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An article from 2018, and HN discussion from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16903440

Reading through those comments, one stood out to me.

> AFAIK the idea was that SQL is so close to plain English that any accountant could simply use it to generate reports or enter data. It's really an old fallacy that using plain language would make complexity go away. > > beew001

Was responding to a thread about how SQL was meant to be "low code" if not "no code", and even COBOL before it.

Now in 2026 with LLMs I'm finding a lot of what's said in that comment section is still true. Would love if some commenters from that original thread popped back in here.

Relevant

https://terriblesoftware.org/2026/03/03/nobody-gets-promoted...

I'm not sure how you can believe that GitHub Copilot in VS Code is just a CLI interface when the former existed long before the CLI. It's not. For a certain amount of time, the two teams weren't even working together. The CLI was adding things customers were wondering when would it reach VS Code. So, it's not just a CLI harness. They added the ability to call the CLI from VS Code but GitHub Copilot in VS Code existed before the CLI and is remains a separate thing that's just interfacing with the CLI now.

All I can say is I know because I know. There's been some "synergizing" among the corporation about the CLI team running off to do their own thing and adding features to the CLI that amount to trying to force a Terminal to act like a GUI.

It instantly made me think this was either written by AI or heavily edited, and I hadn't gotten that sense until the moment I saw load-bearing.

I hate that em dashes have been killed by AI as well. Hundreds of years ago Charles Dickens was using them in his novels and today someone will read his books and in ignorance actually think AI wrote it.

The Databricks thing was a ploy. They then pushed Azure Synapse Analytics and forced all internal teams to stop using Azure Databricks. Synapse was half baked and then they are now pushing Microsoft Fabric which is even less baked.

For GitHub to remain profitable they have to appease those shareholders you mentioned.

It's hilarious to me how we are recreating decades of IDE advancements such that they work on the terminal, only for us to end up with what is essentially an IDE.

Unrelated but your comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736176 related to the Terminal agents coding craze have helped me feel less crazy. People using GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code, they either never review the code or end up opening up an IDE to review the code, and I'm sitting here like, why don't you use the terminal in your favorite IDE? You're using a Terminal as a chat interface, so why not just use a chat interface? Or use the terminal in VS Code which actually now integrates very well with Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI so you can see what's going on across the many files this thing is editing?

The hype is so large with the CLI coding tools I got FOMO, but as you were saying in that thread, I see no tangible improvement to the value I get out of AI coding tools by using the CLI alone. I use the CLI in VS Code, and I use the chat panel, and the only thing that seems to actually make a difference is the "context engineering" stuff of custom instructions, agent skills, prompt files, hooks, custom agents, all that stuff, which works no matter which interface you use to kick off your AI coding instructions.

Would be curious to hear your thoughts on the topic all these months later.

And if software engineering has been solved by AI, why is Anthropic still hiring and employing SWE's?

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-code-founde...

I love this. The cognitive of understanding what this code does is super low, it solves the problem, presents no glaring performance issues, and isn’t trying to be cute.

I am writing this from a coffee shop where myself and others have gone well over 4 hours working. The business owners don’t care so long as you make purchases and don’t sit at a 10 person table for just yourself.

I see people get a morning coffee, get lunch and a drink, and then maybe something on their way out. It’s not a problem.

I disagree with the silence bit. I am a frequent remote worker at coffee shops across the USA and people working have noise canceling headphones usually, I have never seen anyone demand silence in a coffee shop. Libraries are a different story.

That plus Microsoft PoweToys (which inexplicably isn’t installed by default) are the only things that make Windows useable to me.

I am personally refreshed reading through the comments here and seeing a nuanced, rational response to the ad rather than the manufactured outrage you mentioned.

Agreed. Great article title, the article itself falls flat. This is the sort of title where I expected a quasi research paper with links to sources rather than just plain text references.

The level of writing isn’t up to snuff for what I think AI would generate. It’s rather…pedestrian.

After reading, I agree with im3w1l. The author did not do this subject justice. Its too short, makes some sweeping generalizations about the evolution of human culture, and never really dives deep into answer the “How” that it calls out in its title. Great title, mediocre article.

I also think the suggestion that content creators, as in all of them (the author specifically calls out Charlie Damelio), don’t view their fans as anything more than a number is interesting. He calls out a content creator he perhaps views as part of the problem but fails to acknowledge the same extends to literally everyone you’ve ever heard of online that you follow but don’t know in real life, including people im sure the author would defend as being “really good guys”.

About to start my read. What would you say he could’ve done better? Will revisit when Ive finished

> The biggest problem is that we have no idea how to value most of the work people do. I mean, we might know that what a developer should get paid for a year’s work, but how much is that work worth? The majority of the work done in modern corporations is incredibly hard to value, which is partially why companies are so inefficient and make so many bad decisions.

> That brings up an even bigger problem - companies today hire workers to make money from their labor. In other words, they generate profit because they pay their employees less than they’re worth. If everyone could trade their labor for exactly the amount of money it was worth, the corporations that employ them would have a much harder time making money.

Anyone else see an issue with this comment? We don’t know how to value the work of a corporate employee but we’re simultaneously all being paid less than we’re worth.

I like this article but I do feel the author leans too much into theory and what I hope is hyperbole. What I do love though is the admission at the end that we’re in a tough spot with modern capitalism and there’s no easy way to fix things by some “just do xyz” solution.

Enlighten me. Looking for some weekend reading.

Including X (formerly called Twitter)

Proud WashU grad here. Just happy to see us show up on Hacker News today.

Meta’s open source contributions stand on their own as great regardless of their obviously shady social media management and privacy tactics. The former are feats of software engineering, the later have a lot to do with things far beyond problems like handing data at scale, refreshing feeds fast, ensuring atomic updates to user profiles, etc.

Basically I don’t think their privacy nightmare stuff detracts from what the brain trust of engineers over there have been doing in the open source world.

The world at large seems to hate Zuck but it’s good to hear from people familiar with software engineering and who understand just how significant his contributions to open source and raising salaries have been through Facebook and now Meta.

Recently introduced a friend to Desiring God. Changed their whole perspective on Christianity. Took things back to basics for them, here’s what Jesus actually said, here’s what the Bible actually teaches, no sensationalism, let’s calm down and dive deep.

Here are some favorites of mine, bookmarked and ready to reread whenever I feel the urge.

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/how-to-be-spiritually-mi...

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-humility

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-one-must-read-this-y...

Omnivore. Saves a copy using web archive.

https://omnivore.app/

I am giddy seeing a link to Desiring God on HN. John Piper, good stuff.

Absolutely wonderful article that says things I have noticed and haven’t been able to properly explain to people. Many people weaponize science as a tool to defend their moral beliefs, arguing that anyone who disagrees with them is “literally against the facts”. They fail to realize we’ve reached a stage where the only research studies seeing the light of day are those conforming to the popular opinion. Anything else is killed and discredited as nonsense, not based on truth, but based on emotion.

Reminds me of those days where every scientist told us cigarettes are totally safe. If you said otherwise you were an anti science fool, clearly an idiot. Look at us now. What a world we live in. Modern science is closer to religion than anyone would like to admit.

Same. Still climbing out. It’s been a decade for me, but that’s counting college where I was working to keep my family okay alongside school. Been a full time software engineer since 2020, still wading through debt and helping my family stay afloat. Reading this thread has done some good for my soul.

Supabase integrates a lot of the open source tools listed here. A Postgrs backend as a service offering. Just started using it. Very impressed.