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danielvaughn commented on Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use   vecti.com... · Posted by u/vecti
airlocksoftware · 2 days ago
Are you still working on this? Because I like the words I see on your GitHub -- vim-style bindings, keyboard driven, sounds like you write a definition language for your designs, basically?

Lik Matry is to Figma as openscad is to traditional CAD (Fusion 360, etc)?

Though that does sound like a huge project to take on!

danielvaughn · 2 days ago
I don’t know enough about CAD products to evaluate that comparison, but the core idea was to expose language as a design tool. First through code, then through keyboard commands (hence the vim idea). It’s still pretty fun, but LLMs have changed the conversation around what a designer even is, and I’m currently re-evaluating.

Matry might pop up in another form. I’m considering turning it into an actual browser for designers. Right now designers are getting into the code and using Claude/Cursor to make changes directly. But they still have to know how to get the app running locally, which is a hurdle. So if they could just navigate to the site, make some design changes directly in the browser, Matry could then take the changes and create a PR on GitHub for them. Designer wouldn’t have to fuss with any dev tools. Kind of a cool idea.

danielvaughn commented on Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use   vecti.com... · Posted by u/vecti
cobertos · 2 days ago
Are any of your prototypes published or available to view?
danielvaughn · 2 days ago
there are various little things scattered around the github org - a js framework, a treesitter grammar, some old docs, a vscode extension, a vim-style editor, an AI-powered code editor geared towards design, etc.

https://github.com/matry

danielvaughn commented on Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use   vecti.com... · Posted by u/vecti
danielvaughn · 2 days ago
Congrats on launching. I spent a decade trying to build a design tool. I think I built almost 40 prototypes, to various degrees of completion. Never got to a point where I felt it was good enough to share. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do, so kudos to you for sticking with it.
danielvaughn commented on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app   macrumors.com/2026/01/28/... · Posted by u/pier25
nabla9 · 10 days ago
Apple’s App Store profits on commissions from digital sales

    Revenue          $32 B
    Operating Costs   $7 B [1]
    Estimated Profit $25 B 
    Operating Margin ~78%
[1] R&D, security, hosting, human review, and including building and maintaining developer tools Xcode, APIs, and SDKs.

Apple could take just 7% cut and still make 20% profits.

Fun Fact: During the Epic trial, it was revealed that Apple's profit margins on the App Store were so high that even Apple's own executives were sometimes surprised by the internal financial reports.

---

edit: There is no ideological argument for voluntary action here. The entire goal is to force regulators to step in. The debate over 'good vs. bad companies' is just online noise and rhetorical trik, no one on either side of the political spectrum wants these systems to be fixed voluntarily with corporate altruism.

danielvaughn · 10 days ago
I really think I might be done with Apple. The only thing keeping me using them is how much I hate Android. The _millisecond_ a competitor arrives, I'm dropping my iPhone like a bad habit.
danielvaughn commented on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app   macrumors.com/2026/01/28/... · Posted by u/pier25
archerx · 10 days ago
They do and it’s awful. I’m making a browser based game and it works great on desktop browsers but Apple refuses to allow css filters on canvas forcing you to build your own filters and apply them to image data. The web audio api is also a pain to get working properly on iOS safari and a bunch of other arbitrary but feels like they’re intentional obstacles found only on iOS. I’m almost considering just using webgl instead of a 2d context but who knows what obstacles apple is hiding there also it will make everything so much more verbose for no real gain.

Not even in the days of IE was I ever this frustrated.

danielvaughn · 10 days ago
I tried something similar a couple years back, and fully agree. Safari is atrocious for trying to create a good mobile experience. It almost feels intentional.
danielvaughn commented on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks   twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bigwheels
suddenlybananas · 11 days ago
People have said this about every single model release.
danielvaughn · 11 days ago
I had the same reaction. So when people were talking about this model back in December, I brushed it off. It wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I decided to try it out, and I immediately saw the difference.

My opinion isn't based on what other people are saying, it's my own experience as a fairly AI-skeptical person. Again, I highly suggest you give it an honest try and decide for yourself.

danielvaughn commented on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks   twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bigwheels
porise · 12 days ago
I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.
danielvaughn · 12 days ago
It's important to understand that he's talking about a specific set of models that were release around november/december, and that we've hit a kind of inflection point in model capabilities. Specifically Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model.

I never paid any attention to different models, because they all felt roughly equal to me. But Opus 4.5 is really and truly different. It's not a qualitative difference, it's more like it just finally hit that quantitative edge that allows me to lean much more heavily on it for routine work.

I highly suggest trying it out, alongside a well-built coding agent like the one offered by Claude Code, Cursor, or OpenCode. I'm using it on a fairly complex monorepo and my impressions are much the same as Karpathy's.

danielvaughn commented on Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers   lambdaland.org/posts/2026... · Posted by u/ashton314
FjordWarden · 17 days ago
This is like the difference between an orange and fruit juice. You can squeeze an orange to extract its juices, but that is not the only thing you can do with it, nor is it the only way to make fruit juice.

I use tree-sitter for developing a custom programming language, you still need an extra step to get from CST to AST, but the overall DevEx is much quicker that hand-rolling the parser.

danielvaughn · 17 days ago
Every time I get to sing Treesitters praise, I take the opportunity to. I love it so much. I've tried a bunch of parser generators, and the TS approach is so simple and so good that I'll probably never use anything else. The iteration speed lets me get into a zen-like state where I just think about syntax design, and I don't sweat the technical bits.
danielvaughn commented on Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs   github.com/jordanhubbard/... · Posted by u/Scramblejams
deepsquirrelnet · 19 days ago
At this point, I am starting to feel like we don’t need new languages, but new ways to create specifications.

I have a hypothesis that an LLM can act as a pseudocode to code translator, where the pseudocode can tolerate a mixture of code-like and natural language specification. The benefit being that it formalizes the human as the specifier (which must be done anyway) and the llm as the code writer. This also might enable lower resource “non-frontier” models to be more useful. Additionally, it allows tolerance to syntax mistakes or in the worst case, natural language if needed.

In other words, I think llms don’t need new languages, we do.

danielvaughn · 19 days ago
I’ve been on a similar train of thought. Just last weekend I built a little experiment, using LLMs to highlight pseudocode syntax:

https://x.com/danielvaughn/status/2011280491287364067?s=46

danielvaughn commented on Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf]   cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec6... · Posted by u/praptak
danielvaughn · 20 days ago
There's a bunch of really interesting declassified documents if you want to go down a historical rabbit hole. A long time ago I remember reading top secret messages that were sent back and forth between Kennedy and his military strategists in the days leading up to the Bay of Pigs. Feels like reading history from the source.

u/danielvaughn

KarmaCake day7739June 21, 2015
About
UX Engineer. I'm building Matry - a language for UI designers.

https://matry.design https://github.com/danielvaughn

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