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https://archive.fo/5eIam

On the Mac App Store page [1], I can see the settings panel in a screenshot. In General Settings / Onboarding, there is a toggle switch labelled:

"Show onboarding on first launch", with more text underneath

"Show first-run guide after installation"

I have no choice but to conclude that this app was vibe-coded from snout to tail.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/id6776577400

It's a fair assumption being a known potential cause of death. Of course I'm now assuming death is bad.

Edible forms of cannabis raise heart rate and blood pressure substantially as well.

That's also my experience. It's absolutely a letting go rather than a doing; one of Michael Taft's analogies for it is "dropping the ball".

The provisional techniques are great because different techniques click for different people. Once they've seen what it is, it's easier to drop in more directly. If there's any willpower involved, it's more a subtle dropping of discursive mental commentary (especially on the process itself: I've got it - almost there - why can't I get there today - ah so this is what works, etc).

Once you're there, it feels like the most familiar and comfortable place in the world. As one of my teachers said, this is real rest.

Yes this would be one “provisional” method among many, maybe hundreds of techniques but they all seem to lead to the same place as one gets familiar. In Buddhist Vajrayana schools this is called “non-meditation”. The ultimate instruction is to simply do nothing, but this requires a bit of initiation (and paradoxically, concentration) to get right.

Michael Taft has many different guided approaches to this on his channel but there are many other teachers as well, e.g. Adyashanti, Angelo Dillulo, Loch Kelly, Shinzen Young (specifically his Do Nothing and Auto Focus techniques) and expanding the gamut to traditional Vajrayana teachers, Lama Lena, Mingyur Rinpoche, Lama Dawai Gocha, all with accessible online teachings. Also Sayadaw U Tejaniya and Christopher Wallis who are less conventional, so to speak.

Meditation teacher Michael Taft recommends "dropping into awake awareness" whenever you're waiting for a response. [1]

It's the opposite of watching YouTube, pretty much.

[1] https://x.com/OortCloudAtlas/status/2062208343192769004

It would potentially be more business-optimal to ship fewer bugs if everyone else is shipping more bugs. Your development cycle would be costlier, but users would prefer to buy your products over others.

The elegance of the code is not superfluous at all. It correlates with the developer's understanding of both the code and the domain.

Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.

It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.

Here in India, when I was growing up it was normal to sleep without a cover in the summer (no ACs back then, only ceiling fans and perhaps an evaporation cooler in more luxurious circumstances). I remember when a friend and his cousin from Thailand was visiting and the power had just gone out. The temperature was in the early 40s (Celsius) but the Thai cousin who wanted to take a nap insisted on a thin cotton sheet as a cover. My friend and I were confused and kept telling him it's not a good idea but he couldn't fall asleep without it.

The weather in North India has been very weird this year. Normally it's pleasant in March and starts warming up in April all the way to end June. This year it got June-hot in April but then cooled down again in early May. From running ACs in April to even turning ceiling fans off for a few days in May is unheard of.

That's the temperature at the weather station in shade.

The air temperature is higher in the sun in busy marketplaces from high surface temperature of tarred roads and the thermal island effect of poor Indian urban design. Also on the top floors of buildings it tends to be really bad (roofs are mostly uninsulated).

While most right-handed individuals do not exhibit this ability unless they experience an extraordinary event, such as an injury to their right hand, left-handed individuals are compelled to learn how to use their right hand in a right-handed world.

As a person with severe hemophilia in the third world, where the condition is very under-treated (no prophylaxis, very little clotting factor and sometimes none), I've grown up facing this issue with the dominant arm being out of commission due to a bleed for days at a time. I gradually learned to do almost everything with the left hand: brush my teeth, shave, eat, shower, type with one hand (autocompleting IDEs help), even drive a stick shift (using the right hand to hold the wheel briefly while shifting, technically illegal I'll admit).

It's not that difficult to adapt. The barriers are mostly mental because it feels awkward at first. There are some dexterity issues but if you don't mind going slowly, you can get by.

Just sharing my experience, not meant to undermine the challenges faced by left-handed individuals in a right-handed world.

Thanks, from the git log I see it was committed 20 minutes before my comment. I was going by the HN title and description and missed those comments.

I think you're conflating the burden of creation with the burden of relevance, suitability, usability and usefulness of the created artifact. The more the person in charge is disengaged, the sloppier the output is likely to be.

For some reason the app supports a separate standalone window mode as well [0]. It's not clear why the developer took the trouble to support two different modes when the menubar mode doesn't seem to add anything (like a live-updating icon for throughput).

Well, I can think of one reason why it wasn't that much more trouble. François Chollet had a nice tweet [1] on why removing human cognitive friction is resulting in needless software complexity.

[0] https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/blob/main/Sources/...

[1] https://x.com/fchollet/status/2045929951539707957

Thanks, I misread entirely.

Ah, I misread. Thanks.

Legitimate complaint on HN of all places. TODO apps shouldn't be embedding whole browsers.

"... tend to profligacy" was really bothering me as well, until I figured OP probably meant "tend" as in 'take care of', and not 'inclined to have'.

The Gurkaniyan thing was true for Babur but I don’t think it was the case for later Mughals.

The poet Ghalib, who was the emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s contemporary, considered himself a descendant of the aristocracy and referred to himself as a “Mughal baccha” in a well-known quote (sourced from his letters, I believe).

Definitely relies on illustrations.

The author passed away 15 years ago so I will mention the PDF of the book shows up in the first few search results on Google.

For explorations of simple mechanisms like this leading to complex behaviour, Valentino Braitenberg’s book Vehicles is a classic.

Presumably the 1.5 years for the first version involved work other than coding that the LLM rewrite didn’t entail?

There is non-stimulant medication as well for ADHD. If you're really struggling, it might be worthwhile to suspend judgement and actually try these out for a while. In the worst case you go back to how you were without medication. For many people the potential upside is worth the experiment.

Not just that but "you're holding it wrong" on many occasions.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483567 is pretty much (paraphrasing) sucks to be you if you can't make it work.

Well, people who are not above a threshold of experience yet are not in a position to self-assess and course-correct if their long term learning is being affected. And even less so if there is pressure to be hyper-productive with the help of AI.

Speculating here but I think even seniors who rely on AI all the time and enjoy the enhanced output are going to end up with impostor syndrome over the things they suspect they can no longer do without AI, and FOMO about all the projects they haven't yet attempted with AI despite working as hard as they can.

If the argument was about cost per unit output, bringing in Etsy didn't make sense at all, especially when they explicitly mention it was about valuing different things.

Handmade pottery can certainly be better quality than mass-produced pottery, just like handwritten code can be better quality than AI-assisted code. There is a spate of new MacOS apps that are clearly AI-written, with memory leaks, high CPU usage and UI that doesn't conform to MacOS conventions (in one instance I'm aware of, the interface has changed completely between updates). Of course users can tell the difference.

If you're going to spend a lot of time making sure the AI-generated code is perfect, does the industrialisation analogy still hold? There's a spectrum here from vibe-coded to agentic to Copilot-level assistance to no AI assistance (which may be a little silly) of course.

Quality indie software in a niche that Ikea is not addressing can make a decent income unlike a lemonade stand.

And unlike at (this hypothetical) Ikea, you wouldn't have to maintain the impression of 20x AI-augmented output to avoid being fired. Well, you could still use AI as much as you want, but you wouldn't have to keep proving you're not underusing it.

Many other patterns in the text, re-arranging to make it more obvious:

Why do we estimate stories? Because developer time is expensive and someone has to budget for it.

Why do we prioritise features in backlogs? Because we can’t build everything and we need to choose what’s worth the cost.

Why do we agonise over whether to refactor this module or write that debug interface? Because the time spent on one thing is time not spent on another.

We have compilers: either it compiles or it doesn’t.

We have test suites: either the tests pass or they don’t.

Planning. Estimating. Feature prioritisation. Code review. Architecture review. Sprint planning. All of it is downstream of the assumption that writing code is the expensive part.

... type systems, linters, static analysis. Software gives us verification tools that most other domains lack.

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this.

But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each proposition values different things. But if you’re running a business that depends on pottery, you’d better understand the economics.

So which is it?

Will an industrialised process always outcompete a pre-industrial process? Or do they not compete at all, because they value different things?