ogou

Lots of creative software has custom scripting with it's own syntax, like Photoshop actions. I'm glad to point Claude at things like that. Inkscape has an extension API that would be interesting to vibe code with. This is not the real danger for creatives.

Right now we're seeing moves to record behaviour by operators of all kinds of software. That will eventually be distilled into sets of automations for agents to use. To me that's far more labor targeted and extractive than generative AI.

Most commercial websites, especially tech, run multiple A/B experiments in parallel to optimize signup funnels and tier conversions. Even so, there should always be a source of truth for people. We should have some way of verifying what we get for what we pay. There are laws about this as well.

This guy's casual and crass response is a sign of disrespect for customers. Unfortunately, that is pervasive in the industry. The bubbles these teams work in are corrosive to empathy and real world impact.

Thanks for the compliment. Linocuts and monotypes have been considered printmaking for hundreds of years. Those pen plots are also collaged and modified by hand, so not only mechanical. I see all that as traditional printmaking. As for having nothing to saw, there can be a lot of fulfillment in exploring basic themes, like geometric shapes or silhouettes of animals.

Not one actual app is mentioned. As with most articles that are about this, few if any public facing examples are described. Where are the lists of actual production software that was vibe coded and also successful?

Printmaking. In a tiny apartment I did linocuts and Gelli prints on my kitchen counter for a few months. https://lucidbeaming.com/art/prints

Everything is fandom now. I grew up around people obsessed with Nascar and NFL. So much of the discourse sounds exactly the same. It beats listening to people talk about their dogs though.

Don't sleep on Mistral. Highly underrated as a general service LLM. Cheaper, too. Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off. There are all kinds of specialized datasets and restricted access stores that can benefit from their approach. Especially in highly regulated EU.

Not everyone is obsessed with code generation. There is a whole world out there.

I did exactly that and open sourced the API for it. https://joshuacurry.dev/chatjc

It's more than time. That program requires explicit authorization from them. It's designed for larger corporate integrations, not developer experiments. I seriously I doubt I would get approved even if I went through all the paperwork. It's not just a matter of just signing up for an API key.

As for your plan, gathering user data is probably the main thing they want to prevent.

Manually. I went to my profile and saved 4 key pages as html. Then Claude converted those to markdown. Took less than 5 minutes. Automating that would have been more trouble than it's worth. The LinkedIn API is fairly useless unless you're in their partner program. Scraping could have gotten my account blocked because ToS violation. That core information rarely changes so it doesn't need to be dynamically imported anyway.

A RAG-powered chatbot API that answers questions about a developer's professional background. I built it with Hono, LangChain, Mistral AI, and SQLite. I serve it on a Svelte site for my dev portfolio, but it works as a general API as well.

I dumped all my job background info into it: resumes, LinkedIn, cover letter snippets, GitHub repos, recommendations, projects, languages, volunteering, personal work, and even the story of building the thing itself.

It uses structured markdown files I created from all that as a RAG context. It doesn't automatically ingest LinkedIn or other services.

Here it is live:

https://joshuacurry.dev/

Here is the anonymized and secured API repo for general release:

https://github.com/lucidbeaming/chatjc

  Location: San Francisco, CA
  Remote: Yes, prefer on-site/hybrid in SF
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Svelte 5 & Sveltekit, React & React Native, LangChain, Typescript, Node.js, PHP, Python, Linux admin, WCAG, UX/UI, Writing & content creation
  Résumé/CV: https://joshuacurry.dev
  Email: see dev portfolio above

15+ years frontend and full-stack. Lots of experience at content companies. Teaching, writing, video, and DevRel experience. Leadership experience. Recently leveled-up with a bunch of AI middleware courses.

The maker movement evolved. It didn't disappear. Once the tools became accessible to a much wider audience, such as children, it became an integrated aspect of education. It also became a cultural tool. The author is focusing on a very narrow path to monetization and manufacturing. That wasn't the goal of the movement at all. That was how startup pitches tried to capture the movement and extract value. I see 3D printing machines that create structures out of adobe now. Huge ones. I see whole niche industries coming from laser cutters and CnC machines. People who started on Arduino boards now build music synthesizers and modular synth components. That movement continues and now offers a wide array of dividends.

You're right, none of these new tools are disciplines. They are vendor specific approaches that are very recent. That's part of my overall point. Who is out there with 2+ years of very narrow tooling experience at another company at a senior level and is available for a rando startup (or desparate enterprise looking for bolt-on AI features) at a fraction of the pay? Not many, I'm sure. We can level up, do training, and maybe stand up a demo project. But that won't satisfy an ATS scan. It's unrealistic.

This is a good tooling survey of the past year. I have been watching it as a developer re-entering the job market. The job descriptions closely parallel the timeline used in the post. That's bizarre to me because these approaches are changing so fast. I see jobs for "Skill and Langchain experts with production-grade 0>1 experience. Former founders preferred". That is an expertise that is just a few months old and startups are trying to build whole teams overnight with it. I'm sure January and February will have job postings for whatever gets released that week. It's all so many sand castles.

There are multiple services that verify and rate NGOs and nonprofits. The key is to look them up on the service website and not just Google the name. Personally I use Guidestar, but that's for U.S. orgs.

According to the post, it's a usability issue of the open source app layer and not some failure of moderation principles. "Blacksky is dependent on Bluesky’s application server to give users a fast experience, which also means that it is dependent on Bluesky’s labeling system and its moderation choices." Also, Singal's name is mentioned multiple times throughout the the article in irrelevant contexts. I still see the agenda here and I've seen this tactic before.

Speech is not violence.

This is not a general problem with moderation there, centralized or decentralized. This particular issue is specific to a large group of people that don't like Jesse Singal and have been trying to get him removed from Bluesky. It hasn't worked and that group is trying all kinds of way to reframe the narrative to get leverage. All the padding this post adds around that is neotechnical jargon slop.

Why is this on Hacker News?

Social media hasn't been social for a while. Personal posts from people I know are buried under the algorithms. It's a high friction action to actually find my friends. All the defaults are pointed at optimized content from generic sources. I have many friends that are artists and musicians. I follow them on these platforms and my engagement with them is captured and funneled into garbage content about art and music instead of letting my see my friends. I hate it.

This about pitching, not about building. What you can put in a vibe coded demo and a slide deck versus what functions in production a year later are very different. "Three Stanford kids in a trenchcoat" will always be able to get some kind of funding. That's less about technology and business principles and more about the legacy of P. T. Barnum.

Basecamp is a well-known example. I saw it personally at 3 different companies, including one in Germany. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032627

Those distinctions evaporated in 2020 and never returned.

After watching so many work chats disintegrate from politics, social commentary, or pedantic arguments I have totally avoided all unstructured channels. Since 2020 I saw two people get fired after discussions got out of hand. There were many more team meetings, code of conduct edicts, and all hands declarations about communication issues. It wasn't until the bans on politics in Slack arrived until things got better. Even now there are people I will screenshot any DMs that have even a hint of conflict. I doubt I will ever participate in any work chats in a social way again.

An underreported part of the Yahoo story is its relationship to India. I worked there during the Verizon years and heard the history. Yahoo was a forerunner of the "offshoring" of technology jobs to India. It moved lots of core operations to a small army of engineers there. They figured out that their American counterparts made substantially more money than they did, especially the middle managers. Waves of Indian employees began moving to Santa Clara and getting market rate wages. Suddenly, Yahoo wasn't saving as much money as they used to. I don't think it was a major factor in its overall financial decline, but it had some effect I'm sure. On a side note, I heard a couple of Indian engineers say they were moving back to raise their kids because they didn't like the cultural influences in our schools. There were many interesting lunchtime conversations about things like that.