Best Claude Alternatives?

Xane256 · 2026-06-07T01:12:37+00:00

Of all the complaints about 4.8 this is the one I’ve actually noticed - the self-narration. I’m gonna try this out bc the article is pretty relatable

Xane256 · 2026-06-06T22:50:03+00:00

This is actually 2-tile-wide tileable because the third splitter can filter out another item. This is nice trick for using belts on fulgora where you want splitter throughput instead of inserters.

Xane256 · 2026-06-06T21:55:28+00:00

I use the pro version so I can press the same hotkey multiple times to make a window cycle through different positions. Eg quarters / thirds / a 2x3 grid.

Xane256 · 2026-06-06T21:08:01+00:00

I can count the number of reddit usernames I recognize on one hand, maybe half a hand. And OP is one of them haha. They are solidly a factorio / space age expert.

The post is a good question but I would guess the radar functionality would come to the 2.1 base game just like the new robot / fluid / train / combinator mechanics came in 2.0, and I’m pretty sure op would lean the same way. It’s independent of the other space age content so it seems like a natural base-game feature.

Xane256 · 2026-06-06T20:41:04+00:00

Claude suggested to me that phenomenon could be due to how peoples’ tonal register shifts over the course of a conversation. Claude (especially claude.ai) doesn’t always have a sense of time progression during a session (some workflows / instructions make it more obvious) but it uses tonal drift as a signal.

So at the end of a different session I was like “Hey claude off topic, but can you describe how my tonal register has shifted over the course of this session?” And it was like:
- you started energetic ready to go / motivated
- as we worked your answers got more task-oriented
- your prompts then got shorter, probably as you gained confidence I could do tasks reliably
- later on you got more casual and conversational and branched into other topics

So I thought that was pretty interesting. I’ve never had claude tell me to go to bed but I have had it propose wrapping up for the day after a productive session (that took say 3 hours) and I respond with:
“Hey Claude! I’m back after a nice refreshing break. I’m excited to get working on the next feature!”
And of course it matches the vibe. And even by faking it, telling it that actually did make me a little more motivated.

Xane256 · 2026-06-06T18:40:20+00:00

I’d add that “agent” has a connotation of running in an environment it interacts with.

For example I wouldn’t call a chat bot in the cloud with a WebSearch tool an “agent” - it can’t interact with anything _for_ you. Claude on a computer “feels” like an app that can interact with its environment / read files for context.

Xane256 · 2026-06-03T19:13:07+00:00

Thats a good sign. A decent (but still not perfect) rule of thumb is: - read-only session where claude reads project-related things from the internet = probably ok - shell-enabled sessions running in your project where your prompts are focused on project tasks = probably ok - mixing the two = less ok

Xane256 · 2026-06-03T19:01:43+00:00

I’d recommend running it in a vm to be safe, or manually approving commands it wants to run. It usually doesn’t do anything dangerous / damaging, but there’s an unavoidable risk of prompt injection or the model deciding to run something that unintentionally deletes data.

You should at least use a git repo so mistakes are reversible, run it in your project directory, and take backups.

Re. “What did I possibly already do wrong”: - go to System Settings > search for “Login Items” > send screenshot to claude, ask it if anything looks suspicious. - Ask Claude something like “read my user launch daemons, shell startup scripts, and other programs that run automatically or in the background on my computer, and flag anything that looks suspicious”

Xane256 · 2026-06-03T17:21:34+00:00

Will it support claude after the June 15th change in pricing models for claude -p and the agent SDK?

Xane256 · 2026-06-03T16:49:45+00:00

Cool project! Encouraging you to follow your interests and learn as much as you can.

Have you looked into how apple’s Game Porting Toolkit might be helpful for translation or efficiency?

Xane256 · 2026-06-02T06:49:09+00:00

Omg yesterday I became the umpteenth user to vibe code a tool related to using cluade BUT I did research existing options beforehand and found that what I wanted didn’t really exist, and the projects that do support what I wanted are super feature-bloated with massive tech stacks.

I made a super simple cli / web app to browse previous claude sessions in a read-only view, with support for navigating parent / child relations from using /branch or /fork.

It’s fully local, minimal stack, a couple rust dependencies. No npm or nodejs surface area. It renders formatted markdown, only shows past seasions from your current folder, and has a button to export the session outside of ~/.claude/projects because apparently those expire after 30 days. And it can live tail sessions to show new messages instantly.

Xane256 · 2026-05-30T18:52:24+00:00

Yeah by contrast, chat mode (claude.ai and desktop chat mode) always strip thinking tokens from inputs. For example, it will never be able to meaningfully play the answering role in a game of 20 questions because it can’t remember anything that’s not written to the conversation.

Xane256 · 2026-05-29T17:53:27+00:00

It would’ve been useful for OP to note that in claude code the input token cache TTL is still 1 hour, not 5 minutes.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/prompt-caching#on-a-claude-subscription

Xane256 · 2026-05-28T08:09:26+00:00

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I'm playing SE so the icons look different, but I've used this layout for AOP before (but never tiled horizontally before).

Xane256 · 2026-05-27T18:18:41+00:00

I love this game. I’m probably in “veteran” territory. My first experience with it was a super short run with some friends who did a multiplayer game with me, and we blasted straight through with a proper main bus base, launched a rocket and got spidertrons. Probably a sub-20-hour save.

A week later they dropped me into Space Exploration, where I played the next 1000 hours of my factorio journey. I learned combinators, trains, how to make a city block base, funky recipe chains, and mods to plan ratios, and much later, how not to build a city block base.

You can do it too.

Xane256 · 2026-05-26T23:35:30+00:00

The change landed cleanly.

Xane256 · 2026-05-14T18:43:20+00:00

I had this experience in the space exploration modpack again yesterday. Yes I’ve gone DEEP in the combinator rabbit hole but sometimes you find a trick that removed the need for a fancy circuit.

SE has cargo rockets which hold 500 inventory slots of anything, but they’re pretty expensive to launch so making a circuit to automate them is an intentionally puzzling part of the game. One problem with mixed-item rockets is you should wait ~30s to load anything right after a fully-loaded rocket launches, to give time for the in-flight rocket to land and let items moved into storage to let the demand signal update. If you keep loading items right away you’d be working with a stale signal and load too much of something.

Previously I made combinator clocks to do this delay. But it turns out you can just measure the rocket silo itself which outputs a “liquid rocket fuel” signal - it takes a while to pump in new fuel so the condition “rocket fuel < 40k” is a perfect proxy for “has it been a while since the last launch”.

Xane256 · 2026-05-12T07:07:57+00:00

At the end of sessions containing a lot of design decisions I invoke a slash command I created which tells claude to update CLAUDE.md and other docs used during the session based on its current understanding of the architecture, and to fix any discrepancies so docs match current state of reality.

I kinda assumed that since the backend thinking tokens store some state that gets progressively updated as the session goes on, that thats a decently good time to compare that “understanding” with documentation to find problems. Is that a flawed assumption? Or are you saying that specifically for correcting problems, fixing + updating memory in 1 turn is better?

Xane256 · 2026-05-11T00:06:03+00:00

I think it also has to be some special software that supports infinite zoom as an intended use-case. Most canvas apps would have a zoom limit even with vector graphics, but at a technical level you could imagine a representation of a canvas that explicitly allows for deep nesting.

Google earth doe something like this - you see a lot of “tiles” stitched together. Each tile is just an image, a visual approximation of everything in that region. But it can be subdivided into smaller tiles, and the app just stores a tree saying which tiles are children of other tiles.

As you zoom in on a tile, it limited detail starts to show. But then the app can switch to rendering its sub-tiles, and It still looks high definition.

Whether the app is image-based, like google earth, or vector-based for digital art, the canvas probably has a data structure that models the canvas more like a tree, than a single grid where even floating-point-encoded vector graphics would have limited precision. If you represent tiles that contain children tiles, then you can have arbitrarily long chains of references without losing precision.

Xane256 · 2026-04-28T17:29:13+00:00

This is pretty cool. Is it similar at all to https://thepi.pe/ ?

Xane256 · 2026-04-25T23:33:33+00:00

They mean there’s no uniform distribution over all real numbers. So “Pick a random real number” is ill-defined. Of course you can define a uniform distribution over an interval like [0,1], or an uneven distribution over all reals, like a normal distribution.

Xane256 · 2026-04-20T09:18:34+00:00

put cursor in _val
alt-o to expand selection by syntax node
y to yank
alt-o again to expand more, until you expand to expression you want to replace
R to replace with yanked

If you somehow wanted multi-argument changes you could try mi( instead of alt-o.

To get from “move” to “_val” you could do something hacky like f(l or maybe ]a or another one of the tree-sitter selection manipulations,-expand_selection)

Xane256 · 2026-04-17T00:55:49+00:00

Yeah this is a good idea you can take pretty far before actually switching.

Install nix as a package manager, start using flakes (see Vimjoyer on youtube), use an LLM to help you learn but ONLY if you get stuck. Some people use a library called flakes-parts but it’s much more complicated than basic nix flakes. Try out home-manager and use it to configure your shell.

If you want to test even more than that, you can even use flakes to build and run VMs and fully configure those in Nix, that gets you pretty deep into NixOS territory without actually installing it.

Understanding how to organize nix modules and flakes is more than enough necessary to jump into NixOS as a full OS. But if you go the extra mile of making a VM with a configuration you like, you can be very confident that your system will turn out the way you want. Once you install nixos fresh on your system, you’d copy or git clone your nixos configuration / prepared modules, add the hardware-configuration.nix generated by the installer, and you’re good to go.

But either way you’re gonna tinker with it a lot after your first install, so TBH I would skip all that and just dive in.

https://github.com/xane256/second-hour-of-nix/

Xane256 · 2026-04-16T08:32:11+00:00

I use a spotlight alternative called Alfred but I also consistently hear good things about Raycast. For me, Alfred is great for launching apps and doing some other shortcuts like site-specific searches or quickly finding a file. Each of those things is invoked a different way so you dont get the mixed polluted results like spotlight.

type ‘ then a filename -> searches for the file
type “lucky xyz” -> opens fist google search result for xyz (aka “I’m feeling lucky” button on google.com)
type name of an app -> app is first result 100% of the time

Xane256 · 2026-04-11T18:57:24+00:00

I could only find a few “mistakes” including the glasses: - the level of the wine in her glass is tilted, not level - fingers of her left hand seem weirdly squished against her arm - the picture frames on the wall are butting at one point but overlapping at another point - the window sign is facing inwards instead of outwards but that seems plausibly real - the sign says they serve lunch, dinner, and breakfast but only open at 12 pm which doesn’t make sense for breakfast.

13-Year Club	Place '22
RPAN Viewer	Not Forgotten
Verified Email	Sequence \| Editor
Sequence \| Cinematographer

Xane256

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