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The Stack

BetterWispr: free open-source dictation that never leaves your Mac

The paid dictation apps just gained a free, inspectable rival — and its privacy pitch is architectural, not a promise. BetterWispr, an Apache 2.0 dictation app for macOS, landed on the Hacker News front page on its first day out. Built by developer Kartik Labhshetwar under the opennookorg banner, it lets you hold Option-Space in any app, speak, and release to have cleaned-up text typed wherever your cursor sits. Transcription runs on your machine through one of nine bundled models — Apple's on

The Stack

AI agents decompile a shooter: 99% rebuilt, 83% byte-exact

Three months, a swarm of coding agents, and a token bill the author can only estimate — the results are the clearest public data yet on orchestrating agents at scale. Maurice Heumann and a small community team decompiled a popular first-person shooter into readable C++ using up to 16 concurrent AI agents, and the reconstructed game now runs flawlessly. The project started with four agents — three workers committing code, one reviewer auditing — and finished the final weeks with 14 Luna agents

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Coding agents as a hospital: Cockroach's five-month results

The agentic-coding debate keeps being framed as speed versus trust. Cockroach Labs just published the most detailed trust-first ledger yet — five months of numbers, including the parts that didn't work. Cockroach Labs ran its codebase like a teaching hospital for five months and says the pipeline merged well over a million lines of code with seven total reverts. In the setup the company calls MOLT Sinai, GitHub issues are patients, merging is discharge, and the humans in charge are Chiefs of M

The Stack

Open Source Radar — October 10: reviewers, skills, and 3D maps

Today's trending board skews practical: tooling that fixes code, teaches agents a framework, and rebuilds 3D scenes from video. Here's what's worth your stars. alibaba/open-code-review (Go, 45.6k stars) — Alibaba open-sourced the code review tool it runs internally, and it shows: a hybrid of deterministic static-analysis pipelines for the known bug classes (null dereferences, thread-safety, XSS, SQL injection) plus an LLM agent that writes precise, line-level comments. It talks to OpenAI- or A

The Stack

Open Source Radar — October 9: plugins, sandboxes, tokens

Today's open-source signal is infrastructure rather than hype: Microsoft's code sandbox reaches 1.0, Anthropic's knowledge-worker plugins keep climbing, a beloved token counter flips its default, and LocalLLaMA squeezes a usable 2B model into about 700 MB. knowledge-work-plugins (Python, ~27,900 stars, Apache-2.0) — Anthropic's repository of role-shaped plugins for Claude Cowork is the top AI repository on today's daily trending page, and the stars keep coming: roughly 2,100 more than when we

The Stack

How to — estimate what an AI feature will cost before you ship it

You want one number you can defend in a planning meeting: what each completed job on your feature costs, and what a month of it costs at launch volume. This is a measurement job, not a guess — a morning with your real prompts beats any pricing page. 1. Run 20 real requests and keep the usage numbers. Not demo prompts — your actual system prompt, tool definitions, the documents you stuff into context, and a typical user message. Every serious API returns input and output token counts with each

The Stack

Open Source Radar — October 8: The Agent Wranglers

Today's trending list is less about new frameworks and more about the awkward middle of agent development: supervising fleets of coding agents, auditing what they touch, and keeping them fed on long tasks. Four fresh projects, all verified on GitHub. cmux (Swift, ~28,000 stars) is an open-source macOS terminal built specifically for running AI coding agents — Ghostty-based, with vertical tabs, per-agent notifications, and everything exposed through a CLI and Unix socket so agents can drive the

The Stack

Open Source Radar — October 7: agents, CUDA kernels, robot brains

Today's daily trending board splits three ways: a skill that fixes how your coding agent talks to you, DeepSeek's inference math made readable, and Stanford open-sourcing how robot world models get built. All three verified at the source. i-have-adhd (Python, MIT, about 54,600 stars) is a ten-rule skill that stops your coding agent burying the answer: lead with the next action, number multi-step tasks, end with one concrete next step, no preamble, no recap, no "Hope this helps!". The repo's be

The Stack

Open Source Radar — October 6: nothing leaves your machine

Today's trending board is all projects we ran earlier this week, so the fresh signal comes from the Product Hunt launch slate instead — three open-source tools that share one instinct: your phone, your pixels and your MCP traffic should stay on hardware you control. All three verified at the source. iphone-use (Rust, MIT, about 59 stars) is computer-use for a real iPhone: an agent reads the screen as text, taps, swipes and types over WebDriverAgent, and every action comes back with an honest v

The Stack

AI 101 — What is prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering is the practice of writing instructions for an AI model so it gives you what you actually wanted — from a one-line question in a chat box to the multi-paragraph specifications companies embed in their products. "Prompt" is just the text you send the model; "engineering" is the unglamorous work of making that text specific enough to work. Why it matters right now. Prompting is still how almost everyone touches AI, and the craft keeps getting documented rather than disappearin

The Stack

Open Source Radar — October 5: Skill stacks for every harness

The trending board this weekend is less about new frameworks and more about portable taste: skill packs and workflows built in one agent harness, then ported everywhere else. Four fresh picks, all verified at the source. gstack (TypeScript, 135,000+ stars) is YC president Garry Tan's Claude Code setup, opened up: 23 opinionated tools that play CEO, designer, engineering manager, release manager and QA. The repo sits at the top of daily trending, and the appeal is obvious — instead of writing y

The Stack

Open Source Radar — October 4: Cloudflare's OS for agents

Today's trending signal is the toolchain opening up: Cloudflare handed the public its internal AI workspace, Addy Osmani's engineering skill pack crossed 100,000 stars, and a nonogram benchmark is puncturing model confidence in public. Cloudflare OS (TypeScript, ~10,700 stars, Apache-2.0) — Cloudflare just open-sourced the "AI productivity environment" a large share of its own workforce uses daily, and it reads less like a demo than an internal product with a security team's fingerprints on it.

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