oncallthrow

In my experience these models (including opus) aren’t very good at “improving” existing code. I’m not exactly sure why, because the code they produce themselves is generally excellent.

Yeah Opus 4.5 is a massive step change in my experience. I feel like I’m working with a peer, not a junior I’m having to direct. I can give it highly ambiguous and poorly specified tasks and it… just does it.

I will note that my experience varies slightly by language though. I’ve found it’s not as good at typescript.

This is interestingly somewhere where Go really shines, in my experience. Go has no requirement to wrap (or, indeed, even handle at all) errors; yet, despite this, Go codebases I've worked in almost always perform error handling properly (wrapping at each layer of the call stack, so it's easy to identify where an error occurred).

> I don't think that's different though?

It is different. You suggested that rakyll told Claude to simply implement a solution that her team already put the legwork into designing. I'm saying that it sounds like Claude produced the solution independently based on a description of the problem. Those two are completely different and if you can't see that, I'm not sure what to say.

> having Claude produce it doesn't help!

Sure. Also, it could be a coincidence that it came to the correct solution, we can't discount that possibility.

I find Claude (and specifically Opus 4.5) insanely impressive and frankly scary, but I think there is some Pareto principle that people ignore when discussing it. Specifically I find it is great at the first 80%, but I struggle getting the last 20% over the line with it. I think this colours people’s judgement, because influencers/casual/beginner users only experience that first 80%

My reading is precisely the opposite, ie that she fed it the problem without the solution and it independently came to the solution they spent months arguing over.

> As a person living in the Americas… I’m surprised at how good this outcome is? Did we just remove a terrible regime in a comparably bloodless way?

It's way too early to tell this. I mean, hopefully yes, but it's way, way too early to tell.

You might think such a video is not a fit for Hacker News. I implore you, go and watch the video, and I think you will agree with me that it is perfect for this site. Enjoy.

I think it’s a mix of human and LLM writing

No, Java (or frankly anything JVM-based) on the terminal is a terrible experience.

> A library is something you call.

> A framework is some kind of application scaffolding that normally calls you.

There is no real distinction between these two.

By the way, the reason behind all of this, like so many ills of our industry, is the completely broken promotion culture.

This. This. This. I currently work in a codebase where so much code has been abstracted away for “cleanliness” that it’s impossible to understand what code is actually running.

The worst is when three lines of completely standard code (immediately understandable to anybody inline) get „helpfully” lifted out into a utility function.

I was expecting this to be stupid but it’s genuinely funny. I guess LLMs are better at humor than I remember

> most web developers are well aware of the risky parts of the language

In my experience this really isn’t true. Most web developers I know are not familiar (enough) with prototype pollution.

By the way, this isn’t because they are “dumb”. It’s the tool’s fault, not the craftsman’s, in this case. Prototype pollution is complicated and surprising

No, we just found Nicola sturgeon’s hacker news account

It sounds to me like you’re just arguing for premature optimization of another kind (specifically, prematurely changing your entire architecture for edge cases that probably won’t ever happen to you).

If you 300ms latency then yes, you defeat this detection mechanism.

Meh, this is a defence in depth measure anyway

Edit: also, the supported platforms are ARM and x86. If your code isn’t running on one of those platforms, you probably know what you’re doing.

Wrong, collective action doesn’t change anything. It simply interchanges who gets poorer.

Sorry, which grass roots group exactly campaigned for this? Which party’s manifesto was it on?

Is tens of thousands vast enough for you?

This is IPFS

Yes, currently they are both smarter and dumber than humans.

I think Perl is still more popular even today than Python as a sysadmin language. Late 2000s it certainly was. Maybe Google was different, but across the industry more widely Python was barely used, Perl was used everywhere.

> also, it seems like everything in perl is a string?

It's actually somehow even worse than this. The Perl type system is honestly ridiculous. Most veteran Perl developers don't fully understand it.

https://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2025/02/a-deep-... is a good introduction.

> Perl always had a significant amount of what you might call "BOFH" culture, which came from its old UNIX sysadmin roots. All of those passive aggressive idioms and in jokes like "RTFM", "lusers", "wizards", "asking for help the wrong way" etc.

> [...]

> Cultural conservatism as a first principle.

Counterpoint to this: Rust. Rust has a similar RTFM/"wizards" culture, but is not culturally conservative (in any sense of the word).

My two cents: Perl's "culture" had little to do with its fall. I think Perl's problems run much deeper. Perl is built on rotten foundations. It's fundamentally a scripting language (albeit with bolted on additions to make it kinda-OOP), and it therefore has all the problems that scripting languages have for building large software projects.

Those problems have no quick fix, and indeed fixing them would require throwing the language out entirely -- at which point, why not simply switch to another language entirely (which is exactly what happened...).

I agree that mental health conditions probably are overdiagnosed and overdiagnosis of this kind is genuinely harmful in many cases (via nocebo effect).

But equally I do think it's true that there really are more people with mental health conditions, largely because:

* life is genuinely worse today than it was 20 years ago, mostly because of technology

* the excessive amount of screen time that the average person experiences is fundamentally harmful to the natural balance of neurotransmitters in the brain

> "if err!=nil return nil,err" boilerplate that's everywhere in Golang - but now it's annoying and takes up viewspace

This isn't true in my experience. Most Go codebases I've worked in wrap their errors.

If you don't believe me, go and take a look at some open-source Go projects.

> the exception thrown on failure will not only contain the reason, but the filename and the whole backtrace to the line where the error occurred.

... with no other context whatsoever, so you can't glean any information about the call stack that led to the exception.

Exceptions are really a whole different kettle of fish (and in my opinion are just strictly worse than even the worst errors-as-values implementations).