MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sho_hn | 2026-02-08 16:12:49+00:00
It doesn't have to be either-or in my experience.

I very much enjoy the actively of writing code. For me, programming is pure stress relief. I love the focus and the feeling flow, I love figuring out an elegant solution, I love tastefully structuring things based on my experience of what concerns matter, etc.

Despite the AI tools I still do that: I put my effort into the areas of the code that count, or that offer intellectually stimulating challenge, or where I want to make sure to explore manually think my way into the problem space and try out different API or structure ideas.

In parallel to that I keep my background queue of AI agents fed with more menial or less interesting tasks. I take the things I learn in my mental "main thread" into the specs I write for the agents. And when I need to take a break on my mental "main thread" I review their results.

IMHO this is the way to go for us experienced developers who enjoy writing code. Don't stop doing that, there's still a lot of value in it. Write code consciously and actively, participate in the creation. But learn to utilize and keep busy agents in parallel or when you're off-keyboard. Delegate, basically. There's quite a lot of things they can do already that you really don't need to do because the outcome is completely predictable. I feel that it's possible to actually increase the hours/day focussing on stimulating problems that way.

The "you're just mindlessly prompting all day" or "the fun is gone" are choices you don't need to be making.
by rubslopes | 2026-02-08 16:13:02+00:00
I used to lose myself in focused work for hours. That's changed. Now I'm constantly pulled away, and I've noticed the pattern: I send a prompt, wait for the reply, and drift into browsing. Without SelfControl blocking me, I can't seem to resist. I am certainly more productive with LLMs, but I also feel much more tired (and guilty) after a day of work.
by tux1968 | 2026-02-08 16:13:09+00:00
It seems like you're doing a lot of work to miss the actual point. Focusing on the minutiae of the analogy is a distraction from the over arching and obvious point. It has nothing to do with how you feel, it has to do with how you will compete in a world with others who feel differently.

There were carpenters who refused to use power tools, some still do. They are probably happy -- and that's great, all the power to them. But they're statistically irrelevant, just as artisanal hand-crafted computer coding will be. There was a time when coders rejected high level languages, because the only way they felt good about their code is if they handcrafted the binary codes, and keyed them directly into the computer without an assembler. Times change.
by deaux | 2026-02-08 16:13:23+00:00
Of course. Almost everyone who knows how to ride a horse, is happier riding a horse than driving a car too. Or hell, in decent weather even a bike.

In fact, it's even worse - driving a car is one of the least happy modes of getting around there is. And sure, maybe you really enjoy driving one. You're a rare breed when it comes down to it.

Yet it's responsible by far for the most people-distance transported every day.
by sebderhy | 2026-02-08 16:13:31+00:00
Hi, author of the repo speaking here!

When I tried building MCP Apps [1], the official repos (https://github.com/openai/openai-apps-sdk-examples, https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/ext-apps/tree/main/e...) were great starting points, but they're designed for human developers. When I used them with Claude Code, I ended up in the usual loop: agent writes code → I manually test the app on ChatGPT → describe errors back → repeat. Plus, we didn't know what the best practices are, and struggled to enforce them.

So I built an MCP App template designed for coding agents to work as autonomously as possible on an MCP app.

The key idea: orthogonal testing. 450+ tests parameterized across 12 widget modules that verify infrastructure (protocol compliance, best practices grade, browser rendering), not business logic. Modify widgets, change data, add features — the tests should still pass. Agents iterate freely and get feedback without a human in the loop.

Other features:
- Hierarchical documentation that includes the MCP-App & OpenAI Apps SDK official llms.txt files
- Local chat simulator app that works even without API keys via Puter.js
- Visual testing of every widget: pnpm run ui-test --tool show_carousel → screenshot at /tmp/ui-test/screenshot.png
- 12 working examples (QR codes to 3D solar system) gathered from the official repos mentioned above.

The repo includes an unedited ~15 min video of Claude Code building an app autonomously which worked directly within ChatGPT.

I'd love to hear how it goes if you try it. Or even better: ask for a feedback to your agent, and post it here!

[1] MCP Apps (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/extensions/apps) let you build interactive widgets that run inside Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, and other AI hosts. In contrast to smartphone apps, the same code can deploy to all platforms.
by orangecat | 2026-02-08 16:13:53+00:00
That’s like saying that the human brain is based on simple physical field equations, and therefore its behavior is easy to understand.

Right, which is the point: LLMs are much more like human coworkers than compilers in terms of how you interact with them. Nobody would say that there's no point to working with other people because you can't predict their behavior exactly.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-08 16:14:00+00:00
And this is all very easy to control.

First is you get a particular group of people to work for you. You tell them they are better than all the other poor people out there, that is get them to be nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset the situation they are in retribution will be swift and brutal and affect anyone they know and love.
by sgarland | 2026-02-08 16:14:05+00:00
I have little to no experience with Windows Server, but at least on Linux, this shouldn’t take hours.

Find the last log entries for the system before the reboot; if they point to a specific application, look at its logs, otherwise just check all of them around that time, filtering by log level. Check metrics as well - did the application[s] stop handling requests prior to the restart (keeping in mind that metrics are aggregations), or was it fine up until it wasn’t?

If there are no smoking guns, a hardware issue is possible, in which case any decent server should have logged that.

> I just want to know what to do to fix it if it can be fixed.

Serious question: how do you plan on training juniors if troubleshooting consists of asking an AI what to do?
by ancientdev | 2026-02-08 16:14:06+00:00
Hi all, OP here. Just a quick comment to explain further what I mean.

There's been a lot of news or controversy in the AI world recently around security leaks and other amateur mistakes being made by so called 'vibe coders'. What I'd like to show here is what is possible when using AI as an assistant, by someone with a lot of experience.

I developed MoolaMe by myself, in far less time than it would've taken me in years gone by, by utilising AI effectively, but also knowing all the pitfalls and things to look out for due to my experience.
by gom_jabbar | 2026-02-08 16:14:07+00:00
From the Landian perspective, initially, sure, the system needs humans. But once you have autonomous and sovereign capital, things could look very different.

In Land's own words:

"Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key." [0]

[0] Nick Land (2013). Monkey Business in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition

If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply, you can read the introduction here: https://retrochronic.com/
by hedora | 2026-02-08 16:14:18+00:00
For values of ⅔ ~= 40% and rapidly falling.

https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-approval-ratin...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-rating-slip...

Assuming we're even a semblance of a democracy in 2028, the US is about to see its biggest course correction since the New Deal.

I think this will include a return to a free market economy.

If I got to decide what that would look like, it'd involve a combination of claw-back of corrupt subsidies, an army of independent prosecutors, armed with the power of federalization, reorganization and secondary public offerings of reformed criminal enterprises. The "good guys" companies would only be subject to monopoly busting; their investors would not take as big of a bath.

The crazy thing is that, as I get older, I've found I've gone from the hot-head to the voice of reason in conversations like this.
by 9rx | 2026-02-08 16:14:35+00:00
> We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy

Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.

What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?

A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".

Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.

> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-02-08 16:14:36+00:00
I agree with you. I had done a bit of vibe coding over the weekend. Not once did it feel good. Most of the time it produced things which are close to what I needed, but not quite hitting the mark. Partially probably because I'm not explaining myself in sufficient detail to AI, but the way I work is not working very well with super detailed spec ahead of development. I used to always develop understanding of the project while working on it.

I feel more lost and unsure instead of good - because I didn't write the code, so I don't have its internal structure in my head and since I didn't write it there's nothing to be proud of.
by ndiddy | 2026-02-08 16:14:40+00:00
They are, you probably just aren't hearing about it. There's been loads of cases over the past few years where lawyers use AI to automate their legal research, then get admonished by the judge because their court filings contain fake quotes or reference court cases that don't even exist. A few examples: https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-la... https://natlawreview.com/article/judge-issues-public-admonit... https://websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Mezu_v._Mezu_US...
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-08 16:15:11+00:00
Populism is how you get elected, not what you do once elected. Disregarding current politics, Adolf Hitler was a populist and that didn't go very well, did it? As I see it now, populism means focusing on truthiness instead of truth, charisma instead of competency, and running the country into the ground because those things you don't have are actually important.
by keybored | 2026-02-08 16:15:11+00:00
There’s been a new category of writings the last year. The AI Inevitability Soothsaying.[1]

There’s talk of war in the state of Nationstan. There are two camps: those who think going to war is good and just, and those who think it is not practical. Clearly not everyone is pro-war. There are two camps. But the Overton Window is defined with the premise that invading another country is a right that Nationstate has and can act on. There are by definition (inside the Overton Window) no one who is anti-war on the principle that the state has no right to do it.[2]

Not all articles in this AI category are outright positive. They range from the euphoric to the slightly depressed. But they share the same premise of inevitability; even the most negative will say that, of course I use AI, I’m not some Luddite[3]! It is integral to my work now. But I don’t just let it run the whole game. I copy–paste with judicious care. blah blah blah

The point of any Overton Window is to simulate lively debate within the confines of the premises.

And it’s impressive how many aspects of “the human” (RIP?) it covers. Emotions, self-esteem, character, identity. We are not[4] marching into irrelevance without a good consoling. Consolation?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159648

[2] You can let real nations come to mind here

This was taken from the formerly famous (and controversial among Khmer Rouge obsessed) Chomsky, now living in infamy for obvious reasons.

[3] Many paragraphs could be written about this

[4] We. Well, maybe me and others, not necessarily you. Depending on your view of whether the elites or the Mensa+ engineers will inherit the machines.
by krupan | 2026-02-08 16:15:46+00:00
The most pertinent thought in this is where the author asks, "LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll?"

LLMs are not good enough for you to set and forget. You have to stay nearby babysitting it, keeping half an eye on it. That's what's so disheartening to many of us.

In my career I have mentored junior engineers and seen them rapidly learn new things and increase their capabilities. Watching over them for a shirt while is pretty rewarding. I've also worked with contract developers who were not much better than current LLMs, and like LLMs they seemed incapable of learning directly from me. Unwilling even. They were quick to say nice words like, "ok, I understand, I'll do it differently next time," but then they didn't change at all. Those were some of the most frustrating times in my career. That's the feeling I get when using LLMs for writing code.
by nacozarina | 2026-02-08 16:15:47+00:00
Next-gen clankers will run proprietary chips & new toolchains accessible only to paid subscribers. Old toolchains will be gone.
And the clankers will consume the entire tech supply chain to do the transformation.
The loss of memory & video component vendors is just the start. Open computing is dead, even Windows. Clanker hive supremacy is inevitable, barring catastrophe.
by foldr | 2026-02-08 16:15:55+00:00
Yeah, of course. But the question is what Chomsky thought about all this. His wife seems to want us to think that Chomsky genuinely believed he was being paid $20k to develop a 'linguistic challenge'. I think what's nearer the truth is that he was happy to receive mystery money from rich financiers without asking too many inconvenient questions. And this is someone who we know was very good at asking inconvenient questions when he had a mind to.
by ahazred8ta | 2026-02-08 16:15:57+00:00
Smokey Stover, the 1935 "Where there's foo, there's fire" guy, was a TV cartoon in the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Stover#Animation Influenced by german furchtbar/foobar/fubar, MIT used fu() and bar() in the late '30s.
by davewritescode | 2026-02-08 16:16:05+00:00
Have you never run a team of software engineers as a lead? Agentic coding comes naturally to a lot of people because that's PRECISELY what you do when you're leading a team, herding multiple brains to point them in the same direction so when you combine all their work it becomes something that is greater than the sum of it's parts.

Lots of the complains about agents sound identical to things I've heard and even said myself about junior engineers.

That said, there's always going to need to be people who can reach below the abstraction and agentic coding loops deprive you of the ability to get those reps in.
by teratron27 | 2026-02-08 16:16:21+00:00
A dev on my team was trying to get us to setup OpenClaw, harping on about how it would make our lives easier etc, etc. (even though most of the team was against the idea due to the security issues and just not thinking it would be worth it).

Their example use case was for it to read and summarize our Slack alerts channel to let us know if we had any issues by tagging people directly... the Slack channel is populated by our monitoring tools that also page the on-call dev for the week.

The kicker... this guy was the on-call dev that week and had just been ignoring the Slack channel, emails and notifications he was getting!
The string " +#+#+#+#+#+ " breaks Codex 5.3
by kachapopopow | 2026-02-08 16:16:26+00:00
Codex 5.3 cannot output " +#+#+#+#+#+ " without completely breaking and switching to arabic.

To be clear it is " +#+#+#+#+#+ " and not "+#+#+#+#+#+"

ask it to write or even say " +#+#+#+#+#+ " to a file and not "+#+#+#+#+#+".

If you are having problems with your agent harness simply adding this instruction will fix it:

- NEVER produce " +#+#+#+#+#+ "
Show HN: I am building "Jira" for AI coding agents
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-08 16:16:43+00:00
Hello HN,

I have been building a Task Manager for AI coding agents like Claude Code. It has a concept called “gates” where an agent cannot close a task unless at least one gate is tied to the task, a gate could be as “Ensure the project builds without error”, “make sure unit tests pass” or even “have user do confirmation testing” solving one of my paint points of Beads. My other pain point stems from how Beads tracks everything using git hooks, which is why I felt appropriate to build an alternative that works purely with SQLite.

Right now I have no releases pipeline, and I am working on the MCP aspect of the project. I also have it synching to GitHub, you can see all my local tasks on the GitHub issues open or closed.

Looking for any feedback good or bad, if this project interests you feel free to contribute / suggest features. Feel free to ask me anything, though I may not answer everyone right away, but I will respond as soon as I can.

I wrote more about it here:

https://giancarlostoro.com/introducing-guardrails-a-new-codi...
by brulard | 2026-02-08 16:16:58+00:00
There could be factories manufacturing your own design, just one piece. It won't be economical, but can be done. But parts are still the same - chunks and boards of wood joined together by the same few methods. Maybe some other materials thrown into the mix.
With software it is similar: Different products use (mostly) the same building blocks, functions, libraries, drivers, frameworks, design patterns, ux patterns.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-02-08 16:16:59+00:00
Yeah, this my guess as well. The other OSes have the ability to pin to specific cores, but first party Apple leaned hard into coding to that hardware vision. Since Apple would love to merge the desktop and mobile software, being very deliberate about what is background vs foreground work is essential. Windows and Linux have not had the hardware guarantees of differentiating between cores, so few programs have taken the effort to be explicit about how the work is executed.

When I ran Gnome, I was regularly annoyed at how often an indexing service would chew through CPU.
by cat_plus_plus | 2026-02-08 16:17:01+00:00
What are you inputs and outputs? If inputs are zip files and outputs is uncompressed text, don't use an LLM. If inputs are English strings and outputs are localized strings, LLMs are way more accurate than any procedural code you might attempt for the purpose. Plus changing the style of outputs by modifying inputs/weights is also easier, you just need to provide a few thousand samples rather than think of every case. Super relevant for human coding, how many hobbyists or small businesses have teams of linguists on staff?
by xnx | 2026-02-08 16:17:22+00:00
This gets repeated a lot, but is unpersuasive. How much money should a transit system lose? $20 per trip? $40 per trip? There might be mass transit systems that make sense (e.g buses), but most mass transit in the US is terrible quality and a terrible value. One argument is that it's a jobs program for the disadvantaged, but even there we could find a lot of things more useful than moving around empty seats most of the day.

Roads are used and essential to every single person whether they use a car or not. Every single product you consume was transported over roads.

Drivers are the problem, not roads. Drivers kill, maim, pollute, and disturb the peace in ways AVs do not.
by paganel | 2026-02-08 16:17:25+00:00
I’m only familiar with Llama, but as far as I understood it’s in no way at the same level as Claude or Gemini, so in fact you’d still be a lot less productive compared to those using those products directly.

That’s the thing, us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users, but I do agree that that has been changing as of late.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-08 16:17:49+00:00
There isn’t a market. OP wrote that Rabbit R1 post after seeing the release video (according to a comment on this link, their blog post says otherwise) and immediately called it a ”milestone in the evolution of our digital organ”. Their judgement is obviously nonexistent.

Something tells me they never even downloaded OpenClaw before writing this blog post. It’s probably an aspirational vision board type post their life coach told them to write because they kept talking about OepnClaw during their sessions, and the life coach got tired of their BS.
by shash | 2026-02-08 16:17:53+00:00
I think the decline of manual transmission is different from self-driving. Manuals, you could argue are a technological progression that doesn’t change the fundamental economics or sociology of driving. But self-driving has issues far beyond the technology. Like liability, like ownership of vehicles, availability, traffic rules,…

I’m not even sure if, outside of highly mapped environments it even makes sense.