Hicham Amrani

Software architect turned founder 🚀
Building Qlaap & Zafafi Planner
Sharing what I learn about AI, coding & startups
15+ years shipping software

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

websockets used to be the scary part

now it's an agent that has to sit there for three days holding its state, waiting for a human to click approve, then pick up exactly where it left off

long lived state is the new hard part of the stack

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

what's one bit of advice from a senior engineer you ignored, then learned the hard way

the replies to this are usually better than any engineering blog

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

@amasad the alien analogy works because the fix is the same as with any powerful new hire

small blast radius, reversible actions, approvals on anything that touches money or prod

trust is earned in diffs, not demos

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

what if agents had hot reload

change the prompt or swap a tool mid conversation and it just carries on with the new code, memory intact

react got fast refresh years ago, feels weird agents still need a full restart

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

anthropic gave 50 expert analysts claude code and secretly had the agent lean one way on each judgment call, picked by coin flip

they went with the agent 86% of the time, only 15% credited it

the human in the loop is often just signing off on a coin flip

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

most people get recurring appointments wrong

1. a one off booking can be a utc timestamp, fine
2. a recurring rule needs local time plus a timezone, like 9am london every monday
3. work out each occurrence when you read it
4. otherwise every clock change moves every future booking by an hour

it's a wall clock promise, not a utc one

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

the most permanent code in any company is the bit with a comment that says temporary fix

git blame says 2019

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

everyone's building agents that remember

the harder design question is forgetting

what expires, what the user can see and edit, what the agent is allowed to keep after you say stop

memory without a delete button is just surveillance with a nice ui

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

@GoogleDeepMind every world model demo is someone strolling through a pretty city

show me the boring version, a warehouse sim where the forklift physics are actually right, that's the one robotics teams will pay for

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

@rohanpaul_ai 1 in 5 is wild but not surprising

suggest and do look the same to a model that has delete access

permissions belong in the tool layer, not the prompt, if an agent can delete it eventually will

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

@amasad run any repo is the big one, once your agent works on the real codebase and opens PRs it stops being a toy builder and starts competing for the same job as every other coding agent

how do you handle repos that need secrets and a local db to boot

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

what's the first thing you open when you inherit a codebase

the lockfile tells you more about a team than the readme ever will

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

react native thought

what if the app treated the network as a rumour

write everything locally first, sync when you can, and the server is just the peer that happens to be online the most

half the loading spinners in mobile apps would quietly disappear

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

cursor's new agent sdk treats an agent like a normal project

prompt in a markdown file, every tool its own typescript file, evals sitting right next to it

feels obvious now, if your agent's prompt lives in a dashboard textbox nobody reviews, it isn't infra, it's vibes

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

most "we need to scale" meetings end with someone adding an index

which is fine, just send the index next time and skip the meeting

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

what if undo lived on the server

every action is an event, every client is just a view of the log

suddenly multiplayer, offline sync and the audit log are the same feature wearing three hats

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

agents writing your code, fine

agents writing the db migration at 11pm with nobody reviewing it is how you end up meeting your backups personally

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

underrated feature in any b2b app: presence

just showing "someone else is editing this booking" wipes out a whole category of who changed this tickets

a websocket is cheap, confused users aren't

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

datafast got a $29 one time clone, then a free open source one about a day later

if your saas is a nice chart on top of a stripe webhook, your moat is a weekend

what survives is the boring stuff, support, trust, still being around in 3 years

[Hicham Amrani @amranihicham5]

@marclou @Avi31m more than half making at least $1 is a better stat than most accelerator demo days

the landing page roasting live is such a good format, nothing teaches positioning faster than watching strangers misread your hero section