1,969 karma · joined May 25, 2015
When I make a change with a Copilot Agent, it checks for issues, builds my project, runs tests, and iterates until things work. Multiple agents can do that in parallel.
My impression was that this does more or less the same thing.
That said, I'm definitely open to learning more about them both.
What are the advantages of this in your experience?
Go to the URL, type what you want done, and a cloud Claude agent creates a PR. $10/month.
Every spammer and scammer, even a bot, is ultimately controlled by a real person in some sense. That doesn't mean we want their content here.
If this were about grammar, it would be appropriate to translate something you wrote, not use generative AI to create it.
This whole thing is an ad. All the post's sentiments that people are engaging with ("imposter syndrome" etc.) were spit out by a clanker.
What a disheartening start to my morning.
The author even insists that AI was used because of their poor English, which is the standard excuse on Reddit as well. But clearly, this is not a translation:
> Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?
This is bog-standard AI slop to increase engagement.
Look at the blog on their linked site as well. AI-generated posts.
This has been posted here for SEO. This is a business venture.
It's times like this when I think HN needs a post downvote button. Flagging might not be quite appropriate here, but I hate to see this content cluttering up the front page.
As everyone rushes to them for fear of falling behind, they're forking over their secrets. And these users are essentially depending on -- what? The AI companies' goodwill? The government's ability to regulate and audit them so they don't steal and repackage those secrets?
Fifty years ago, I might've shared that faith unwaveringly. Today, I have my doubts.
He then proceeds to passive-aggressively browbeat readers who aren't as grateful as he is for the "lucky ticket called being alive."
Has it occurred to him that perhaps it was his ticket that was lucky? It certainly seems luckier than that of the Filipino family who opened their "last can of tinned meat" to feed him, a volitional vagabond.
If there's anything worth reading here, it's the reminder that altruism is more prevalent than individualists sometimes expect. The rest is frankly stomach-turning.
Example: One of my customers (which I got by Reddit posts, cold calls, having a website, and eventually word of mouth) wanted to do something novel with a vendor in my niche. AI doesn't know how to build it because there's no documentation for the interfaces we needed to use.
- 2025-09-19. My query: "is mics an abbreviation for micrograms." AI Overview: "No, MICs is not an abbreviation for micrograms; it is an abbreviation for Minimum Inhibitory Concentration."
- 2025-09-19. My query: "75 mics of medication." AI Overview: "When discussing medication, 'mics' is a common abbreviation for micrograms (mcg)."
- 2025-11-03. My query: "copilot 'replace string in file'." AI Overview: "While Copilot in tools like Visual Studio Code can assist with code generation and refactoring, its primary function is not directly to perform 'replace string in file' operations across an entire project." ("Replace string in file" is the name of an operation that Copilot performs, and I was looking for more info about how it works.)
- 2025-11-22. My query: "u2 'spirits move you'." AI Overview: "The phrase 'spirits move you' is not a direct U2 song title, but it likely refers to their song 'With or Without You,' a famous track from their album The Joshua Tree." (Who said anything about it being a "direct U2 song title"? It's a lyric from "Mysterious Ways.")
It's so frequently wrong and so frequently makes insulting assumptions that it's worse than worthless. And when you click the "Dive deeper in AI mode" button at the bottom, the new response often contradicts the old one. Just garbage.
And fair enough: When the ship is that big and there are that many people on board, you often don't want to "move fast and break things," because the downstream effects can be extreme. Now you've just broken a company that had been working for decades. You're incentivized to take small risks with high likelihoods of reward.
Of course, the problem is, at some point that becomes fatal. A balance can be struck, but it can be hard when the original driving force is long gone.
It was one of the best places I've worked. People were kind, had families, and went home after their 40 hours. I stayed for 6 years before deciding to strike out on my own.
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
---
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...
I don't believe it. Personally, I think spiritual weakness and religious corruption are more likely culprits -- and not necessarily the type of spirituality or religion that you might be thinking of.
Either way, "good times" is a dangerous place to put the blame. It relieves us of responsibility for our own catastrophes (it was the good times' fault), and it makes us suspicious of prosperity and happiness.
Good times are not evil. We don't need to shun them, provided we keep strengthening the better angels of our nature.
How are others doing this? How is Hacker News hosted/protected?
This assumes teams care more about performance than comfort and convenience. Many teams care about both. And which one wins out can vary. It can even change over time.
The question is how to incentivize what, and what methods are the most effective at doing that for a particular team at a given point in time.
When I returned, I reviewed the PR. It wasn't perfect; one of the dozen or so tests that Copilot had generated didn't actually test what it purported to. So, I fixed that by hand. It wasn't a big deal. It was still quicker and took less cognitive effort than writing the entire PR myself.
I'll confess that part of me is pleased to be dismissed with epithets like "AI-pilled," because properly using LLMs is an enormous competitive advantage. The more negative sentiment around them there is, the less likely the competition is to be inclined to learn and master them.
I'm guessing others here who are primarily on Windows can relate to this. We've been disappointed with what Apple and Microsoft are doing, and we want, not necessarily more customization of our OS, just less interference.
Amazing that this free-to-download application supports Linux when Adobe doesn't. Or maybe not so amazing given their different approaches.
- Davinci Resolve
- Adobe suite
- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them
- Microsoft Office, mainly PowerPoint, Excel and Word for creating and interacting with other companies' docs. Libre/OpenOffice mangled them/were missing features I depend on
- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.) last time I tried to switch, and rabbit holes that I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)
That said, I would love to switch back. I loved rofi [0] last time, for example.
Can anyone speak to the above? What's the status of running Windows apps like Adobe, Resolve, Office, for instance? Or AutoHotkey or equivalent?
It's as if, for her, only phone calls, speeches, or handwritten letters would be enough to start a dialog. She seems to be under the misapprehension that digital communication is something to which norms and laws and, fundamentally, rights don't apply. Which is a misguided and dangerous belief.
When a lone developer is untrained and doesn't follow best practices, as happened here, the community rushes to their defense on the grounds of empathy: "We would ALL make this mistake." But what if we wouldn't? What if we're trained and have certain safety protocols and procedures that we hold ourselves to?
This is why, at the end of the day, I run my company on a more centralized ecosystem, for all its warts. At least there's the promise of standard practices and procedures and training, whether it's always perfectly fulfilled or not. With a community-driven ecosystem, you don't have that: You're relying on the standards of the community, a vague and nebulous group that doesn't necessarily have any security sense, as you rightly pointed out. I realize not everyone has the luxury of making that choice due to career/financial constraints.
To this day, I don't follow links in other kinds of emails. I mouse over the link to view the domain as a first step in determining how seriously to take the email. If the domain appears to match the known-good one, I copy the link and examine the characters to see if any Unicode lookalikes have been employed.
If the domain seems legitimate, or if I don't recognize it but the email is so convincing that I suspect the company truly is using a different domain (my bank has done this, frustratingly), I still don't click the link. I log in to my account on the known-good domain -- by typing it by hand into the browser's address bar -- and look for notifications.
If there are no notifications, then I might contact the company about the email to verify its authenticity.
If anyone reading thinks that seems like a lot of work, I agree with you! It stinks. But I humbly submit that it's necessary on today's Internet. And it's especially necessary if you're in charge of globally used software libraries.
To adopt the tone of the article's author, if they aren't willing to do that, they're wrong, and they're going to keep getting phished.
The article's author seems to be under the misapprehension that standard libraries should or have to be community-driven like Node's and that falling for phishing attacks is inevitable over a long enough period of time. Neither notion is accurate.
Personally, I wrote 200K lines of my B2B SaaS before agentic coding came around. With Sonnet 4 in Agent mode, I'd say I now write maybe 20% of the ongoing code from day to day, perhaps less. Interactive Sonnet in VS Code and GitHub Copilot Agents (autonomous agents running on GitHub's servers) do the other 80%. The more I document in Markdown, the higher that percentage becomes. I then carefully review and test.
Look at the language Coinbase uses. Only their view is a "belief." The opposing view is a "worry." Others are motivated by fear. Only holy Coinbase is motivated by love!
This is, of course, doublethink. We all know that removing humans from the hiring process is, by definition, dehumanizing.
Coinbase's article would have been more palatable if it were truthful:
> Some believe AI will dehumanize the hiring process. We agree, and we're SO excited about that! I mean, we aren't in this business to make friends. We're in it to make cold, hard cash. And the less we have to interact with boring, messy human beings along the way, the better! If you're cold, calculating and transactional like us, sign on the dotted line, and let's make some dough!
But if they were that truthful, fun, and straightforward, they'd probably be more social, and they wouldn't have this dehumanizing hiring process to begin with.
It really doesn't matter what "they" said about books. We are talking about screen time. And screen time has measurably harmful effects on child development.
It leads to worse outcomes across the board. Sleep disorders. Obesity. Mental health disorders. Depression. Anxiety. Decreased ability to interpret emotions. Aggressive conduct. And this is to say nothing of ADHD (7.7 times higher likelihood in the heaviest screen users) or social media's effects on adolescents. [1][2]
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353947/
[2] https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/childhood-adhd/childhood-adhd...
> This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural.
> We’re not innovating. We’re rebuilding broken versions of tools the web already gave us – and doing it badly.
> We’re not iterating toward impact – we’re iterating just to stay afloat.
It's not X, it's Y? Dashes? Question fragments? This style isn't just tedious—it's a hallmark of LLM-generated content.
The whole article feels like low-effort LLM-generated clickbait to fan the eternal flamewar between web developers and web app developers. Yes, you might not need React for a static blog. Yes, React is useful for writing web applications. Can we talk about something else now?
Examples:
- Screensharing in Teams. There was a gaussian blur over everything. I had this happen during a work call.
- Nvidia. I kept getting screen-tearing. I went through various guides, installed drivers and so on, but it never worked properly.
- Office. LibreOffice slaughters my Office docs. The formatting is wrong, things are broken.
- Media. I had issues watching things that I could just watch on Windows.
Those kinds of issues were fun to me 20 years ago; they were part of the adventure of roughing it and sticking it to the man. Today, I don't have the time or energy. I'd rather use an OS that Just Works. When I need Linux, WSL has worked great.