Top all-time · #1237
Mario Zechner
Personal blog · mariozechner.ataiprogramminghardware
Mario Zechner's personal blog at mariozechner.at covers ai, programming and hardware. Since 2024, 59 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-30, and you can follow it by feed.
developer, coach, speaker
Most-linked posts?
- What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent20 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2025-12-02
- I've Sold Out5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-04-08
- Cchistory: Tracking Claude Code System Prompt and Tool Changes4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-08-03
- Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-03-25
- What if you don't need MCP at all?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-11-16
- Taming agentic engineering – Prompts are code, .json/.md files are state4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-07-03
- /posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-02-25
- Boxie – an always offline audio player for my 3 year old2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-25
- MCP vs. CLI: Benchmarking Tools for Coding Agents2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-16
- What if you don't need MCP at all?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-03
What Hacker News says?
I've only used it at home a little on personal projects. My usage is probably odd -- I connected it with Bedrock, but otherwise used it the same as I do Claude Code (mostly). My basic flow was simple: - Ask it to accomplish some coding task - If it fell short, and I determined that was due to the harness, ask it to patch - Otherwise proceed to next task - Rinse + repeat I run it within a sandbox, so I've been comfor…
Comment linking /posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
on “Pi 1.0”Submitted Boxie – an always offline audio player for my 3 year old as a story · 286 points
HN discussionhttps://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ They explicitly said no MCP and no fullscreen TUI, which makes it minimal and attracts many people.
Comment linking /posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
on “Pi 1.0”Submitted What if you don't need MCP at all? as a story · 237 points
HN discussion> but MCP has been growing for nearly 2 years, and it only gets support now? I don't know if you were aware, but not shipping with MCP was one of its "features": https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-02-what-if-you-dont-ne... They let you have it via a plugin/extension.
Comment linking /posts/2025-11-02-what-if-you-dont-need-mcp/
on “Pi 1.0”Submitted Taming agentic engineering – Prompts are code, .json/.md files are state as a story · 21 points
HN discussionSee https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/ Why do you think these aren't legit?
Comment linking /posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/
on “Claude Code 2.0”Submitted I've Sold Out as a story · 9 points
HN discussionWith cchistory https://github.com/badlogic/cchistory Here's how it works: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/
Comment linking /posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/
on “Claude Code 2.0”Submitted Boxie – an always offline audio player for my 3 year old as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThat's just a dynamic bogus prompt used to trace and extract the system prompt. Here's how it works in detail: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/
Comment linking /posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/
on “Claude Code 2.0”Submitted What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm using Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API, since it was easier to set up on the server than CC's CLI/web login method. Running the bot costs me ~$1.8 per month. The bot is based on Mario Zechner's excellent work[1] - so all credit goes to him! [1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/
Comment linking /posts/2025-08-03-cchistory/
on “Claude Code 2.0”Submitted What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI love this! Not just because I also grew up in the 90ies and like your music choice :) As we drown in media and slop, I think it's super important to teach kids how to be selective, develop taste. And I too found that physical connection does help with that. Great project and execution. It would be great if you could also introduce a social aspect, i.e. kids sharing/swapping cards. (Did something similar for our th…
Comment linking /posts/2025-04-20-boxie/
on “I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery”Submitted What if you don't need MCP at all? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGenuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue. I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically. [1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-0…
Comment linking /posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review/
on “Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale”Submitted MCP vs. CLI as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe framework has the following capabilities: 1. A way to create function tools 2. A way to create specialised subagents that can use their own tool or their own model. The main agent can delegate to subagent exposed as a tool. Subagents don’t get confused because they have their own context window, tools and even models (mix and match Remote LLM with Local LLM if needed) 3. Don’t use all tools of the MCP servers yo…
Comment linking /posts/2025-11-02-what-if-you-dont-need-mcp/
on “Agent design is still hard”Submitted Taming agentic engineering – Prompts are code, .json/.md files are state as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSkills are not only Markdown files. I often structure my skills as small Python scripts and the actual Markdown is only the skill front matter and maybe some brief documentation. You can even stick an OpenAPI schema or whatever you see fit. If you often need timezone conversion, sounds like a `timezones` skill exposing a few lines in a Python script. Boom. No MCP needed. No server needed. It's just files, all the wa…
Comment linking /posts/2025-11-02-what-if-you-dont-need-mcp/
on “MCP was always a bad idea?”Submitted Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA 77% score on terminal-bench 2 is really impressive. I remember reading the article about the pi coding agent ( https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ ) getting into the top ten percent of agents on that benchmark. It got about 50%. While it may still be in the top ten, that category just turned into one champion and a long of inferior offerings. I was shocked to see that in the prompt for one of…
Comment linking /posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
on “GPT-5.3-Codex”Submitted Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYeah, look at what https://x.com/badlogicgames has done porting an engine with the help of Claude Code. He's set up a TODO loop to perform this: https://github.com/badlogic/claude-commands – background blog article: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-06-02-prompts-are-code/
Comment linking /posts/2025-06-02-prompts-are-code/
on “Claude Code Router”Submitted What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou get used to it :) And especially once you get used to the YOLO lifestyle, you end up realizing that practically any form of security is entirely worthless when you're dealing with a 200 IQ brainwashed robot hacker. I think using the Pi coding agent really got me used to this way of thinking: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...
Comment linking /posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
on “Let your Coding Agent debug the browser session with Chrome DevTools MCP”Submitted Cchistory: Tracking Claude Code System Prompt and Tool Changes as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs crazy as it may sound, my workflow today does not look too different from a year ago - where I was already heavy into claude code. Im not certain things will look too different a year from now either. We still have serious bottlenecks in terms of focus/attention you have for both delegating agent work and being able to review it. Even if we solve the "trust what ai does" problem, these cognitive deficit issues st…
Comment linking /posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/
on “Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven't progressed enough”Submitted Taming agentic engineering: A complex porting job, 7x faster with Claude Code as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
