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

It's a puzzle game -- numbers on a board -- where the gap between numbers dictates the arithmetic operation done to them.

The goal is to use all the spaces on the board to make sums of 12.

Have shared it a few times on HN already, but keen to hear from anyone who hasn't tried it yet!

sarrephon Nobody has built a software factory

LLMs being used as a tool in general (and in the future) to automate creation and maintenance of software is not mutually exclusive to one person using LLMs to create an article.

sarrephon Nobody has built a software factory

I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years.

However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms, my eyes glaze over, and I stop being able to follow what the article is trying to communicate to me. I would love for the OP to call me out and correct me (that they haven't used LLMs to write this).

sarrephon Ending my elixir exploratory writing

> What did you need to write with golang?

This is a great follow-up that I don't have a satisfactory answer for, because I can't really recall. I _think_ I was trying to do something with Firebase w/ high parallelism using goroutines. I just remember the feeling of imperativeness when I was iterating through results, etc, and not having a built-in mapping function.

Elixir was totally different -- was just scratching an "intellectual" itch, and it fit my needs like a glove in terms of feeling.

I'm confident that I could learn to like Go, though, lots of people I know rave about it.

> The OTP is not that useful to me

Also agree, didn't really get into OTP even, just enjoyed the style and structure of the language itself!

sarrephon Ending my elixir exploratory writing

The most enlightening experience I had from programming was picking up Elixir for Advent of Code[0] 3 years ago. At that point in my career, I knew what I was doing and had built various apps and systems. TypeScript and React was my safe-space, but which I often committed the sin of over engineering things to be as functional as possible in.

I'd tried Go, which I didn't really like because it was too imperative for my taste and also required you to write every... single... thing you needed from scratch. (Not trying to start a flame war here -- it's just how I felt using it).

One of my engineers was kind of obsessed with Elixir (he was / is extremely smart) and he convinced me to give it a go over Christmas break. It really was the functional Valhalla he had made it out to be. I felt like I'd finally found a language that "got" how I wanted to approach writing code. Unfortunately, startup life got in the way, and I was hardly going to suggest an Elixir rewrite (well, I did try, but anyway).

I'm planning on re-approaching Elixir, as a haven to write code as a human. I still use LLMs for writing code pretty much daily, but if you're looking for something that's different and fun, I would recommend checking it out. It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!