lnrd

Personally I don't use CLI anymore, Codex app is very good and it starts to look like how IDEs will be in the future. You can review code in a GitHub style diff and leave inline comments (super useful), have multiple agents work in parallel with or without worktrees, plus there is very good code navigation (especially if you ask followup clarification questions that will link to other parts of code).

> A host of reasoned declarations and open letters to protect/guide the math research community have been released over the past few months, spiking in intensity after OpenAI announced their solution to the Millennium Prize variant of Navier-Stokes. They quickly gained widespread support among mathematicians. The Leiden Declaration already has 4,000+ signatories, Math and AI has 7,000+, and even the open letter opposing the Caltech Mathathon has 2,000+.

> Among non-mathematicians, the public response was more sympathetic than not, but I observed a vocal minority (particularly from the technology and economics communities) with reasoned objections, generally saying that the mathematicians should adapt and cede control in the new AI world.

Interesting how Software Engineers, instead, seem to have given up early without any declarations or open letters.

This is plain untrue and misinformed, there's an entire category of companies where the whole business model is to pump money into ads to push their own apps and games. They carefully make sure that cost to acquire one paying user is lower than the amount of money the paying user brings. They usually achieve this by aggressive conversion tactics in the app and overly optimized ads with hundreds of variants. There's a whole industry built around this.

This app has 15/20 screens, an app this small wouldn't employ many people to begin with. Before there was one guy (op) maintaining it in react native and now he maintains it native. I don't see much change tbh.

> They intentionally threw $15 million in compute at the problem

what? really?

> Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world.

Last week alone I was unable to access two major websites because their auth flow was broken (I was attempting to log in with Apple, so not "the happy path"). I was just locked out, had to contact support. I guess this mentality is what causes it.

We had safeguards and best practices built over the years of learnings to avoid introducing these kind of regressions. And we threw them away in half a year to...gain some productivity in delivering features that most likely the users don't even want.

It's "what if" thought exercise, doesn't need to be an accurate (or realistic) prediction.

I know Loupe, very cool project. Yes, as I said fingerprinting is the biggest risk, but personal data, photos, location, microphones, camera access are locked (which is what concerns most people).

Fingerprinting I would argue it's a problem on all platforms though, web included.

I'm a mobile dev and know the iOS ecosystem quite well, i can assure you that iOS APIs are locked and developers can access very little user data without user consent. What an iOS user is vulnerable to is fingerprinting (not too different than what happens on web tbh) and 0days. But given how valuable iOS 0days are it's unlikely they are used inside large scale generic apps and not for targeted attacks. Also it's unlikely that a random company sits on a 0days and uses it against its users.

So ultimately yes, installing an app on iOS is not a trust decision because the dev are very limited in what they can do. The biggest trust decision is toward Apple that might have private secret APIs allowing them to do things developers cannot. That's a possibility, but overall Apple business has never been around ads, big data and users profiling so the chances are not this high.

This is a step in an interesting direction for many reasons. First of all it reduces the "conversation in english" aspect and goes back to kinda "writing code" which I think would reduce a lot of fatigue and bring back some joy in making software. But then it also gives more control over the output in a way that makes sense: I know how i want to code this, but I can save time not having to deal with the syntax/boilerplate/actual writing. Also since I structured everything precisely, reviewing is going to be way easier. It requires though yet another mental shift in how to code: you stop chatting and you go back to writing in a text editor similarly to what you did before, the difference is that now you write some kind of scaffold instead than the actual code.

It has two problems though: if my approach has flaws the agent would implement it as-is even if could instead suggest an improvement. Also, an advantage of agents in huge codebases is that they can find where to make the change and draft it, which wouldn't work with this system.

Of course the Logitech mouse can be plugged and will just work without installation. The software allows to customize buttons, macros, DPI ranges, lights, etc. Still sucks, but it's not really needed to make it work or use it.

Never heard the words "basic economics" used outside of strawman political arguments. To think that H-1B developers can meaningfully shift the supply to the point that is felt by other people it's very shortsighted. The job market has been very difficult for years with vastly more supply than demand and its due to plenty economic, financial and political reasons. Interest rates itself affect it way more than any H-1B developer could ever do it. If you were to actually sit down and look deeply into it and look at the data, I'm sure that H-1B would be a small percentage of the problem and you would get fired up about so many other things.

But that's difficult and time consuming, if anything it's advanced economics and requires effort to decode what's happening. What it's very easy to do is getting angry at a group of people and to feel deep unfairness about it, then think that if that group of people were to leave, the problem would improve or be solved. That's exactly the kind of thought that seems to be so pervasive at all levels and yes, it is a scapegoat. Especially since that the only merit someone has over H-1B is to (by pure chance) having being born in a different place. I really feel that many people complaining against H-1B wouldn't even qualify for it if they were born somewhere else.

That works now because there are human made sources that the AI can find and summarize for you. But now there are no incentives at all for humans to write anything on the internet and if they do the content will be buried by hallucinated content someone else posted at a larger scale.

I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, google didn't return anything useful (besides a blog post clearly written by AI and with absolutely no information in it). Claude managed to give some interesting pointers, but its suggestions were not working and I also noticed that it started to hallucinate badly about ipv6 and gave me some suggestions that were just plain untrue. Claude Opus is smart, usually when it gets so convinced about something is after researching the internet and not just based on its training data. I wonder where it got so convinced about it. Maybe reading some other hallucinated blog post like the one I stumbled upon?

> What's the benefit of this type of stacked PRs over a well-curated set of commits, and reviewing per commit?

Even if the reviewer does the review commit-by-commit, all the comments and discussions will be on the same PR leading to multiple ongoing conversations about different topics that would be split if the PR are stacked. Also, all the new commits addressing the comments with spoil this commit-by-commit design, as the previous commits will be outdated and the new changes will be on top of those. I think it's beneficial for new changes to be a separate commit and not rewriting history, to not force the reviewers to re-read everything but just the latest changes.

They don't need to be the majority. One big company paying 200/300k in credits each month easily makes up for the majority of single users not doing so. I believe AI companies today make money through b2b enterprise deals and not selling to individual users, the latter is mostly a marketing expense to get people to use their product instead than the competitors one.

As long as you are fine with everything your team puts into Claude being retained by Anthropic. Afaik only enterprise API plans provide non data retention policies.

One would think that it could be possible to make a tool that takes some text and "anonymizes" it by making it a little more standard and boring (uniforming punctuation and sentence structure, changing words with some synonyms, etc). Maybe wouldn't make it particularly compelling, but would be valuable for political dissidents and other people with a high threat model.

Does anyone have some tools to share?

I mean, video montages of pictures for birthdays/weddings/whatever were never creative to begin with. Before AI they were just some random template downloaded from a website or backed-in some editing software (I remember so many birthday montage videos made with Windows Movie Maker that looked all the same).

People love these not because they are creative or good executed, but because they see the pictures and the story of the people they love.

> Writing every line by hand is no longer the norm. Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much

> It remains important to be able to read the code and understand the architecture. As a result, I reduce my velocity by iterating over my PR until it reaches the same level of quality I would have produced "by hand"

I do that too and when I do it I'm not sure anymore if I'm "producing as much more" than if I was doing it by hand. I need to spend time to read the code, break down the flow so that it clicks in my head and so that I'm 100% sure that I understand what is going on and what every line does. And then I still test it (executing it), because that's where you notice the edge cases anyways. Once I understand it and test it, the part where I iterate or fix small quirks and hallucinations is the smallest part of the job and is irrelevant if i do it by myself or ask the LLM to make the change.

I'm still not convinced that I'm faster with an LLM at all, since I add this new bottleneck (the time spent understanding every line). If I do it by hand it already clicks in my head, so it's faster for me to test it, find unaddressed edge cases and then confidently ship it. Maybe the LLMs gains are not in this at all and writing every line by hand will still be the norm for a long time.

Still, LLMs make me insanely faster in: finding something in the codebase, recostructing a flow and understanding the architecture, triaging a bug (sometimes it just solves it with a prompt), writing and updating tests, reviewing changes for potential issues. These days I have almost always 2/3 agents running doing something of the above. That saves me hours and you can pry an LLM from my dead hands, but I'm still not sold that it makes me faster at producing production grade code that I fully understand and follows my company architecture and standards.

Then sure, if I need to make a prototype or a small tool for myself or some novelty thing, an LLM can do it without me ever touching or reading the code. But I think that's not what the majority of software engineers are employed to do.

In my company, user reported bugs get triaged and once they are confirmed they end up in the board of the team owning that part of the system (often they also built it, but is not necessarily the same people). Then there's a team bug threshold and if it gets reached then the whole team can't merge anything else until X amount of bugs are fixed and the number goes down. It's very annoying system and in cases of emergency it can of course temporarily be lifted by someone above, but honestly is very effective in making sure that bugs are fixed in a reasonable amount of time. This makes fixing bugs "part of maintenance work that is a given and expected to be done between new initiatives".

Marketing salaries are not high at all

> I think GPT writes code the best. How well will it write in version 5.6? It gives me chills.

Heard this exact sentence multiple times a few months ago about Opus 4.6, then 4.7 and 4.8 were considered a disappointment and today people miss "the good old times of 4.6" (referring to a few weeks of February 2026).

Very fascinating to look at all of this unfolding.

Used it for years and never encountered a single bug, and I'm quite a power user with hundreds of items stored in it, shared vaults, and access multiple times per day. It's one of the few softwares I happily pay for. Maybe it differs from platform to platform, otherwise I can't explain your comment.

I don't agree with this view of an "attention marketplace". Besides the HN small (and arguably irrelevant) bubble, most of the world attention is swayed by pop-stars, actors, musicians and influencers talking about what they had for breakfast and the gossip surrounding them. That on top of politically-controlled content/slop factories. A non-researched piece of content presenting an idea that was somewhere already talked about in a book or a paper can't do that much damage imho. If it reaches anyone and makes them think about something it can only be a net positive.

> Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.

I would invite you to read more philosophy if that's your idea of what philosophy is, because it feels very far from what has been discussed over the centuries by many authors way smarter than me and you.

I think this is some sort of modern academia bias. What you say it is true in academia, most things have already been thought and studied and that's why any academic book or paper has a citation in every sentence. I understand why this rigor is important in academia, but is it in the rest of the world?

If I have an interesting thought about a topic and I share it with an audience that is not PhDs, to them it might be interesting and insightful and provoke new thoughts. Most likely yes, someone in the 70s somewhere in the world already wrote a paper about this idea or even a book. Does it matter though? Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.

I don't think that what's worth sharing are only documents that quote everyone else that already talked about it and their thoughts. That might work if I want to prove that my work is at boundaries of human knowledge or that is the most plausible explanation for something, but if I just want to share ideas then I find it limiting. Not just because it limits the people with the knowledge to write anything to a handful, but also because for those people there is this anxiety of "not worth it, wasting people time" if it's not researched for months like you mention. Share your thought, if some expert will find it wasteful or naive they will not read it, but someone else might and it might open their mind.

This makes me think about philosophy, if you really dig down into it virtually all philosophy ideas were already discussed first by Plato and Aristoteles. You cannot find a modern philosophy thought that isn't in some way already discussed by those two. Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?

> and all software dies

Can you elaborate?

What was that Warren Buffett's quote about everyone trying to leave the party seconds before midnight in a room where there are no clocks? I think it was at peak of the dot com bubble

Spotify killed the concept of downloading music, either legally or not.

> When rewriting the entire codebase is very quick and cheap, why bother iterating on small components?

We are nowhere near this scenario tbh. Token cost is very high and is currently heavily subsidized by VC money to gain market share. Also this realistically only applies to small projects, small codebases and mostly greenfield ones. No way you can rewrite the whole codebase quickly and cheaply in any mid-sized+ projects

But even assuming token cost plummets, any non-trivial piece of software that is valuable enough to generate income for the company is also big, complex, interconnected enough that cannot be rewritten quickly even by AI, also for business reasons too. If a piece of code works, is stable and is tested, then rewriting it will always bring a high degree of risk and uncertainty that in a lot of business critical applications is just not worth it. A stable system can stay untouched for years besides minor dependencies updates.

Only small businesses and startups pay $200/month, most medium+ sized companies will have an enterprise plan and pay by token usage to access the security, privacy, and compliance guarantees that their legal and security teams require.

Also, I think the $200/mo plan is subsidized by VC money and is likely hemorrhaging money for Anthropic, so it's not really meaningful to reason around that.