ctbellmar's comments

ctbellmar | 4 months ago | on: AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

Various AI services (e.g. Perplexity) are down as well

ctbellmar | 4 months ago | on: Augment Code's pricing is changing on October 20

They sent out emails to existing customers yesterday, showing if you are above/below/at average usage. I'm above (no surprise), and I wonder if anyone on higher plans will find themselves under-utilizing their subscription - probably not.

ctbellmar | 4 months ago | on: Show HN: Augment your dataset with LLM distillation techniques

Pawel,

This looks promising! Is it for text based models only at this time (i.e. no vision/image training)?

ctbellmar | 6 months ago | on: Show HN: OWhisper – Ollama for realtime speech-to-text

I wrote a tool that may be just the thing for you:

https://github.com/bikemazzell/skald-go/

Just speech to text, CLI only, and it can paste into whatever app you have open.

ctbellmar | 7 months ago | on: Augment Code model comparison: GPT-5 vs. Claude Sonnet 4

I wonder how well Augment system will play with both of these. I recall that for some time, Cursor worked really well with Claude LLMs and less so with OpenAI's offerings like GPT and o's. So far, my own testing had a few timeouts on GPT-5 and slower results. Nothing substantially different - need to experiment with different languages and projects to pick out the use cases for GPT-5.

ctbellmar | 7 months ago | on: GPT-5 vs. Sonnet: Complex Agentic Coding

I know it's been mentioned a few times, but worth repeating: these LLMs tend to do noticeably better in their own native environments. Claude (Opus or Sonnet) in Copilot != Claude in Claude Code. Same applies to Cursor, Windsurf, Augment, etc. This likely has a lot to do with context manipulation (and compression), which affects the resulting output. I imagine that GPT-5 likewise will do better in Codex vs 3rd party plugin/VS Code fork.

ctbellmar | 7 months ago | on: The Claude party is almost over

"Qwen3-Coder ... is the first open-source model I’ve been able to accept patches from. It isn’t by any means a Claude killer, but it feels like Claude 3.7 Sonnet, maybe even better."

Has anyone been able to set up Qwen3-Coder to run locally in agentic mode (via LM Studio or similar)? So far, I have only seen in work as Chat via Continue plugin. It gives reasonable suggestions, and it is supposed to be able to call tools, just haven't figured out how to make that happen yet.

ctbellmar | 7 months ago | on: Ask HN: What's Your Take on Perplexity AI?

I had some time for in depth experiments with it this summer and was disappointed. It gets the surface level details alright, but falls apart on any detailed work.

Examples that failed: - opening hours for POI (restaurants, tourist attractions, etc) - mostly made up - GPS coordinates - produced results that were nearly 100% inaccurate - finding contact info (e.g. phone, email) for specific government or public bodies - nearly 100% inaccurate

The issue with above was mainly not a lack of results but rather fabricated/made up ones. As in: here are the coordinates (that don't correspond to actual locations) or here are the phone numbers of such and such departments (that don't exist), creating more work to try and discover they are nonsensical vs. just giving "no results found" message.

ctbellmar | 9 months ago | on: Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

WhatSignal, WhatsApp <-> Signal relay, written in Go

https://github.com/bikemazzell/whatsignal

I'm working on a WhatsApp to Signal relay. I.e.: whenever someone sends a WA message to you, it appears in your Signal. You can reply and it will go back to the original sender.

Why? I'm privacy conscious and don't fancy using a Meta product. But some of my friends/associates/family still insist on WhatsApp only. Running this WhatBridge service on my micro server behind a VPN allows me to communicate without having WhatsApp on my mobile.

Behind the scenes, it connects WAHA (https://github.com/devlikeapro/waha ) and Signal CLI (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli). Still early stages, but getting closer to a workable state.