Keep pulling the thread on Matt Van Horn.
Matt Van Horn built a product called The Printing Press, which creates Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs) for various services.
Matt Van Horn identifies Thanksgiving 2023 as the turning point when AI development tools, specifically new versions of models from Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (Codex), became powerful enough to build valuable products rather than just toys.
The Printing Press uses HAR (HTTP Archive) sniffing to discover and utilize undocumented or "secret" APIs for services that lack official APIs, such as Google Flights and Kayak Direct.
For each service it targets, The Printing Press generates a CLI, an agent skill for frameworks like Claude Code and OpenClaw, and a full MCP.
Matt Van Horn successfully contributed a major feature to the Python programming language that suggests correct Python syntax when a user inputs syntax from a different language.
Matt Van Horn's favorite tool for building software is Compound Engineering.
The Compound Engineering tool uses a "/ce plan" command to generate a plan.md file, which creates a step-by-step execution plan for an AI agent.
Matt Van Horn asserts that AI agents have a propensity to be lazy, aiming to satisfy users with the fewest possible tokens spent.
Matt Van Horn launched a product called Agent Cookie, which synchronizes browser cookies between a main Mac laptop and a Mac mini over Tailscale.
Matt Van Horn states that he does not read or write code, and his last coding experience was with HTML and AppleScript in high school.
The inspiration for The Printing Press came from studying the work of Peter Steinberger, who creates custom CLIs for his agent framework, OpenClaw, to interact with services like Google products and Discord.
A key technique used in Peter Steinberger's CLIs, such as the one for Discord, is to download all relevant data into a local SQLite database to enable faster and more efficient queries by an agent.