kweingar

7 ms·

1.
by kweingar 1y ago
And yet the systems built at these places far exceed what an indie dev can do
2.
by kweingar 1y ago
I was wondering if there was something particular about AI, but that's just the standard reason people give to use JS for anything.
3.
by kweingar 1y ago
Why is JS particularly good for agents?
4.
by kweingar 1y ago
Many of the curious ones will be adversely affected. When you're a college student, the stakes feel so high. You have to pass this class or else you'll have to delay graduation and spend thousands of dollars. You have to get t
5.
by kweingar 1y ago
Is it natural, or have we just adapted to it? Maybe if we had always had 10-day weeks, we'd get sick if we switched to 7.
6.
by kweingar 1y ago
I was being sarcastic there, a bad habit of mine. There are some advantages to being an early adopter (you get to reap some of the benefits now), but it doesn't give you a permanent advantage, and the people who aren't closely fol
7.
by kweingar 1y ago
(I deleted a less productive comment.) I do use these tools though! I spent some time with AI. I have coworkers who are more heads-down working on their projects and not tinkering with agents, and they're doing fine. I have coworkers w
8.
by kweingar 1y ago
This is why devs who started with J2ME are the holy grail of app developers, since they started making apps years before iPhone devs
9.
by kweingar 1y ago
If the "meta" changes so quickly, then that sets an upper bound as to how far behind you are, no? Unless you are doing low-autonomy, non-specialized work or are applying to fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants startup jobs, no hiring man
10.
by kweingar 1y ago
You're making at least a year's worth of pre-LLM progress in 5 weeks? You expect to achieve more than a decade of pre-LLM accomplishments between now and June 2026?
11.
by kweingar 1y ago
If progress continues at the rate that AI boosters expect, then soon you won't have to use them smartly to get value (all existing workflows will churn and be replaced by newer, smarter workflows within months), and everybody who is be
12.
by kweingar 1y ago
I can't think of many engineering disciplines that do things this way. "This seems to work, I don't know how or why it works, I don't even know if it's possible to know how or why it works, but I will just apply thi
13.
by kweingar 1y ago
I think we agree. Interacting with employees is not an engineering discipline, and neither is prompting. I'm not objecting to the incantations or the vibes per se. I'm happy to use AI and try different methods to get the results I
14.
by kweingar 1y ago
This is an interview published in Common Dreams, rehosted at Chomsky's site. Those are the interviewer's words, not Chomsky's.
15.
by kweingar 1y ago
How do we benchmark these different methodologies? It all seems like vibes-based incantations. "You are an expert at finding vulnerabilities." "Please report only real vulnerabilities, not any false positives." Organizin
16.
by kweingar 1y ago
> If you cannot afford the hundreds of dollars a month Claude costs Employers will buy AI tools for their employees, this isn't a problem. If you're saying that you need to buy and learn these tools yourself in order to get a j
17.
by kweingar 1y ago
Highly recommend this podcast by patio11 explaining that poor people are not funding credit card rewards programs. https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-r...
18.
by kweingar 1y ago
I keep hearing people express dismay that people are financing their lunch, sneakers, or concert tickets. But this has been the norm for a while, no? I can't remember the last time I didn't utilize credit at a restaurant or reta
19.
by kweingar 1y ago
> I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems. That's true of all SWEs who write HTML and CSS, and it's the reason I don't think there's much downside for devs to not proactively start using these a
20.
by kweingar 1y ago
I actually agree with this. I use LLMs often, and I don't compare them to a calculator. Mainly I meant to push back against the reflexive comparison to a friend or family member or colleague. AI is a multi-purpose tool that is used for
21.
by kweingar 1y ago
Agreed. The nice thing is that I am told by HN and Twitter that agentic workflows makes code tasks very easy, so if it turns out that using these tools multiplies productivity, then I can just start using them and it will be easy. Then I am
22.
by kweingar 1y ago
If it's zero effort, then why do devs need to adapt fast? And wouldn't adapting be incredibly easy? The only disadvantage to not using these tools would be that your current output is slower. As soon as your employer asks for more
23.
by kweingar 1y ago
I expect my calculator to be 100% accurate 100% of the time. I have slightly more tolerance for other software having defects, but not much more.
24.
by kweingar 1y ago
I don't think there was ever a sustainable route to a semantic web that would work for the masses. People wanted to write and publish. Only a small portion of people/institutions would have had the resources or appetite to tag fac
25.
by kweingar 1y ago
Exactly right. My books (and later, college courses) emphasized linked lists and inheritance as fundamental concepts of programming, but the reality as a working engineer is totally different. When I first encountered Go, I was still a lear
26.
by kweingar 1y ago
I learned programming from a Java 7 book in high school. When I went through the Tour of Go, I found myself shocked that anybody would want to write software in a language like this. Where is inheritance? Where is the data structures packag
27.
by kweingar 1y ago
With GPL you don't have to actively work to upstream your patches, but in practice you can't withhold your patches from upstream. If you add a feature, they get to have it too. Unlike permissively licensed software, where you ca
28.
by kweingar 1y ago
Since this has become a general thread about Epic, here are my comments: I am amazed at some of the software Epic has built for itself over the years. Using its own database product (the backbone of the product they ship to customers), they
29.
by kweingar 1y ago
> This is an issue of tooling, not intelligence. Language models absolutely have the power to process email and send (push?) code, should you give them the tooling to do so (also true of human intelligence). At a certain point, a tooling
30.
by kweingar 1y ago
This is the reason why I am so confused by the strain of open source thought which says that large companies exploit OSS maintainers and ought to pay them. Maintainers often pick permissive licenses specifically because they want companie

More ›