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mvanzoeston Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Interesting. I downloaded some PDFs for the adjustment of status forms recently and most of them were editable but only partially - the conditional fields couldn't be edited it seemed.

mvanzoeston Many SWE-bench-Passing PRs would not be merged

Yeah I had a similar experience on a smaller scale, reducing a function from 125 lines to 25.

mvanzoeston Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

I've found it useful for getting features started and fixing bugs, but it depends on the feature. I use Claude Sonnet 4.5 and it usually does a pretty good job on well-known problems like setting up web sockets and drag and drop UIs which would take me much longer to do by hand. It also seems to follow examples well of existing patterns in my codebase like router/service/repository implementations. I've struggled to get it to work well for messy complicated problems like parsing text into structured objects that have thousands of edge cases and in which the complexity gets out of hand very quickly if not careful. In these cases I write almost all the code by hand. I also use it for writing ad-hoc scripts I need to run once and are not safety critical, in which case I use it's code as-is after a cursory review that it is correct. Sometimes I build features I would otherwise be too intimidated to try if doing by hand. I also use it to write tests, but I usually don't like it's style and tend to simplify them a lot. I'm sure my usage will change over time as I refine what works and what doesn't for me.

mvanzoeston Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

yeah like how about the "sonic hedgehog" protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein

mvanzoeston Teckstack: Question-Based JavaScript Practice

Hi, I recently launched a site called Teckstack which offers quizzes on JavaScript knowledge. The content is pretty basic at the moment, but am looking for feedback, and direction on where I should take things. Go deeper into more interesting JS territory, or expand to React, or Web APIs or Node, or HTML/CSS, or build more features for usability?

Let me know what you think, or if you run into any issues. Apologies up-front if the site mistakenly marks your answers incorrect! I will do my best to resolve any of those issues in a timely manner.