tomatohs (u/tomatohs)

tomatohs commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine

tomatohs · 5 days ago

It's not 2010 anymore. Most startups can't even attract "the best engineers" much less hire them.

This is the late game, why would an engineer work for a fraction of a percent of equity and a below market salary when they can take a job at FANG?

You've got to be offering something really, really valuable like remote work, an interesting problem, and/or a new experience. Otherwise the math doesn't math.

tomatohs commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

tomatohs · 3 months ago

TestDriver.ai | https://testdriver.ai | QA, Engineers, Customer Support | Austin / Remote | Full-time / Part Time 95% of companies are still wasting time manually testing due to shortcomings in Playwright, Cypress, and other frameworks. Developers rank testing as the #1 blocker to release.

We've built an AI Agent that performs manual testing on it's own VM with complete desktop access. It works like a specialized "Claude Computer Use."

We're scaling our early sales and seeking QA engineers, customer support, and sales engineers.

Please DM ian [at] testdriver [dot] ai

tomatohs commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025) · Posted by u/david927

tomatohs · 4 months ago

Computer-Use Agent for QA Testing https://testdriver.ai

tomatohs commented on Show HN: Magnitude – open-source, AI-native test framework for web apps github.com/magnitudedev/m... · Posted by u/anerli

NitpickLawyer · 4 months ago

> The idea is the planner builds up a general plan which the executor runs. We can save this plan and re-run it with only the executor for quick, cheap, and consistent runs. When something goes wrong, it can kick back out to the planner agent and re-adjust the test.

I've been recently thinking about testing/qa w/ VLMs + LLMs, one area that I haven't seen explored (but should 100% be feasible) is to have the first run be LLM + VLM, and then have the LLM(s?) write repeatable "cheap" tests w/ traditional libraries (playwright, puppeteer, etc). On every run you do the "cheap" traditional checks, if any fail go with the LLM + VLM again and see what broke, only fail the test if both fail. Makes sense?

tomatohs · 4 months ago

This is exactly our workflow, though we defined our own YAML spec [1] for reasons mentioned in previous comments.

We have multiple fallbacks to prevent flakes; The "cheap" command, a description of the intended step, and the original prompt.

If any step fails, we fall back to the next source.

1. https://docs.testdriver.ai/reference/test-steps

tomatohs commented on Launch HN: Cua (YC X25) – Open-Source Docker Container for Computer-Use Agents github.com/trycua/cua... · Posted by u/frabonacci

tomatohs · 4 months ago

Would love to use this for TestDriver, but needs to support Windows :*(

tomatohs commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

tomatohs · 6 months ago

TestDriver.ai | https://testdriver.ai | QA, Engineers, Customer Support | Austin / Remote | Full-time / Part Time

95% of companies are still wasting time manually testing due to shortcomings in Playwright, Cypress, and other frameworks. Developers rank testing as the #1 blocker to release.

We've built an AI Agent that performs manual testing on it's own VM with complete desktop access. It works like a specialized "Claude Computer Use."

We're scaling our early sales and seeking QA engineers, customer support, and sales engineers.

Please DM ian [at] testdriver [dot] ai

tomatohs commented on No Calls keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/... · Posted by u/ezekg

elicksaur · 8 months ago

Weird that I’d say almost exactly the opposite. 1-1 speaking is one of the slowest forms of communication today.

Writing copy is 1-many and the many readers can read much faster than they can listen.

Making a demo video is also 1-many and can be sped up (who doesn’t listen to content at at least 1.2x these days?).

tomatohs · 8 months ago

I agree with you IRT scale but not speed.

Copy and demo videos are essentially one way communication channels ("fire and forget"). The creator has no idea if the message was understood.

Also, writing copy or making a video typically takes 10 - 100x longer than consuming the same video.

tomatohs commented on No Calls keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/... · Posted by u/ezekg

tomatohs · 8 months ago

A friend described calls as "high bandwidth information transfer."

An average typing speed is 40wpm but an average conversation is between 120 - 150 wpm so about 3 - 4x bandwidth.

Calls also offer sub second latency and maximum priority.

When you add video and audio in there, the pure amount of data transferred is higher.