HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

nicksergeant

2,836 karma · joined December 19, 2008

I build websites, mostly.

Email: nick@nicksergeant.com Website: https://nicksergeant.com

submissionscomments
nicksergeant··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
My dream keyboard, if only it could split down the middle for ergonomics :(
nicksergeant··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
Still a few great ones hanging around, like WBER in Rochester: https://wber.org/
nicksergeant··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
I suppose that's also a good point!
nicksergeant··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
Interestingly LLMs are extremely bad at chess position _images_. I have to imagine if you give it positions in text it'd be pretty great but when I was learning chess and pasting images of positions in for analysis I couldn't believe how wrong it was. I actually thought it was looking at the board in reverse but even when pointing out problems it seemed completely incapable of understanding what it was missing (of course... it doesn't really "understand" anything).

LLMs truly are marvels with text but anything spatial seems to really mess it up, somehow.

nicksergeant··on We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2
I'm coming back to Django after a decade of experience with it post-0.96 and having moved to Next.js a few years ago. Going from 1,700 dependencies to 65 total with Django + Wagtail + HTMX.
nicksergeant··on I quit. The clankers won
If you build a house from scratch but you didn't mill the lumber, did you build it from scratch?

If you make a pizza from scratch but you used canned sauce was it from scratch? What if you used store bought dough? What if you made the sauce and the dough but you didn't grow the tomato?

nicksergeant··on I Quit. The Clankers Won
Agree with pretty much everything you wrote here, I guess with the addendum that LLMs can be a part of the learning experience you're describing. It's as easy as telling the LLM "don't write a single line of code nor command, I want to do everything, your goal is to help me understand what we're doing here."

There are always going to be people who just want the end result. The only difference now is that LLM tools allow them to get much closer to the end result than they previously were able to. And on the other side, there are always going to be people who want to _understand_ what's happening, and LLMs can help accelerate that. I use LLMs as a personalized guide to learning new things.

nicksergeant··on I Quit. The Clankers Won
"I mostly don't look at the crap coming out."

This is pretty much my point. I use LLMs to code _and_ to learn. I read everything that comes out. Half of it is wrong or incomplete. The other half saved me a bunch of time and taught me things.

nicksergeant··on I Quit. The Clankers Won
The latter.
nicksergeant··on I quit. The clankers won
I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past.

I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know existed, writing scripts to churn through tricky data, using specific languages for specific tasks like Go for concurrently working through large numerous tasks, etc.)

Anyone not learning things via LLM coding right now either doesn't care at all about the underlying code/systems, or they had no foundational knowledge or interest in programming to begin with (which is also a valid way to use these tools, but they don't work very well without guidance for too long [yet]).

nicksergeant··on ArrowJS – The first UI framework for the agentic era
Ah, thanks! Looks like that was long enough ago that my submission didn't auto-redirect me to the existing conversation (which was what I was trying to do, haha).
nicksergeant··on LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop
You should definitely watch Maniac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries)
nicksergeant··on Slop Terrifies Me
I wouldn't let an LLM touch my business's books with a 10 foot pole.
nicksergeant··on Clicks Communicator
s/haptics/feel
nicksergeant··on Clicks Communicator
Yeah I think I have the original, and reading this again seems like these new ones are more "touch sensitive". It's a neat idea if they can nail the haptics.
nicksergeant··on Clicks Communicator
Pretty neat. I have the Clicks keyboard and I just wish the keys weren't so stiff. Too hard to type on, sadly.
nicksergeant··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
I don't know. I would argue that driving experience and reliability are still very much going to be things in the electric car market. I'm an EV9 owner and we have issues w/ the suspension making it feel sloppy over some bumps. There's going to be a ton of nuance in terms of how all of these different electric vehicles drive, ride, and are experienced. And those are all going to come down to the vehicle manufacturers themselves, not just the technology partner for screens.
nicksergeant··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
Yep. I certainly wanted an R1S, but ended up in an EV9 due to CarPlay plus huge lease incentives. No regrets, and will probably get another after this lease is up.
nicksergeant··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
Meanwhile, the only thing people really want from Rivian is CarPlay / Android Auto support, lol.
nicksergeant··on Radiant Computer
It's funny you mention that because the first thing I thought when viewing this page was "is this a loading state? why is everything grey?".
nicksergeant··on Show HN: Git Auto Commit (GAC) – LLM-powered Git commit command line tool
Oh I just pipe the diff into the Claude prompt, so it's only the one call.
nicksergeant··on Show HN: Git Auto Commit (GAC) – LLM-powered Git commit command line tool
Neat project. If you're looking for something simpler just to use w/ Claude Code, a simple call to "claude -p" can work: https://github.com/nicksergeant/dotfiles/blob/master/zshrc#L...
nicksergeant··on Every vibe-coded website is the same page with different words. So I made that
Not exclusively - we have a few clients outside of our region, but most of our marketing is centered around local businesses in our area, and probably 80% of our client base are located within a 50 mile radius.
nicksergeant··on Every vibe-coded website is the same page with different words. So I made that
Yep! I built the whole business around slightly higher monthly fees with no (or much lower than typical firms) setup fees. It makes a lot more sense for smaller locally owned businesses.
nicksergeant··on Every vibe-coded website is the same page with different words. So I made that
Thanks for the kind words! We really do try to create nice looking, functional, and accessible websites for our clients.
nicksergeant··on Every vibe-coded website is the same page with different words. So I made that
I run a design agency and I've invested a lot of time and energy into a general design prompt that puts out some decently unique looking sites.

We offer this as our "Mini" package at a very affordable price ($99/mo, no setup fee) for clients who don't want (or need) a fully custom design.

I'm not sure you can call this "vibe coding" as much as "vibe engineering" because the resulting code closely models the heavily customized components and styling patterns of our other 60+ custom websites, but the following website designs were very heavily "vibe-derived", from a design sense:

- https://thedalaijavacdga.com/

- https://crossroadsflx.com/

- https://privateertattoolounge.com/

nicksergeant··on The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review
Yep. Self-reviewing your own PRs is a large boost to both yourself and the team, and often one of the first things I encourage new-ish developers to do.

- 90% of the time when you self-review your own PR, you're going to spot a bug or some incorrect assumption you made along the way. Or you'll see an opportunity to clean things up / make it better.

- Self-reviewing and annotating your reasons/thought process gives much more context to the actual reviewer, who likely only has a surface level understanding of what you're trying to do.

- It also signals to your team that you've taken the time to check your assumptions and verify you're solving the problem you say you are in the PR description.

nicksergeant··on Show HN: Jobs by Referral: Find jobs in your LinkedIn network
The new AI search restricts results to a specific location - you can't search for "remote", for example. So "frontend in my network" returns 5 results, whereas the old Classic Search with the "In My Network" toggle returns 392 results.

FWIW, I didn't know the current search was a new "AI search" and that the "classic search" still provides this functionality, when I built this :)

nicksergeant··on Show HN: Jobs by Referral: Find jobs in your LinkedIn network
Anyone can threaten legal action for anything, so you're not wrong, but JSearch also returns LinkedIn jobs so the traffic is headed right back to them anyway.
nicksergeant··on Show HN: Jobs by Referral: Find jobs in your LinkedIn network
We've added some privacy details here: https://jobsbyreferral.com/privacy.

You absolutely do not need to upload all of your data. Just a CSV in the format we need (which is now updated on the homepage as well).

Page 1 of 19Next →