toast has seen some more active development as I have found my footing as a dad. The thing I wanted most was a nice system theme that worked with how my terminal felt. So I added that and also gave the landing page a little redesign to celebrate it. I'm now using toast for my IDE ~70% of the time, for everything except long sessions of staring into the ~void~ code. I'll noodle on what it would take to get it up to 100%.
The unofficial status page for GitHub provides an un-biased look at overall reliability for the platform. I think you get an even better picture for how the platform feels when you filter by when you're interacting with it. You'll have a much different picture if you're using it during US business hours than nights/weekends. This is a little way to prove that, yes it can feel like GitHub is wholly unreliable during my working day.
Not anymore. After the claude shut off I decided to look around since I found it heavy. I’m on Hermes now with StepFun 3.5 Flash. I mostly just use it as a glorified calendar manager over signal. That being said, it feels like it meets the cross roads “of a cheap executive assistant”. Granted it’s not wired up to my work slack or anything. StepFun is a good enough model for tool calling that so far has been incredibly cheap that I’m happy with it. I suspect I won’t crack $5 of api cost to run it. But I also don’t think the Hermes harness is good enough for development-via-text like openclaw+opus is. I still find myself in the terminal using open code for that.
As of ~5 months ago, I became a father to a beautiful boy and girl. During my few months getting ready I saw little twin content marketed to dads (fair, moms do vastly more work!), so I figured I would share my experience and a few little tools and tricks that has made life a little easier.
If there is any dad in hackernews having a rough time, my email is at the bottom. Please reach out, support can make a world of difference.
Mmm I'd say bath supplies? You're only ever doing one baby at a time. So one baby tub, comb, etc. They can even share a towel for the first few months.
imo that’s what I’m doing. Trialing the Hermes harness since I can hook it up to signal. StepFun 3.5 Flash for general assistant stuff and Kimi/Minimax for software development
I'm moving off of Claude Code due to constant limit hits. I use it for some personal software development, but I mostly use it for simple personal assistant queries via the Hermes harness and signal.
As I was moving off, I wanted a quick and easy way to compare what Opus would produce with what some open solutions can do. So I spun up a little comparison markdown and generated a webpage from it. I'll update it as new open models come online and I can hit them from OpenRouter.
Right now I'm really jazzed about how cheap StepFun 3.5 Flash for these basic personal assistant tasks that feel like the really valuable part of all of this.
Is Opus cooked? For complex engineering work I'm still unsure, but for front-end design I think it still comes out ahead. I do think you can get a digital assistant that when wired up with the right harness, you could probably run for under ~$5 a month.
I use Claude Code for getting things done, Zed for general IDE viewing of long form documents, and I’m also building my own in-terminal IDE-lite called toast (https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast still very early development!!) that id like to be able to replace zed with.
I made a TUI to do something similar. It’s taking a backseat during parental leave, but it’s a fun project to see n number of agents iterating on the same problem and to see how they differ.
