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David Mosher
Personal blog · blog.davemo.comaiprogrammingsystems
David Mosher's personal blog at blog.davemo.com covers ai, programming and systems. Since 2010, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Deterministic Core, Agentic Shell”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-14, and you can follow it by feed.
How do you make AI agents deterministic? Put a state machine at the core. A pragmatic architecture pattern for AI agents using Mastra and XState.
Most-linked posts?
- Deterministic Core, Agentic Shell3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-16
What Hacker News says?
I love XState. It has solved so many problems in quite a few codebases for me, most recently it has become the backbone of a voice app I'm building for the banking sector. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into making it great. I blogged[0] a bit about my experience with Finite State Machines, and about the architecture we landed on with XState and Mastra (although since publishing we have swapped to Pip…
Comment linking /posts/2026-02-14-deterministic-core-agentic-shell.html
on “Statecharts: hierarchical state machines”Submitted Yahoo Pipes (2009) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI've got a bunch of irons in the fire at the moment, most leveraging or built with agentic coding tools; my harness of choice these days is pi+codex. - An internal apps platform built with bun, pg-boss, and railway - A smart music setlist manager that downloads chord charts, creates spotify playlists, and automatically drafts emails with attachments and practice schedules - A recruiting intelligence platform called…
Comment linking /posts/2026-02-14-deterministic-core-agentic-shell.html
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)”Submitted Deterministic Core, Agentic Shell as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI was an avid user of Pipes and blogged a bit about the experience of using it to build an aggregated set of feeds from various employee blogs to feed into our company site back in 2009 [0]. It holds a special place in my memory alongside early internet greats like del.icio.us [1] - [0] https://blog.davemo.com/posts/2009-04-06-yahoo-pipes-at-vend... - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
Comment linking /posts/2009-04-06-yahoo-pipes-at-vendasta.html
on “Pipe Dreams – The life and times of Yahoo Pipes (2023)”Submitted Deterministic Core, Agentic Shell as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Benefits of Interactive Prototyping as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The SCNA 2011 Narrative : Suitability, Capability, Anarchy and Propaganda as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Front End Debugging Techniques: Isolation as a story · 1 points
HN discussion