stevepotter

I never understood the copy paste thing. Shadcn just reeks of a fad, and even after doing copy paste and trying it, I didn’t see what the big deal was. But enjoy it, y’all. One of the benefits of AI is that HN isn’t clogged with talk of JavaScript frameworks as much

Love love love mantine.

It's inevitable that someone will build a good robot to do these mundane chores. But is that a good thing? I vacuum every night and during that I get some great thinking done. If I had a robot vacuum, I can said with certainty I would make good use of that time.

Same. I got spooked after a car pulled out on the country highway I was doing 160 on. Then ran out of money and sold it. I just rode my Dads Harley, first ride in 20 years. Was nice but I’m good. I have a longboard and a little hill once in a while gives me the occasional adrenaline rush I crave.

All I ever hear are horror stories. Can someone tell me a good story about VC that isn't Facebook or something?

Svelte is cool although I didn't have some big epiphany. I'm not going to use Svelte because "it compiles" and "is faster" when my existing React app performs very well. Plus there are some libraries for my specific use case that didn't exist in Svelte. I know people love things besides React, and I would be happy to see it unseated. Sure I'm part of the problem but it's been good to me and I have bigger fish to fry.

I remember in 1999 being so psyched about changing a button image on mouseover. Went hard on jquery, little bit of angular and bootstrap. React was big for me because it’s one way data binding solved the kinds of bugs I had spent years dealing with. Vue svelte and others are cool but they are all very similar to me. I always encourage people to work at first without any framework because then you gain an appreciation for why these things exist (or you stay vanilla and constantly blog about it)

You are mixing local and federal politics. This is a town issue and would likely have happened regardless of who occupied the Oval Office

Others have provided details about how it works. I suggest zooming way in on that image and you'll start 'breaking though' the surface and that'll help you get an idea of how it works. Important thing is there is no defined geometric surface ("mesh"). Also important to know is that it's very, very hard to get a good splat without taking a ton of photos at different angles. It's also really, really easy to create a crappy looking splat. But when it's done right, it's a marvel

Maybe not at first. Regardless of when they get replaced by tech, you’ll see those jobs get saturated and wages go down. Which sucks because they are already low

This is a good take. I’d like to know how you think this is going to shake out over the next few decades

I'm the same way, which makes sense because for 20 years I've done things by hand, tediously managing every line.

I hired a few fresh grads and they have no problem just going with the default AI output. As long as it works, they are good.

For me, it comes down to the ability to properly test. If the code works, is covered by tests, and its performance is measured for regressions, and the high level design is sound, it's hard to argue with vibing. The problem is almost nobody has such a testing system. They are still hard to find and/or build. So that's what I'm putting my effort into because otherwise I'll have trouble sleeping at night (for good reason)

I’m working on ways to evaluate and give feedback on surgical techniques. But you just helped me find a new pivot. Thanks! And yes I’m on the toilet.

I couldn’t quite understand exactly how it was exploited. It sounds like there is some cache that is shared across action runs and they took advantage of that. Is that at the core of it?

Be careful there. The whole "just wait 6 months" thing is problematic. It gives you an excuse to make a mess now, because "in 6 months" AI will magically fix it.

It also belittles the human resources. "I heard that 6 months AI will do everything, so why would I hire new engineers or promote the ones we have?"

I also love to build. And I'm mourning the loss of coding as a craft that is sought after and well compensated. I like to get my hands dirty and it feels wrong that I can basically write specs and the real labor that I love is done for me. But it also allows me to build some pretty amazing stuff that I would have never been able to do otherwise. So I'm slowly accepting it and want to come up with ways to coexist. I code for several hours a day because and will continue to do so because even after 36 years I still get joy and comfort from it

I wasn’t talking about unit tests. Was talking about tests that accelerate development, where you can setup everything and test a feature by just pressing enter vs clicking around or whatever. The tests are how you build features, so I don’t consider that boring

There is problem solving in coding, but the bigger problems exist at a higher level and that’s still on you to solve.

Also I’ve been messing with “ai-only” files recently. You make a markdown file that basically tells it what the file does, how it’s used, and point to an API contract in some other file. Then you can run async ai that will try things and only submit a PR of all the tests pass and the perf improves. The files become almost unreadable to be, but I decided to embrace it because they were already unreadable. But so is the output of, say, the protobuf code generator and I never had a problem accepting that

Which to me is why it’s so important to build cooler and crazier shit. A web app to facilitate some business process was always boring, but at least you got to code. Now it’s just boring. The thing I’m building right now is pretty wild, involving computer vision, robotics, and surgery. It’s super complex and without AI, the development would have bankrupted us. But because of ai, we did it and the product is going to FDA this year.

For me, if I can make a kickass testing system that people love so much that they actually build features with it and it’s not an afterthought, then maintenance becomes much easier. It’s often called test driven development but I’ve rarely seen it done in such a way that the dev ex is good enough for it to work.

But say you have that. Then you have great profiling. At that point you can measure correctness and performance. Then implementation becomes less of a focal point. And that makes it a lot easier to concede coding to ai

Agree. I didn’t like being forced to use it. There was some edict based on some different past problems. My service was a devops thing and didn’t really have a data plane. A regular db would have been perfect but would have required some silly high level approval we weren’t willing to get. All that despite being told service teams are free to build how they want

I was such a fan of it that I ended up working there for 4 years. Now I avoid it and encourage others to do the same.

AWS used to have a nifty tool called "policy analyzer" or something that monitored for permissions used by a role so you could scope it down. The other day I had the need for it and when I went to use it, found out they charge something like $9/resource. So I would pay $45/month for metadata monitoring on just 5 things? Nuts. If they knew how to build truly delightful products, they would make something like a role that starts with broad permissions and automatically scopes itself down after some point. And it would be free or at least really cheap.

DDB is hardly a database. The only reason I can think of to use it is for massive amounts of data whose schema and query patterns are guaranteed to almost never change, which is very rare. Need to sort data on a field? Then you have to create a 'secondary index', which is a copy of the table that they charge you for and that is not strongly consistent. Schema change? Good luck with that. And don't you dare ask to use a nice ORM library. But hey it's serverless.

Here's a good one: you stop an EC2 instance and its volume keeps running and you pay for that. If you detach the volume, you still pay. There is no way to 'archive' an instance. And the only way I found out about that was I got hit with a big bill for those volumes with the charge labeled 'EC2 - Other' lol. Not very 'customer obsessed' to me.

My gripes are clearly not important to them because this is old stuff. So all I can do is go somewhere else, which is fine with me

Upper management wants to say they use AI and spend is an easy indicator. That trickles down and ultimately the engineers spending a lot is seen as good. It’s just a lazy measurement, like cloud usage or number of microservices used to be.

Well played

A link to a project that does the exact same thing, except it’s built with Rust

Praise about one their older projects that I used in the good ol’ days

A condescending put down from someone who has expertise in this area but also didn’t read the article and just felt like feeling superior this morning

It would be nice to see some of the software source. I’m super interested and i think I helped pay for it

I keep hearing “they aren’t intelligent” and spit out “crap code”. That’s not been my experience. LLMs prevented and also caught intricate concurrency issues that would have taken me a long time.

I just went “hmmm, nice” and went on. The problem there is that I didn’t get that sense of accomplishment I crave and I really didn’t learn anything. Those are “me” problems but I think programmers are collectively grappling with this.

I used to work for AWS on a service team. I noticed we were spending way too much on provisioned concurrency for dynamo and would benefit from on-demand provisioning. After proving it worked, making the change, deploying, was rather pleased with myself. "Saved $2M in costs by switching to on-demand provisioning" barely made it onto my performance review lol.

I'm just going to stand by until Microsoft is back in everyone's good graces again by releasing some oss software that we all swoon over