Mark Percival

Developer and open source enthusiast since Linux 1.2 (it came on a CD). Partner at 1984 Ventures -

[InsForge @insforge]

We’re building the agent-native alternative to AWS, but it's actually good.

- 33,000+ projects created (10% WoW growth)
- 2x weekly active projects (2000 → 4000+)
- 11,000+ GitHub stars (5x in the last 3 months) - faster than React, Supabase, and Linux

Introducing InsForge ↓

[Mark Percival @mdp]

So I'm happy for the 18 years we got, and I hope we get many more. But if we don't, it was still a hell of run. Thanks GitHub.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

So much hand wringing over GitHub. But honestly? GitHub had a great run. 18 years, and a huge impact on my life and so many others.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

Communities build tools, those tools get productized, products get juiced for revenue, they die. Sometimes they get enshittified and die quickly. Sometimes they make it 18 years and change the trajectory of open source in ways we never could have imagined.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

@kentcdodds Same validation I felt when I heard Balmer and decided to go all in on being a developer.

Kidding aside, I do feel like we are through the rough patches on MCP and it’s starting to take hold in more places in my workflow.

[InsForge @insforge]

Introducing InsForge Compute.

Deploy long-running backend services as Docker containers via your coding agent.

It writes the Dockerfile, builds the image, injects env vars, runs the container, and returns a live URL.

All in under 60 seconds.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

We live in a world where agents are mostly yolo’ing it, and meanwhile apt is like: “Whoa, hold up, are you SURE you want to install curl? It’s 500 KB, but I’ll need to download 1 MB, so I just want to be extra sure.”

The contrast is jarring: one minute you’re passively dropping a production database, the next you’re confirming a 500 KB install.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

@adrian_horning_ Yeah, it gets you the old interface with less clutter and no sign in nags. It’s also great for agents to read. It’s such a standard that it’s even in Brave’s browser settings.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

One thing I'll miss is reverse engineering by hand. I remember when the Economist app screwed up the audio player with a new release (like ~2013), so I decompiled the Android app to try and figure out how to just get the raw mp3's.

It was something really easy like `PASSWORD=$(echo -n "$KEY$DATE" | md5)` - where DATE was this weeks magazine date in iso, eg. 2026-05-21 and the KEY was just a big 'ol hex string hardcoded into the app.

Then you took that md5 string password and used it to unzip the mp3's you could download from their CDN (also hardcoded in the app).

I suspect my ENTIRE day of messing around and learning baksmali is now like 15 minutes of a decent model looking at it.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

It’s easy to forget how weird and wonderful tech was in the early days of the internet.

You can’t go back, but you can appreciate it for what it really was. Truly a land of misfits.

Good book BTW

[gabriel @gabriel1]

when i voice prompt, i yap for 10 minutes straight and change my mind 3 times in the middle of the yap, and send it without reading

yap enough tokens for the picture to be complete, it understands well when you change your mind in the middle. ai is smarter than you think

[Mark Percival @mdp]

Being old enough to have been on both sides of this, buying music on physical media felt like ownership. Buying a file never did.

Add in the fact that it was DRM’d to shit, when Rdio/Spotify came along, it felt like a better deal.

I miss physical media, but I don’t miss those middle years of the iTunes Store.

[Pigeons & Planes @PigsAndPlans]

When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, the idea was simple: 99 cents per song.

Looking back on that announcement, what stands out most is hearing Jobs reference subscription services, and why he believed that the streaming model couldn't work for music.

A lot has changed since then, including attitudes toward music consumption. Apple Music launched over a decade later in 2015 under Tim Cook, but this is what Jobs had to say about music streaming in 2003:

"People have told us over and over and over again, they don’t want to rent their music ... Music's not like a video."

[Mark Percival @mdp]

But you get spoiled by how good the coding agent is, because code either compiles or it fails, it's a tight loop. The agent can self-correct.

"Go through all my calendar events and..." is an open-ended orchestration task - there's no ground truth, no compiler, nothing to catch when it skips event 14 or loses track of where it is. The agent has no way to know it's drifting.

[Mark Percival @mdp]

"If you’ve ever resorted to MANDATORY or DO NOT SKIP, you’ve hit the ceiling of prompting." - This one seems to have hit a nerve on HN today and I tend to agree.

Agents don't need better prompts, they need deterministic control flow. LLMs as components, not the orchestrator.

https://t.co/Lo7E0pLupp

https://t.co/rfqzbaUntM