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dakiol

2,642 karma · joined January 29, 2020

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dakiol··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
Honest question: if you're using multiple agents, it's usually to produce not a dozen lines of code. It's to produce a big enough feature spanning multiple files, modules and entry points, with tests and all. So far so good. But once that feature is written by the agents... wouldn't you review it? Like reading line by line what's going on and detecting if something is off? And wouldn't that part, the manual reviewing, take an enormous amount of time compare to the time it took the agents to produce it? (you know, it's more difficult to read other people's/machine code than to write it yourself)... meaning all the productivity gained is thrown out the door.

Unless you don't review every generated line manually, and instead rely on, let's say, UI e2e testing, or perhaps unit testing (that the agents also wrote). I don't know, perhaps we are past the phase of "double check what agents write" and are now in the phase of "ship it. if it breaks, let agents fix it, no manual debugging needed!" ?

dakiol··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
Fair enough. I've been in software more than I would like to admit. And the more I'm in, the less I care about achievements in a work environment. All I care about is that the company pays me every month, because companies don't care about me (they care about my outome per hour/week/month). So it's essential to rank yourself high against your peers (being ethically and the like, ofc), otherwise you are out in the next layoff. I know not every company is like this, but the vast majority of tech companies are.

Outside of work, yeah, everything is fine and there's nothing but the pure pursue of knowledge and joy.

dakiol··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
Are you kidding? What else would managers get credit from? They don't produce anything the company is interested in. They steer, they manage, and so if the ones being managed produce the thing the company is interested in, then sure all the credit goes to the team (including the manager!). As it usually happens, getting credit means nothing if not accompanied by a salary bump or something like that. And as it usually happens, not the whole team can get a salary bump. So the ones who get the bump are usually one or two seniors on the team, plus the manager of course... because the manager is the gatekeeper between upper management (the ones who approve salary bumps) and the ICs... and no sane manager would sacrifice a salary bump for themselves just to give it away to an IC. And that's not being a bad manager, that's simply being human. Also if you think about it, if the team succeeded in delivering "the thing", then the manager would think it's partially because of their managing, and so he/she would believe a salary bump is deserved

When things go south, no penalization is made. A simple "post-mortem" is written in confluence and people write "action items". So, yeah, no need for the manager to get the blame.

It's all very shitty, but it's always been like that.

dakiol··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
I don't understand the "being more productive" part. Like, sure, LLMs make us iterate faster but our managers know we're using them! They don't naively think we suddenly became 10x engineers. Companies pay for these tools and every engineer has access to them. So if everyone is equally productive, the baseline just shifted up... same as always, no?

Mentioning LLM usage as a distinction is like bragging about using a modern compiler instead of writing assembly. Yeah it's faster, but so is everyone else code... Besides, I wouldn't brag about being more productive with LLMS because it's a double edge sword: it's very easy to use them, and nobody is reviewing all the lines of code you are pushing to prod (really, when was the last time you reviewed a PR generated by AI that changed 20+ files and added/removed thousands of lines of code?), so you don't know what's the long game of your changes; they seem to work now but who knows how it will turn out later?

dakiol··on Node.js needs a virtual file system
One reason: if it takes 2 minutes to put together a PR, then you'll get an avalanche of contributions of which you have no time to review. Sure, I can put AI in fron to do the review, but then what's the point of my having an open source project?
dakiol··on WFH is becoming a benefit again
It's not just about gas pricing, it's also about housing. E.g., why live in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, if you can live in a cheaper (and way less populated) city? Going back to the office, even if it's 2 days/week completely defets decentralization of housing in most of Europe.
dakiol··on WFH is becoming a benefit again
> This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored.

Not necessarily true. A company that operates 100% remotely in country X not necessarily can hire people from other countries (and let them work there). I work for a french company, 100% remote. The company doesn't have branches in other companies, and so everyone works within France. This is ideal, because the HQ is in Paris, and many people don't (want to) live in Paris. Having to go to the office 2-3 times per week, makes it impossible for my company to hire outside of Paris... which is idiotic

dakiol··on Node.js needs a virtual file system
Nobody wants to review AI-generated code (unless we are paid for doing so). Open source is fun, that's why people do it for free... adding AI to the mix is just insulting to some, and boring to others.

Like, why on earth would I spent hours reviewing your PR that you/Claude took 5 minutes to write? I couldn't care less if it improves (best case scenario) my open source codebase, I simply don't enjoy the imbalance.

dakiol··on Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
If it's any consolation, at my company (and others) we have shifted the way we are doing tech interviews: nowadays we focus more on CS/software-engineering fundamentals rather than ability to code. We also still do the systems design interviews (for which fundamentals of networking and design are needed).

We care way less now about leetcode-like interviews (we used to have them before, but not anymore)

dakiol··on Ask HN: How are you doing technical interviews in the age of Claude/ChatGPT?
> 1. Does testing a candidate's ability to "steer" and debug AI-generated code make more sense to you than traditional algorithms?

Testing the candidate's ability to "steer" agents seems to be like testing their ability to know the Java API or to recite SOLID by heart.

> 2. How are you currently preventing these "prompt-only" developers from slipping through your own interview loops?

We don't ask anymore leetcode. We keep the usual systems design interview in which usage of AI is not needed (or at least we don't allow it because in this kind of interview we are more interested in seeing how the candidate thinks and so on)

We have a new stage in our job interview, though: generic Q/A about the fundamental of software engineering/computer science. Again, we don't care anymore how candidates produce code. We care about what they know, and what they don't know. What's the scope of their knowledge, and when do they need to rely on AI to come up with an answer. Silly (non-real) example: "Can you write a program that detects if another program halts?". The people we want are the ones who would say something about the Halting Problem but also perhaps be practical and perhaps ask more questions about such a program requirements.

You get the point: we look for people with a good breadth of knowledge, who can communicate well and know their shit. Whether they can use tool x or y (including LLMs), comes for granted for such people

dakiol··on Billion-Parameter Theories
> You could capture the behavior of every falling object on Earth in three variables and describe the relationship between matter and energy in five characters.

What we can do is to approximate. Newton had a good approximation some time ago about gravitation (force equals a constant times two masses divided by distance squared. Super readable indeed) But nowadays there's a better one that doesn't look like Newton's theory (Einstein's field equations which look compact but nothing like Newton's). So, what if in a 1000 years we have yet a better approximation to gravity in the universe but it's encoded in millions of variables? (perhaps in the form of a neural network of some futuristic AI model?)

My point is: whatever we know about the universe now doesn't necessarily mean that it has "captured" the underlaying essence of the universe. We approximate. Approximations are useful and handy and will move humanity forward, but let's not forget that "approximations != truth"

If we ever discover the underlaying "truth" of the universe, we would look back and confidently say "Newton was wrong". But I don't think we will ever discover such a thing, thereore sure approximations are our "truth" but sometimes people forget.

dakiol··on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
> While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.

But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key question is whether the same person has the skills to asses (e.g., to ask the right questions) that the produced output is what's needed. In my experience, junior + AI is just a waste of money (tokens) and a nightmare to take accountability for.

dakiol··on How do you plan to make a living after AI takes your job?
Wondering what the data would say if you compare it to the numbers in 2015. It definitely feels there are more jobs now (at least from my POV)
dakiol··on How do you plan to make a living after AI takes your job?
So, in the 80s it took around a year and a half for a team of ~10 people to develop Pac-Man (Namco). Nowadays it probably would take any engineer between a day and a weekend to develop it solo. Does that mean engineers are out of jobs? No. Things get easier to be developed, but humans always want more. So in X years when developing a Figma may take one or two guys and a week of development effort, the society will expect "better" (more complex) software. And there I will be ready to develop such software (using AI probably like yet another tool). The AI available in X years will probably do wonders but won't be a silver bullet to develop the software required in such days. Our needs are always ahead of what the technology can provide, that's why technology keeps evolving. It's silly to thing that we'll reach a ceiling and that a given tech will do everything from that point onwards.
dakiol··on Ask HN: How do you handle duplicate side effects when jobs, workflows retry?
I think this suggestions are fine but none of them solve the problem here. The "client" (the service the OP owns) can be as atomic and transactional as one wants, but if the "server" (the 3rd party service being called by the "client") doesn't offer either a) idempotency or b) a retrieval mechanism for existing resources, then the "client" can't do anything about the original stated problem.
dakiol··on Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026
No joke. In my company we "sabotaged" the AI initiative led by the CTO. We used LLMs to deliver features as requested by the CTO, but we introduced a couple of bugs here and there (intentionally). As a result, the quarter ended up with more time allocated to fix bugs and tons of customer claims. The CTO is now undoing his initiative. We all have now some time more to keep our jobs.
dakiol··on Open source is not about you (2018)
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all

I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy. For example, if you show courtesy by contributing to an open source project and following all the guidelines they have, I think it's fair to assume that courtesy will be shown in return. I know that may be difficult to achieve (e.g., a high volume of noise preventing project authors from giving courtesy to those who deserve it), but that doesn'tt mean we are entitled to nothing. And this has nothing to do with open source or software; it's just common sense when dealing with people.

But yeah, if you contribute something of very poor quality (you didn't give it the attention it needed, it's full of bugs, or shows no attention to detail; or these days, it's packed with AI-generated content that makes it 10x harder to digest, even if the intention is good), then perhaps you are not entitled to anything

dakiol··on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
You can be both good and bad. Like, it's not an impossibility.
dakiol··on My AI Adoption Journey
Don't get it. What's the relation between Mitchell being a "better" developer than most of us (and better is always relative, but that's another story) and getting value out of AI? That's like saying Bezos is a way better businessman than you, so you should really hear his tips about becoming a billionaire. No sense (because what works for him probably doesn't work for you)

Tons of respect for Mitchell. I think you are doing him a disservice with these kinds of comments.

dakiol··on Ardour 9.0
Is this similar to Ableton? Wanted to "create" music as a hobby, but don't really wanna pay for Ableton. I tried once https://lmms.io/ but didn't stick. Never heard of Ardour.
dakiol··on Doing the thing is doing the thing
And running the marathon is just running the marathon? I disagree. Big part of running the marathon is in the preparation. Weeks after weeks of training and not skipping a single session. The marathon itself is the tip of the iceberg; important but not the whole "thing".
dakiol··on Doing the thing is doing the thing
I kinda agree, but I also gain pleasure from doing all those things that are not supposed to be "the thing". The thinking, the dreaming, the visualizing... I just like that. I do it a lot when working on personal projects (which some of them I never ship). I think it's fine, and I wouldn't go as far as saying that those things are "not doing the thing"; in many ways those things are "the thing", at least for me.
dakiol··on Doing the thing is doing the thing
Is it always like that? I worked in teams where we had some planning beforehand (months, like in your example). We shipped just fine and the product started to bring money. I guess it depends, as usual.
dakiol··on Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager
As an IC that's been in the industry for over a decade, I don't see myself jumping into the management track. I just can't. I see my calendar and I see few meetings, and typically I have the power to move some of them (because some of them are arranged by me). I see my manager's calendar and it's constantly packed with meetings he probably cannot move. Worse than that, I see for instance he has one meeting at 10, then another at 12, then another at 3 and then another at 5. Like, you cannot escape that hell. I start my work at 10, work solid 4-5 hours or so and then close the laptop. I cannot sacrifice that kind of freedom
dakiol··on Zotero 8
I've been using Zotero as my "book" organizer. I have all my epubs, pdfs, everything there. Since version 7 I think you can read PDFs within Zotero, and I love it. I keep custom labels so I easily search for stuff. The only feature I don't use is everything about citation (funny enough). Before Zotero I had everything in file system directories, but I wanted the feeling of having one place (one app) where I could see all my books by category, by read/no-read, etc.

Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)

dakiol··on So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?
The question is: why would services like Google and others want to use such privacy-preserving identity solutions? They wouldn't gain anything from a non-invasive, user-friendly system, so I don't think they'd use it. They want more data, so they are going for it.
dakiol··on So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?
I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go. Take a hypothetical case where HN requires ID verification. I'd just stop using HN, even if that meant giving up checking tech news. Sometimes things end, and that's fine.

I used to watch good soccer matches on public TV. When services like DAZN appeared, only one major match was available each weekend on public TV. Later, none were free to watch unless you subscribed to a private channel. I didn't want to do that, so I stopped watching soccer. Now I only follow big tournaments like the World cup, which still air on public TV (once every 4 years).

Sometimes you just have to let things go

dakiol··on Ask HN: If you had $10M in the bank, would you still show up to your job?
I would work, not for my current employer (or any employer) but for myself. I would setup a one-man LLC or similar and build products I'm proud of. If some of them work out and bring money, good! If not, also good.

Also, I wouldn't work 40h/week on it. More like ~10h/week. I would take it very slow, focusing on the parts that I enjoy the most (like deciding the font of the website for my product, or deciding the dir. structure of my backend, or thinking about that algorithm for days or weeks until I got it right).

I don't like tech companies. I work for one because they pay good. I love my career nevertheless and I become better at it in my free time (that's another reason tech companies pay me good money, because I'm good at it... but I couldn't care less about their products; I pass their interviews with a fake facade)

dakiol··on Meta announces nuclear energy projects
What kind of logic is that? It reminds me some people I know that vote to extreme-right parties because "well, we know that the regular parties are not gonna change anything. These new guys may do something new. Who knows, let's vote them and find out"
dakiol··on Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?
The moment my manager or some other non-technical stakeholders start to use AI to push software to production and it works fine, that's the moment I'll know for sure I'm out of business. I don't think that's really gonna happen soon, not because of the tech, but because non-technical stakeholders need at least one more generation to change their mindset. It doesn't really matter if we reach AGI, your manager (or their manager) is too busy to be hands-off with anything and will most likely delegate to some IC. That IC is me.
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