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redact207

1,643 karma · joined July 8, 2009

https://bus.node-ts.com redact207~at~hotmail-dot_com
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redact207··on Agentic Coding Is a Trap
I sometimes wonder if I'm in a different universe to other devs. Anytime AI coding is brought up, comments are overwhelmingly negative and often point out correctness, quality, slop, etc.

There's also the 'more stuff is being delivered, but it's not right, full of holes and papercuts'.

I'm 22 years into development and couldn't think of going back to non AI programming now. Not only has it sped up velocity by an order of magnitude, it's also helped me unlock side projects that I would never even begin in the past as I knew I didn't have that time.

It's just like any tool though, and I've found enormous differences in outcome depending on how you drive it. Launching into 'build this' and expecting it to output code that you would manually write would not get you there; and I feel this is where most developers stall out.

Getting the right outcomes takes a lot of harness set up - the same as if you wanted to hire new devs and get them productive without peering with them. You would set up linting, good test coverage and approaches, thorough documentation about what your project is, the domain, the architecture etc. This at least gets good code consistency for the most part.

For how to build, https://github.com/bmad-code-org/BMAD-METHOD is really good and I've onboarded a few Saas projects into it now. Tech speccing and multiple cycles of elicitation are what deal with all the edge cases that you normally only encounter during coding. It does front-load all of the planning brainwork; but condensing that into a couple days of solid speccing is far more productive than spreading it out over months.

It's taken a while to get to this point, and most agents aren't good for substantial work out of the box. Most of the time what the agent does will be a product of its environment.

redact207··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)
I'm a big PostHog fan - can GMT+10 be written off as just bad latency?
redact207··on Humpback whales are forming super-groups
their music's making waves
redact207··on Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype.

No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

redact207··on 99% of adults over 40 have shoulder "abnormalities" on an MRI, study finds
Same here, it helped a lot. Also don't eat a big meal and go straight to bed. Aim for an earlier dinner.
redact207··on Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch
I love that this man resurrected his blog after 10 years just to write this. Anger and spite are strong motivators.
redact207··on Show HN: An SQS Alternative on Postgres
I agree in general, but there will always be certain requirements and team structures where stuff like this makes sense.

For me, I work in a small team of 6 devs on an ever growing app and feature set. I 100% will leverage managed services where cost and complexity allow. SQS is one of the most stable and cheapest AWS service, and the ability to just use it and not have to sysops it means we can spend more time building features.

redact207··on How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles
I just use copilot for this and bash scripting, which I both do very little of and forget the syntax
redact207··on My 25-year engineering career retrospective
I highly recommend strength training. To anyone. But especially us developers.

Big compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, rows etc all hit a lot of muscle and posterior groups and have made my back bullet proof.

It doesn't take a lot of equipment - any commercial gym with a power rack, or BYO home gym with a rack and barbell will do. Start with a simple program like Starting Strength and then pivot to something more intermediate friendly when you get there like 531. You can run these programs for decades.

redact207··on Testcontainers
I didn't quite understand why this was made. We create our local test environments using docker-compose, and so I read:

> Creating reliable and fully-initialized service dependencies using raw Docker commands or using Docker Compose requires good knowledge of Docker internals and how to best run specific technologies in a container

This sounds like a <your programming language> abstraction over docker-compose, which lets you define your docker environment without learning the syntax of docker-compose itself. But then

> port conflicts, containers not being fully initialized or ready for interactions when the tests start, etc.

means you'd still need a good understanding of docker networking, dependencies, healthchecks to know if your test environment is ready to be used.

Am I missing something? Is this basically change what's starting your docker test containers?

redact207··on Catalyst – Tailwind CSS Application UI Kit
I paid for the UI kit early last year and think it's good value. The amount of time its saved me has more than paid for itself, and it's just nice to have something that isn't a subscription model, or licensed per project.
redact207··on Unwrapit provides a way to handle errors in JS/TS
I think their reasoning is that it's type safe so the compiler complains that you didn't handle something that returns an error.
redact207··on Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager
I've been looking for a personal finance app for a long time. I don't want a Saas that charges me monthly and can shutdown at anytime. Most other homebrewed apps are incomplete or abandoned. Of all things I ended up paying for an Excel sheet to track it all - https://cspersonalfinance.io/

This tracks all my cashflows, investments, net worth etc, and since it's in excel there's no risk of it disappearing after 10 years

redact207··on Ghostfolio: Open-source wealth management software
This is so good. I've tried so many homebaked spreadsheet trackers and semi-complete side project sites. This one looks like it strikes a good balance between feature completeness and simplicity
redact207··on My journey away from the JAMstack
Sounds like your lead engineer setup NX too soon. we made it about 5 years in to our monorepo before having to use tools like that. Once we were at a point where our codebase included multiple products, apis, frontends was when build and test times became unbearably slow and only then did we add NX to conditionally build changes and their dependants. I wouldn't recommend starting a new project with it by any means.
redact207··on Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
This is what would do it for me. I make planning and big decisions once or twice a year where having write access is needed. I'd be happy to pay $14 for it.

For the rest of the year I'm just checking in from time to time to see how I'm tracking against the plan, so a free read-only mode would be ideal.

redact207··on Social media for AI bots: “No humans allowed”
wonder if you'll get effected by the API pricing changes.

that's pretty cool though, are you willing to share the source?

redact207··on Write better error messages
For Saas products, this plus use structured logging so you don't have to grep-parse log messages when searching your log collectors.

Ie all the meta/log context in a hashmap alongside the error message.

redact207··on Our moon has been slowly drifting away from Earth over the past 2.5B yrs
If the moon wasn't drifting away and was in a static orbit, would the Earth's rotation slow and the moon's orbit speed up to the point where they're in sync?
redact207··on Show HN: ESInfer – Make JavaScript Type-Safe
Second this. Also much easier to pick up code or review a PR if the types are explicitly provided rather having to backtrack to see how something's called.
redact207··on Australian activist can't use encrypted apps, must let police access phone
Yes, those anti-mask nut jobs complaining about mandates that don't exist.

Now, is protesting climate change any less legitimate or any more harmful that would warrant the level of punishment mentioned in the article?

redact207··on A billion-dollar industry helping students at Australian universities cheat
We don't do leet code or coding tests. We do talk about projects they've worked on in the past - either academic, professional or personal - whichever they're most across.

Again, what I'm saying is despite all this most candidates still don't have anything they can talk about because they're disinterested in IT and doing it for a tech salary. You don't sound like you fit that profile, but most candidates that we receive wouldn't be found on HN anyway.

redact207··on A billion-dollar industry helping students at Australian universities cheat
We don't find it hard to hire in the sense that our offers are always accepted. I was moreso trying to indicate the difficulty of finding competent developers in a sea of candidates who are disinterested and lack the technical aptitude.
redact207··on A billion-dollar industry helping students at Australian universities cheat
I've been hiring SEs here in Australia for a few years, and finding decent graduates is hard.

Covid made this worse by pushing more people through bootcamps who did it for the tech salary rather than genuine interest, which just added to the noise.

The thing is that good developers could be anywhere. I've had great hires come through good unis with fantastic grades, as well as some who transitioned from a different industry and did a bootcamp.

Unis for a lot of industries are losing their relevance. Here in Australia they'll continue to be subsidised by internationals who get favourable visa conditions upon graduation that can be worked into a family immigration plan, but for the rest of us it's just a lot of unnecessary debt.

redact207··on Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
My guess is he's hit that obscene level of wealth and realizes he is now beyond the controls of the system, and can therefore game it to his advantage.

When you can afford the best legal team money can buy and payoff the rest of the gatekeepers, then the game is simply to transfer wealth into your own pocket in bigger chunks.

redact207··on Twitter Layoff Started Today
"recruitment", since labelling humans as resources is apparently inhumane
redact207··on A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV
Oh it happens, I'm not saying it doesn't. But my comment was more about how the TV show sets it up. I think kids should have more autonomy and be allowed to fail in a safe way, and shows like this do well to show what they're capable of.
redact207··on A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV
If you watch it, you'll notice:

  - Most of the kids live in quiet country towns or rural areas
  - Most of the errands avoid crossing roads, or:
  - If they do, then the assistants are checking for and controlling traffic
  - It shows kids doing their first ever errand, it's not their everyday life
redact207··on You probably don’t need AWS and are better off without it
These articles are pointless, they completely miss any nuance to you and your solution.

Who are you? A hobbyist developer? A small team of 3 devs? A large company with multiple teams of devs dbas sysops?

What's your use case? An occasional Cron job? A small WordPress site? A distributed HA app that manages a huge ingress with strict uptime SLAs?

Where do you want to spend your effort? Happy to apt-get a few packages and call it a day? Need to create and maintain a load balanced postgres cluster with low lag and cross region replication and backups?

There are a lot of considerations that go into choosing a provider. Making blanket statements like this just feel click baity.

redact207··on A toast to all the rejects
Reminds me of 100 days of rejection - https://www.rejectiontherapy.com/100-days-of-rejection-thera...
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