Writing
Things we measured while trying to get a small developer tool in front of people. We keep finding that the received wisdom in growth is either unmeasured or measured once and copied forever, so when we check something and the answer is useful we write it up — including when the answer is that we were wrong.
- Every MCP server you connect charges rent on every turnNine common MCP servers cost about 29,000 tokens per turn just to be connected, before you ask anything. The surprise is that tool count barely predicts the bill: one server has two tools and costs more than another's seven.
- The same one-line edit takes an agent 318 seconds, or 8.7We measured one small change to a 100 KB document two ways. Re-emitting the page took 5.3 minutes; sending a patch took 8.7 seconds. Same model, same server, same edit. Patch cost tracks the size of the change and rewrite cost tracks the size of the document, which is the whole result.
- The best time to post on Hacker News is just the emptiest timeEveryone says post Tuesday morning. Across 186,890 stories and 182 days that window is the worst named window in the data. The effect is real but it is competition, not attention — and the whole lever is worth about 1.4x.