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wreath

782 karma · joined October 14, 2016

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wreath··on Ask HN: Is your leadership pushing you to skip dev review?
Leadership not so much. Its mostly engineers who interpret shipping fast as “no code review” and other risky things like automated deployment with poor test suite, all while taking months to go from idea to implementation and nobody seems to be payin attention to this part
wreath··on GitHub Incident with Git Operations, Pull Requests and Actions
Silver lining is that this slows down the all the crappy half baked vibe coded crap from being shipped.
wreath··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
> A bad or below average dev with AI will run your product and company into the ground in a matter of weeks.

I had a recent experience with this. Although it was months and not weeks and there were other factors into play such as the market etc but the last company i was in had a poor engineering culture with inexperienced engineers equipped with AI output some of the lowest quality features for both customer-facing products and internal dev tools. A lot of customers churned, and im sure quality us part of the reason.

wreath··on Don't paste the AI, please
Same here. I sometimes dont feel like typing but I use voice dictation, that should be the first option in a text convo imo.
wreath··on Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
And it doesnt play reallt well with Aurora
wreath··on Ask HN: Any tips for a college freshman enrolled in computer science?
> Learn data structures and algorithms. Understand finite state machines and context free grammars. Learn at least some mathematics. Discrete math, Boolean logic, and statistics. Learn how operating systems work, networking, databases, compilers, machine code, low-level details like registers and the cache hierarchy. Learn more obscure programming languages: like Lisp, Prolog, Haskell, and Forth.

Also, these may seem like separate subjects but there is some overlap especially once you work with things like databases in production at some scale.

wreath··on AI Is Boring
To me AI conversations are exactly like ones about VIM config etc. ok cool, but show me something cool you built with it, and most importantly something that was worth the cost.

Otherwise, it sucked the air out of everything else especially in tech and startup culture.

wreath··on Queues Don't Fix Overload (2014)
Yeah I totally agree. My point was that it can be intimidating as an intro book to the topic. Excellent material otherwise
wreath··on Queues Don't Fix Overload (2014)
I don't think this is a good resource for an intro tbh. Unless you are interested in proofs and have some probability basics covered, it feels quite dense.

I liked Principles of Product Development Flow a lot more because it was easier to digest, although it's a different application of queuing theory.

wreath··on Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
What kind of problems do people solve that require this amount of money per month, let alone per day?

Is anyone reviewing the output of the generated work (PRs, docs etc)?

wreath··on The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
At work we are literally forced to use AI and it’s part of our performance review. Even though I really like coding by hand, I have to now use AI so I can keep my job. I will try this out though, 2 days per week using AI and the rest handcoding, enough to stave off the inevitable lay off perhaps.
wreath··on Git commands I run before reading any code
And what of the original author is not there anymore?
wreath··on Slop is not necessarily the future
Even with enough money, you may not be able to attract/keep talented engineers who are willing to put up with such a work environment (the codebase itself, and probably the culture that led to its state) and who want to ship well built/designed software but are slowed down by the mess.
wreath··on Where does engineering go? Retreat findings and insights [pdf]
PMs do different things in different organizations.

In my last job, PMs were responsible for identifying problems that were worth solving and align with the overall company vision and plans within the owned domain, and design+engineering decided how to solve those problems and what to build. Of course with collaboration w/ the PMs (and EMs).

The job before that, PMs wrote jira tickets and nagged engineering when tickets will be delivered. The "what problems to solve and what to build" questions came straight from CEO/CTO.

wreath··on Palestinian boy, 12, describes how Israeli forces killed his family in car
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.

I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.

wreath··on Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
I dont think parent was questioning it, sounded they were more curious but thanks for explaining because i wasnt sure myself.

Re: safe from LLMs, id imagine the level of rigor in sys engineering is higher so maybe people are more wary of LLM produced code?

wreath··on Grief and the AI split
Yeah to get the definitive answers, sure AI is quicker. Google is more like the librarian pointing you at possibly good resources to get your answers from after reading the materials and there are a lot of good learning opportunities there. LLMs just give you the answer and robs you of those opportunities.
wreath··on Agents that run while I sleep
Technical debt is never a problem now since only AI reads code /s
wreath··on Agents that run while I sleep
Exactly! How do other parts of the organization deal with this avalanche of features in terms of documenting, pricing and packaging, marketing, selling and getting feedback on them. How do users adopt these features and incorporate them in their workflows so fast? Never in my career was the speed of writing code alone the bottleneck.
wreath··on Agentic Engineering Patterns
It's hard to be engaged when you are constantly jumping from one thing/prompt to another vs you are actually doing the work.
wreath··on Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
I dont even think you need to be neurodivergent or anything to answer this question like the parent’s cofounder did.

From one side, we call ourselves problem solvers, on the other hand we are not satisfied with simple solutions to these problems. If im interviewing for a job, i should be expected to behave and solve hypothetical problems the way id do it on the job. If that screws up your script, you probably suck at hiring and communicating your expectations.

wreath··on Agentic Engineering Patterns
Thats interesting. While i do get mentally tired after a session of focused coding, i feel like i have accomplished something. Using AI for coding feels similar to spending hours doom scrolling reels. Less engaging but Im drained as hell at the end.
wreath··on Better JIT for Postgres
I think reading queries that are always served from cache are CPU bound because it also involves locking the buffers etc and there is no I/O involved.
wreath··on AI is making junior devs useless
You don't have to take 5 years off for it. Just continue same old business (assuming you don't have outside pressure to use this slop-machine) and keep your skills and judgment sharp until the tools and workflow stabilizes, and most of all, the money to fuel this hype runs out.
wreath··on AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
We already knew this, but in the light of this AI hysteria we pretend like coding speed has always been the bottleneck
wreath··on What AI coding costs you
And not to mention that most tests available to AI training is trash, so no wonder AI-generated tests are not only worthless but costly in terms of false sense of reliability.
wreath··on Layoffs at Block
He’s been building tech companies for 20 years, he sure knew smaller teams move faster when he was hiring thousands of more people during covid
wreath··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
Right on.. we already have open source alternative to all the major SaaS out there and companies still opt for the SaaS option instead to avoid the headache of self-hosting and all the other stuff. The extra resources that AI affords you will be directed to building more features for your customers.
wreath··on Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
This has been my experience as well. I get drained at the end, and I spent most of my energy and thinking capacity dealing with the LLM instead of the problem space.
wreath··on Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
More like the fresh parents who start schooling everyone else on how to parent…
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