iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 26/09/2026

Watched Devin prompt itself to implement Stripe. The prompt barely mentioned any technical steps. It described what the user should be able to DO, not what to build. Here’s my take 👇 seed.horacioh.com/short-posts/...

seed.horacioh.com

Learning from seeing Devin prompting itself

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 12/08/2026

So happy I learned about state machines & the actor model years ago. It's SO IMPORTANT in the era of AI agents and human/agent collaboration ❤️❤️❤️ AI agents are actors: messages, internal state, transitions. The actor model wasn't invented for AI but it might as well have been.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 11/08/2026

Me uno oficialmente como @DevinAI Ambassador 🎉 Llevo meses usando Devin en proyectos reales, no en demos. Ahora quiero compartir esa experiencia. Quick intro de lo que hago con él 👇

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 11/08/2026

The hard part of building software is never the code. It's modeling what should happen — and what shouldn't. What's something in your projects where the *model* mattered more than the *implementation*? Reply with yours ↓

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 10/08/2026

I used to test components. Now I test state machines. Component tests check 10 things you don't care about (React, DOM, CSS, timing). Machine tests ask one thing: given state + event, did it transition? You already have a state machine — make it explicit.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 07/08/2026

AI didn't just make code cheaper. It made maintainer attention more expensive. When anyone can generate a PR in 30 seconds, the bottleneck shifts: the scarce resource is review capacity, not code production. The best OSS contributions compress maintainer attention.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 06/08/2026

Local-first is not just offline mode. It changes who owns the product relationship: your work starts with you, survives the network, and syncs when the system catches up. That shift affects architecture, UX, and trust. It's a philosophy, not a feature.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 05/08/2026

Block identity is the most underrated problem in document editors. A block isn't just content — it's position, children, selection, version. Move it, split it, merge it — did the identity survive? Most editors miss this for months.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 04/08/2026

AI made code cheap. It didn't make knowing what to build easier. The bottleneck was never typing. It was understanding the problem, modeling abstractions, knowing what the user needs. AI didn't kill coding — it made visible what the real job always was.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 03/08/2026

Our designer asked me to make text formatting persist when you press Enter — if you're writing in bold and hit Enter, the next line stays bold. My first reaction: "yeah, that makes sense." Then I actually used it. Nope.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 03/08/2026

Your framework doesn't matter as much as your model. React, Vue, Svelte — they all render state. The hard part is knowing what states exist, which transitions are valid, and what happens when things go wrong. Good architecture is just good modeling with a nicer name.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 01/08/2026

Autosave looks simple until it isn't. "Just debounce a useEffect" works for v1 — then races, stale saves, and lost work crash the party. At that point the real model is not "an effect." It's a state machine. Explicit states + transitions = no stale IDs, no impossible UI.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 31/07/2026

My coding setup right now: Jean on local (web access), Jean on a server, Devin in the cloud. All reachable from a phone, tablet, or laptop through Tailscale. I could be anywhere. The agents don't know and they don't care. They're just working.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 31/07/2026

Boolean flags are fine until the product starts having memory. `isLoading` + `isError` + `isSuccess` + `isSaving` + `isRetrying` + `wasCancelled` = a state machine you're pretending isn't one.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 30/07/2026

I shipped 3 PRs this week while I was at BJJ. My agent wrote them. I reviewed when I got back. The code was fine. Not perfect — but neither is the code I write at 2am. The difference is I was on the mats, not at a keyboard.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 23/07/2026

We had 10 useEffect calls in a single React component. Our TipTap document editor was a mess of side effects fighting each other. Here's how we went from 10 → 2 by embracing state machines and atomic hooks.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 07/07/2026

Good communication comes from connection and alignment

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 06/07/2026

I built a cron job so my wife wouldn't have to check a website every day. When I was almost done, she said: "You don't have to. I'm already used to doing it." That was a good reminder 👇

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 05/07/2026

Considering Devin? Here's my honest experience after a month of real use. I'm a cofounder working full-time. I had a clear side project idea but zero time to build it myself. 🧵

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 04/07/2026

A common refactor mistake: extracting JSX first. Splitting into <Header /> <Body /> <Footer /> helps readability — but the real complexity stays buried inside Body. Better order: extract rules → test rules → then split components if JSX is still noisy.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 03/07/2026

Rich text editor bugs hide in tiny interactions: click an image caption, type text, press Enter, verify the image wasn't deleted, check the next paragraph gets focus. That one test is worth 100 snapshots. Test the interaction.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 02/07/2026

Autosave looks simple until it isn't. "Just debounce a useEffect" works for v1 — then races, stale saves, and lost work crash the party.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 01/07/2026

New Post! seed.horacioh.com/writing/depl... Because Seed is open source, you are able to fork it and make it yours. Here I teach you how I did it for my own site.

seed.horacioh.com

Deploy a Seed Site From Your Own Fork

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 30/06/2026

Today I will show what we are doing with agents in @seed.hyper.media come and join us! luma.com/xauvgrx6

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 29/06/2026

4 booleans = 16 possible combinations. Only 7 are valid. The other 9 are bugs waiting to happen. Why I model UI workflows as state machines: seed.horacioh.com/writing/butt...

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 28/06/2026

A rich text editor is a document system with a schema, transactions, selections, and identity — not a decorated <textarea>. That's why I built Seed's editor on ProseMirror. Full writeup: seed.horacioh.com/writing/rich...

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 27/06/2026

AI made code cheap but didn't make knowing what to build any easier. The bottleneck was never typing — it was understanding, modeling, and product sense. Expanded my thoughts: seed.horacioh.com/writing/ai-e...

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 26/06/2026

A trust graph for OSS shouldn't be owned by any single platform — not GitHub, GitLab, or anyone else. Maintainer reputation shouldn't evaporate when you change forges. The graph has to be portable.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 25/06/2026

The big question: how does OSS change when plausible code is nearly free? My answer: contribution friction should scale with trust distance and change criticality. Full proposal here: seed.horacioh.com/writing/grad...

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 24/06/2026

The MVP I want to see: scoped expiring vouches, contribution policies as signed docs, hop-distance calculation over the graph, and a GitHub Action surfacing trust distance in PRs.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 23/06/2026

What's the right primitive for OSS trust? Not stars, followers, tenure, or signed commits alone. I keep coming back to scoped, revocable, reputation-bearing vouches.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 22/06/2026

AI did not just make code cheaper. It made maintainer attention more expensive. In OSS, the valuable contribution is not only "here is code." It is: the problem, the reproduction, the tradeoff, and the smallest useful fix. Good contributions compress maintainer attention.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 22/06/2026

A good OSS trust model has to be portable. Every forge should read the same graph. Maintainer reputation shouldn't disappear when you move from GitHub to Codeberg.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 21/06/2026

Open source ran for 30 years on a hidden assumption: a working patch = real human attention. AI broke that. Plausible-looking code is nearly free to generate, but human understanding is not.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 20/06/2026

Betting on XState for frontend logic is never a bad call. useState works at first — but logic always gets more complex. When it does, not having a statechart means untangling implicit state manually. Start with XState early. You'll thank yourself later.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 19/06/2026

Local-first is not just offline mode. It changes the product relationship: your work starts with you, survives the network, and syncs when the system catches up. That one shift changes architecture, UX, recovery paths, and trust.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 18/06/2026

Rich-text editors are not textareas with bold buttons. They are document systems: schemas, selections, history, identity, comments, embeds, collaboration, import/export, and recovery paths. The toolbar is the easy part. The product system underneath is where the complexity lives.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 17/06/2026

Most complex UI bugs are invalid states wearing a nice design system. Once you add loading, retry, cancel, partial success, background sync, and recovery paths, you are not just managing component state anymore. You are modeling product behavior.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 17/06/2026

A good statechart is a product spec developers can run. It captures what can happen, what cannot happen, and what the UI should do next. That is the real value for complex product flows: ambiguity becomes visible before it turns into bugs.

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Horacio Herrera @horacioh.com · 16/06/2026

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