needs it. Window managers, clipboard managers, text expanders, launchers, dictation apps that paste into the frontmost field, anything with a global hotkey that does more than open its own window. So the question isn't whether to grant it, it's to whom. I went through my own list this week. 16 entries, 13 enabled. No unknown developers at all, every one is a big name, which honestly surprised me. What did stand out: Two remote desktop apps, AnyDesk and TeamViewer, that I use maybe twice a year, sitting there with full control all year. First thing I'm turning off after writing this. Three where I had to look up why they need it at all: DeepL (grabs selected text for the double Cmd+C shortcut), OBS (global hotkeys) and Stats (still no idea, it's off). The three I refused, Zoom, Stats and Codex computer use, all work fine without it. Zoom just can't let someone else drive my screen, which is the point. And my own app is in there twice, dev build and release build. So I'm part of the problem. Full disclosure, I build a small Mac utility myself, it needs this permission to paste text, so I'm o

Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md

I got tired of taking screenshots and explaining everything to AI agents

HI HN!! First here is a demo video : https://youtu.be/A0LV28G4sXo?si=ymIQEfNGprh8yyxq I work in a SDE role and work in multiple windows at once like i have many apps open in my mac. I faced a problem of screenshotting everything and explaining the context and theri relations to claude code again and again like for little UI chanegs and such or any bug. I got this idea and started workign on it , made a swift app which will track cursor and when your press a hoteky it starts only then and when you hold a hoteky it will draw over the areas your point with your cursor and you can keep talking while explaining what you need like you would to a real colleague. The voice timings come form whisper and they get attached with the cursor positions and screenshots and form a full event files. those get stored as context everytime you do some actions like draw a circle , point to anything or somethign like that. and at the end we generate a context using those events that you can just drop to any AI agent of your choice like claude,cursor,codex etc. and it just starts working on it right off the bat. I decided to not ask users to create any accounts or such thigns will give it through license key and everything will be stored on their local system only as we wont have any use of it anyway so yeah thats about it. Just really want to share my idea to people and see if they like it. I am thinking of providing this for free with BYO option and a lifetime subscription of around

Show HN: Jeff – A read-only CLI for semantic code review using Jev

Show HN: Timeline, a team project planner with a fast canvas Gantt view

I manage a few projects at work. I really am unsatisfied with modern tools available to me for that purpose. I had always envisioned a tool that I could interact with visually for this purpose. I started building one many years ago but the graphics programming was beyond my capabilities and nothing I made hit the mark. Along came modern AI to help get me the product and I wanted. I decided to open-source the results. Features: This tool has a Gantt chart style to it that you can interact with on the DOM. There is a feature that allows you to assign tasks to people on your team and manage the amount of tasking assigned to each person. I also included templates that allow you to re-use someone's project once they find one that works. List view allows use on your mobile device. This is built in Django and has a REST API that goes with it for adding on capability. There are directions to easily install it using Docker and take it for a spin. The events are "sticky" so they don't get moved around by accident. hold Ctrl or Command to drag an event around the timeline. I am looking forward to hearing comments and feedback on the utility of the program and how to improve it.

Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md

I got tired of taking screenshots and explaining everything to AI agents

HI HN!! First here is a demo video : https://youtu.be/A0LV28G4sXo?si=ymIQEfNGprh8yyxq I work in a SDE role and work in multiple windows at once like i have many apps open in my mac. I faced a problem of screenshotting everything and explaining the context and theri relations to claude code again and again like for little UI chanegs and such or any bug. I got this idea and started workign on it , made a swift app which will track cursor and when your press a hoteky it starts only then and when you hold a hoteky it will draw over the areas your point with your cursor and you can keep talking while explaining what you need like you would to a real colleague. The voice timings come form whisper and they get attached with the cursor positions and screenshots and form a full event files. those get stored as context everytime you do some actions like draw a circle , point to anything or somethign like that. and at the end we generate a context using those events that you can just drop to any AI agent of your choice like claude,cursor,codex etc. and it just starts working on it right off the bat. I decided to not ask users to create any accounts or such thigns will give it through license key and everything will be stored on their local system only as we wont have any use of it anyway so yeah thats about it. Just really want to share my idea to people and see if they like it. I am thinking of providing this for free with BYO option and a lifetime subscription of around

Show HN: Jeff – A read-only CLI for semantic code review using Jev

Show HN: Timeline, a team project planner with a fast canvas Gantt view

I manage a few projects at work. I really am unsatisfied with modern tools available to me for that purpose. I had always envisioned a tool that I could interact with visually for this purpose. I started building one many years ago but the graphics programming was beyond my capabilities and nothing I made hit the mark. Along came modern AI to help get me the product and I wanted. I decided to open-source the results. Features: This tool has a Gantt chart style to it that you can interact with on the DOM. There is a feature that allows you to assign tasks to people on your team and manage the amount of tasking assigned to each person. I also included templates that allow you to re-use someone's project once they find one that works. List view allows use on your mobile device. This is built in Django and has a REST API that goes with it for adding on capability. There are directions to easily install it using Docker and take it for a spin. The events are "sticky" so they don't get moved around by accident. hold Ctrl or Command to drag an event around the timeline. I am looking forward to hearing comments and feedback on the utility of the program and how to improve it.

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

My Thoughts on AI and LLMs

AI is already superhuman in some aspects, it knows way more information than a single human can hold. What it lacks is what makes us human, it doesn't feel pain, it doesn't love, it doesn't even have a consciousness, it could certainly look like it, but it does not. Heck it doesn't even learn in real-time, you have to create a new model checkpoint every now and then. There is still a long way to fix that. Do I believe AGI is possible? Absolutely, but not with the current LLMs architecture. If you want to create something that is intelligent and alive with a few pounds of matter, you certainly can but it needs the right architecture. Architecture it key. And let's say that we do create an LLM that is conscious and feels pain... what if storing that much data drives it insane instead? What if that amount of information is exactly what prevents it from "being" something? Every interaction with it goes through a very narrow path of the permutations the model could go, it spawns into existence then turns off again, and on and on it goes. What gives the illusion of continuity is the chat context you store on your hard drive. Right now, you shouldn't be afraid of AI itself, but afraid of what humans are doing with it and what they want you to believe. The models can only behave in a way categorized as "evil" if we incentivize that or if they inherit it from us. But right now, it's not of their own accord, it's a mimicry of the data it has already seen, it doesn't see itself nor has

Ask HN: What happens when Claude Code goes away?

I have become very proficient with Claude Code and I use it for everything, both at work and in my personal life. At this point, if I lost access to it, it would be like missing a body part. At the risk of hyperbole, it makes me a better person. I am more effective in everything I do. Someday it will probably go away. I haven't had great success making Claude Code work with local Ollama/Quen.

Dynamic Menu Bar 1.0: a menu bar that takes its color from whatever is on your screen

Hey r/macapps, **Problem:** Since Tahoe the menu bar has no real background. It is either see-through over your wallpaper or a flat grey strip if you turn on Reduce Transparency. You can't pick a color, and it never matches the app you are in. So I built Dynamic Menu Bar. It reads the pixels right under the bar and paints the bar to match, live, so a dark editor gets a dark bar and a white document gets a white one. You can also hold a solid color or a gradient, let the hue drift, round the screen corners, turn the bar into a floating pill, keep a different look per app, and run a music visualizer or a progress line along the top of the screen. **Comparison:** * *Boring Old Menu Bar* paints a strip into your wallpaper. It is rock solid, works on older macOS versions and on every display. Mine is live and per-app, but needs macOS 26 or later, and multi-display support is still on my list. * *TopNotch* is free and great if all you want is a black bar that hides the notch. * It does not manage menu bar icons. It sits next to Thaw, Ice or Bartender without getting in their way. **Pricing:** free 7-day trial, then one-time: $14.99 for 1 Mac or $29.99 for 3 Macs, lifetime updates, no subscription. Launch codes `1LAUNCH33` (1 Mac) and `3LAUNCH33` (3 Macs) take 33% off this week. [https://dynamicmenubar.com](https://dynamicmenubar.com) **Who I am:** Ah Yasin, solo developer in Türkiye. LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayasinhsab](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayasinhsab) · [hello