HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tomwphillips

704 karma · joined October 20, 2010

tomwphillips.co.uk
submissionscomments
tomwphillips··on Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B
Yeah, me. I've used it every day for years. With a hybrid/remote team it is a fantastic alternative to a physical whiteboard. Whole team uses it.

I don't care for or use any of the AI features.

I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.

tomwphillips··on Apple Watch Series 12
The video demo is so strange. A waitress spoke too fast - just act like a normal person and politely ask them to repeat themselves, instead of reading a transcription on your watch. My goodness.
tomwphillips··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Definitely not a bubble.
tomwphillips··on If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know
Can you elaborate what you mean by "won't let me fix"? What happens when you try to?
tomwphillips··on MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
I was in a similar boat with my M1 Pro. I have an M4 Pro for work but rarely notice the difference.

Unfortunately the display in my M1 has failed and a replacement is £500-700. Very frustrating.

tomwphillips··on Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?
*All* my work as a solo consultant/contractor was from former colleagues who needed "trusted pair of hands" to deal with a project, or former colleagues introducing me to new people.

People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.

tomwphillips··on How to make a sliding, self-locking, and predator-proof chicken coop door (2020)
I have this problem, but I just lock the front door.
tomwphillips··on Copilot Adverts in Pull Requests
A colleague sent me this search directly.

Dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269

tomwphillips··on Copilot Adverts in Pull Requests
Yes.

https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...

tomwphillips··on Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command
I'm not sure a staging environment would have caught it.

I often find Claude makes changes that _look_ reasonable, but it's only when I really dig in (e.g. when refactoring) that I realise there's insidious problems.

I can imagine the author making the changes in a staging environment, seeing that it _appears_ to be ok, then blowing up production anyway.

(AI aside, staging is a lie: https://www.tomwphillips.co.uk/2026/01/staging-is-a-wasteful...).

tomwphillips··on UUID package coming to Go standard library
At $dayJob we use (user facing) IDs like this. Select a prefix then add a sufficient number of random alphanumeric characters for your use case.
tomwphillips··on GitHub Actions is shitting the bed again
In October they were talking about it taking 18 months.

https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

tomwphillips··on GitHub Actions is shitting the bed again
There were reports that they're migrating to Azure. Maybe it isn't going so well. I thought AI was supposed for have solved software engineering...
tomwphillips··on GitHub having issues [resolved]
That's good - I'll reconsider Dagger.

Yes, I agree on your assessment. AI means a higher rate of code changes, so you need more robust and fast CI.

tomwphillips··on GitHub having issues [resolved]
A while back I think I heard you on a podcast describing these pain points. Experienced them myself; sounded like a compelling solution. I remember Dagger docs being all about AI a year or two ago, and frankly it put me off, but that seems to have gone again. Is your focus back to CI?
tomwphillips··on Layoffs at Block
Also seeing this in the UK right now.
tomwphillips··on Red/Green TDD
I agree it works well. Although as a long-time TDD practitioner it is mildly frustrating that it has taken LLMs to get more people to realise it works!
tomwphillips··on AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
Like we don't feed the trolls, we shouldn't the feed agents.

I'm impressed the maintainers responded so cordially. Personally I would have gone straight for the block button.

tomwphillips··on System Initiative Shutting Down
Anyone know what happened?

Thought it seemed like a great idea but I never tried it. In a startup it seemed like an unnecessary source of risk and in an enterprise too much hassle to convince stakeholders to switch from existing IaC products.

I admired their commitment to open source.

tomwphillips··on Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies
In my last company, we _did_ pay for Google Cloud support and when BigQuery jobs started to fail randomly, causing huge trouble producing critical reports, the response was essentially "we are investigating", "we have identified the issue", and "please wait for it to be fixed". Hardly what I would call support. They couldn't care less.
tomwphillips··on HTTP Cats
Thank you, and please keep it online. Apparently I am incapable of remembering HTTP status codes and I always go straight to http.cat!
tomwphillips··on I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
The post is light on details. I'd guess the author ended up hammering the API and they decided it was abuse.

I expect more reports like this. LLM providers are already selling tokens at a loss. If everyone starts to use tmux or orchestrate multiple agents then their loss on each plan is going to get much larger.

tomwphillips··on Staging is a wasteful lie: the case for the mono-environment
Author here, thanks for reading. Yes, naming is tricky. By mono-environment, I mean that there is one _long-lived_ environment to which we deploy software.
tomwphillips··on LLMs Are Not Fun
>Every project has boilerplate. It gets written once.

Agree with you - I think when my colleagues have talked about boilerplate they really mean two kinds of boilerplate: code written once for project setup, like you describe, and then repetitive code. And in the context of LLMs, they talking about repetitive code.

tomwphillips··on LLMs Are Not Fun
I like this analysis.

I'm constantly surprised by developers who like LLMs because "it's great for boiler plate". Why on earth were you wasting your time writing boiler plate before? These people are supposed to be programmers. Write code to generate the boiler plate or get abstract it away.

I suppose the path of least resistance is to ignore the complexity, let the LLM deal with it, instead of stepping back and questioning why the complexity is even there.

tomwphillips··on UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating
Interesting. I don't recall this happening during my studies. You didn't have the time in my exams to cheat, leaving for the toilet was strongly discouraged and if you did leave, you would have an invigilator standing behind you at the urinal or outside the cubicle.
tomwphillips··on UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating
The article is about accountancy. Accountancy is not academia.

>In the end of the day academia in general should stop relying on exams based on memorization of random facts and start using real world examples of what kind of work student would be working with as an employee.

I have an undergraduate degree and PhD in chemistry and I don't really think "blind memorisation" had much to do with my success. It will only get you so far.

I think there is also substantial within academia about the purpose of academia. I think a lot of academics might disagree that it is about preparing people to be employees.

tomwphillips··on Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
Our team uses IntelliJ so we use Code with Me with Slack for AV. Specifically on Slack we have channels called pairing-room-1, pairing-room-2, etc. Allows colleagues to drop in and out.

I would try Tuple but to be honest we are fine on Code with Me.

tomwphillips··on Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service
Indeed. Github is a nightmare when I'm working on an unreliable 4G connection too (e.g. on a train in the UK). Half the page will load.

Night and day compared to something like Linear.

tomwphillips··on Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
>Pair programming is less fruitful.

I'm surprised at this statement. My team pair a lot - at least half of the time - and the majority is remote.

We find it much more comfortable to pair remotely on our own setups than crowded around a single desk and keyboard.

I wonder why our experiences are so different.

Page 1 of 3Next →