Hùng Phan

Founding Engineer at
building by day, learning by night, gaming by chance

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.

Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

Small win today: convinced my CEO to try @heliumbrowser

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@nico_laqua @karrisaarinen ?

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors.

Available today at the same price.

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@ElevenLabs Evaluating this for our voice stack.

Is $0.08/min flat across all voice models? Agents page suggests bundled, but ElevenAPI shows per-model rates.

[Jack Fields @OrdinaryInds]

Let’s be clear. If you’re doing this you aren’t a software engineer. Software engineers actually know how to use the computer.

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

I have no enemies.

[Denzel Rust @AdemLuz]

Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@rousseaukazi "good at everything" is the wrong frame imo. AI eats shallow generalist work first.

what survives is deep judgment + wide execution. you stay a specialist in taste, you just stop being precious about scope.

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

I'm sorry, GPT- what now

[DataCamp @DataCamp]

Stop overpaying for LLM API calls 💸
If you're building with GPT-4 or any OpenAI model, your token costs can spiral fast—and most developers don't catch it until the bill arrives.

Here's a simple Python trick using TikToken (OpenAI's own tokenizer) to count exactly how many tokens your prompt will use before you make the API call.

No surprises. No mortgage-sized bills.

Drop this into your workflow and you'll always know your cost upfront. 👇

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

lol i love this team

[Zed @zeddotdev]

@dmythro dog can we just have a launch day

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@tim_cook Let Tim Cook!

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

not sure how should i feel about this one...

[Astral @astral_sh]

Astral has entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.

https://t.co/UkFATfFpop

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@NVIDIAGeForce no

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@kr0der The debug mode is crazy good too

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@VivalloAndres @mikeysee @convex it's right above, but doesn't seem to be doing very well

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

@IroncladDev exactly, it's not just about product quality but dev quality as well

https://t.co/Rrc4XWtBkd

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

There's one thing people don't realize about vibe coding.

We communicate best through our work. Whether it's a song, a novel, a piece of code, it speaks volumes about who you are.

Sadly, that signal is fading day by day in the age of AI, and I'm still mourning for it.

[Hùng Phan @hungquangphan]

There's one thing people don't realize about vibe coding.

We communicate best through our work. Whether it's a song, a novel, a piece of code, it speaks volumes about who you are.

Sadly, that signal is fading day by day in the age of AI, and I'm still mourning for it.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

“If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything?”

[Andras Bacsai @heyandras]

tldr: https://t.co/1yIqwrhq5j - check it out, its cool.

not tldr:

I was so skeptical like 8-10 months ago about AI and AI-based workflows and now I am using it 24/7 - lol.

I quickly realized that this requires a totally new kind of apps to be able to efficiently use it.

So I found Conductor - totally awesome, and cool what they are doing with it, check it out! Chefs kiss.

However, I needed some features for my open-source work.
(there was also one more thing that I will do a longer post about soon).

So I made my own app, and I think there are others out there who will find it useful.

It is called Jean, like Jean-Claude (you get it?!): https://t.co/1yIqwrhq5j
It is opinionated. It is free and open-source, backed by our philosophy (see image). 💜

Current features:
- load issues, PRs, and other session's compacts even from different projects as context to any sessions.
- quickly check out PRs, issues, branches.
- you can work on the base branch or use git worktrees if you want, both could have several parallel sessions.
- predefined and customizable magic prompts to easily review PRs, investigate issues, investigate CI build fails, generate release notes, generate commits, generate PR descriptions, etc.
- almost everything could be done with keyboard only, but with a nice GUI.
- most importantly I can see everything on the interface, so I don't need to open several tabs / apps to do my work.
- a lot more.

As it runs on your computer, where as a developer, you have your natural habitat (😅) and your already configured dev env.

But you can enable web access so you can use it from your phone/tablet/fridge through Tailscale, or CF tunnels or locally in your home network.

So you can add your thoughts after a fresh shower (you know what I mean, best thoughts pops up after that) from anywhere, so LLM's could start planning it out immediately.

Currently, it supports @claudeai CLI, but @opencode and Codex support is coming soon. It reuses your subscriptions, so you don't need to pay anything else.

I have been using it for weeks as my daily driver on my Mac, but it should work on Linux and Windows soon (testers needed, btw 🙏 https://t.co/gYh6X12yfT).

Ofc, it has bugs ���, but I will escort them out through the window. eventually.

Ok, this is too long, get back to work!