Hacker News

https://youtu.be/zhLUlIKB1Mg

The CLI supports a hillclimbing loop:

- set up tasks for coding agents that would need your docs, like 'set up Gauge CI checks'

- run the tasks

- analyze session transcripts for friction or failures

- create variants of your docs to resolve the issues

- re-run the tasks with the doc variants injected (transparently, at the same hostname)

- repeat until you have a variant that resolves the issues

The same loop supports hillclimbing your Skills, CLI, and other agent-facing surfaces.

We started out 2 years ago building open-source developer tools (like Tach https://github.com/tach-org/tach), then pivoted to AI Search optimization, and are now focused on the intersection of the two spaces. We were already working with awesome devtool companies, and they were the first ones to ask us how to optimize for Claude Code and Codex. We realized this would be something that eventually every company needs to do. Our CLI provides primitives for docs/devrel/eng teams to measure, analyze, and improve how coding agents use their product.

The design boils down to two components: VMs and a network gateway.

The VMs are straightforward, we want the agents to be highly privileged within their environment so that they are representative of developers' coding agents. Each VM generally comes with the agent harness itself, language toolchains, and a git repository.

The network gateway is where we terminate TLS and swap in variants of your docs transparently. The gateway also handles credential replacement, so agents see placeholders and can't exfiltrate keys.

The CLI comes with a 'local' execution backend (inference is still remote). For VMs, it uses Docker containers, and the network gateway is mitmproxy running in a sidecar container for each session.

We've used the hillclimbing loop internally to find and fix coding agent issues like mistaken pricing, inaccurate product limitations, and repeated workarounds. We saw coding agents report that Gauge only supports Claude Code and Codex, traced it back to the web pages they fetched, and fixed the behavior (we support Pi, OpenCode, and Antigravity as well). For Clerk, we helped shift coding agents from their legacy 'keyless' mode to their new 'clerk init' command. They were able to validate a pre-release change to their SDK's error messages using Gauge, then saw a 3x increase in coding agents using 'clerk init' post-deploy.

Due to the 'static' nature of AI models, we've realized that closed-loop optimization techniques are now possible for essentially all software products. The same agent can be simulated over and over, meaning that a high-fidelity testing environment is all you need. Achieving the best results boils down to high-quality analysis (finding generalizable friction and objections) and paired experiments (vary only the content, measure the downstream change in behavior).

The repo is here: https://github.com/gauge-sh/gauge-cli and you can start using the CLI with: npm i -g @withgauge/cli

We also have documentation and a quickstart here: https://docs.withgauge.com/agents/guides/cli

If you point a coding agent at those pages, it should guide you through the initial setup - let us know if it doesn't! The intention is for your agent to run some sensible evaluations and find at least one point of friction you can fix.

We'd love to know from HN: Has anyone tried to DIY this locally, or built something in-house at their company? Is this an improvement? If not, what would need to change?

https://kino.ai). Kino lets you make great videos with your agents and your teammates. Storage of footage and assets, a rich video editor, and review links for teammates are all bundled into one. Your colleagues and Codex / Claude Code can work on the same timeline with review notes and footage all in one place. See a basic overview at https://kino.ai/walkthrough-video and our launch video (made entirely with Kino!) at https://kino.ai/launch-video

Opus 5.5 can edit videos and make great motion graphics now. But with a raw agent harness, you need to describe tiny edits either in words or in quick one-off UIs, you can’t refer to footage shared across your devices, and feedback from teammates comes as screenshots on Slack.

Kino is code-first. All editing, all motion graphics, all dragging of timeline items around, all teammate comments, and all 3D scenes are expressed as code, built on Remotion. This was hard to get right, as we found ourselves building a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor for React, which we then turned into a video editor. For our launch video I told Claude-with-Kino to find a macOS Leopard install disk and reskin our whole video to match.

Kino is also fully collaborative and real-time, so you can see your teammates' cursors and exactly which part of the timeline they’re currently watching. For our launch video I had 5+ agents editing the timeline concurrently while my friend Donald had his swarm working a few minutes further down. Donald had one agent rotoscoping to make our visual effects work, I had an LLM color grading all media via our LUT support, and we both made tiny tweaks to the timeline along the way.

To make this code-first editor work with video footage, everything gets transcribed, embedded, described, and face-detected. You can scrub your footage locally after you drag it in, but we upload a low-res proxy so your teammates and cloud inference can see it. This local scrubbing plus custom pro media decoders means you can drag a 250GB ProRes clip from your new iPhone right into your Kino timeline. We built custom decoders for professional codecs such as ProRes, BRAW, R3D, and more (see my extremely successful nine point HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198052). None of the performance we’re getting would have been possible before WebCodecs and libraries like Mediabunny.

I grew up making YouTube videos, and during my undergrad at MIT I co-directed a 3.5 hour archival footage documentary on the history of my school and technological development in America (https://regressions.net). Much of the work was logging footage, managing hard drives, manually syncing Premiere project state, and planning our movie in a spreadsheet.

Our first launch in 2023 proclaimed that Kino was "Silicon Valley meets Hollywood." It was more like Palantir for Hollywood; we ran bespoke on-prem Kino deployments with our team of forward deployed engineers on shows like Survivor and A24's Beef. It was a rush, but it felt like the slowest way to improve video editing for the whole world. Bound by the Avid Media Composer and strict studio security rules, we couldn't touch frontier models, and we couldn't make editors >10x faster. So in 2025, we rebuilt Kino as a true editor, and we took a bet on coding-as-editing.

Everything in Kino has a URL: projects, clips, footage, comments and replies, even a single frame and the line of code that draws it. Projects and media living in one place and everything being addressable means that your agents and team have a single, editable source of truth for video production. At a lower level, I now paste Kino links into my agent constantly, whether it’s making sure Codex knows exactly which timeline item (among thousands) I am referring to or which teammate’s comment needs fixing.

We have teams managing their whole company’s media in Kino, spinning up agents to make new videos every day, then using review links to flag issues. One founder ships ads like this: each day he uses Kino's YouTube support to find b-roll he is allowed to use, he edits something, his co-founder leaves notes such as “we need to use this clip instead” and his agent can then apply them. Full-time filmmakers are also using Kino. They tend to resemble “toxenmaxxer” software developers, where 15+ agents iterate on a single project, each trusting Kino as the source of truth for timeline state, graphics, media, everything.

The full editor is free, including unlimited imports and exports, real-time collaboration and MCP access for your own agent. Pro is $25 per editor per month and adds unlimited MCP tool calls, share links, more storage, YouTube search, and the ability to edit alongside your team. You can download it at https://kino.ai. We have not yet released Kino for the pure web browser, just Electron for now.

If you make videos personally, if you have ProRes media and you want to try to break Kino, if you have legacy video editor projects to bring in, or if you want to make more content for your company, we'd love to hear how Kino works for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpft--x3WlI

https://twitter.com/pierrecomputer/status/211799903617518818...

1) What AI subscriptions are you personally paying for? (Claude, ChatGPT/Codex, Cursor, etc)

- Which tiers?

- Have you purchased multiple subscriptions from the same provider (eg two Claude accounts)?

2) Are you using models outside (or instead) of those subscriptions? For example, pay-as-you-go APIs, OpenRouter, or locally hosted models.

- Which models and providers?

3) What coding harnesses and interfaces are you using? Are you sticking with the default CLIs or IDE integrations, or using alternatives like OpenCode, Pi, Aider, Muse Code, or custom-built harnesses?

- What made you switch harnesses (if you switched)?

4) Are you using any agent orchestration or swarm tools?

- For example, Munder Difflin, Gas Town, Ruflo, or something custom.

5) Are you using broader agent platforms like OpenClaw / Hermes Agent / Grok bot / Dots / Muse?

- If you are using them, what are your main use cases?

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I know my workflow has differed significantly from a year ago, and so it would be interesting to capture a snapshot today of what people are using and why.

https://github.com/squid-protocol/gitgalaxy