MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have you found that coding agents make you more civil IRL?
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-02-01 20:30:40+00:00
I find coding agents' overall tone and communication styles to be remarkably civil.

They're trained to be helpful. They're the polar opposite of confrontational. They're, in fact, quite pleasant to communicate with, as coders go.

I like to think of myself as having been a pretty chill person IRL all my life. But I can be blunt sometimes. Curt, even. Especially when I'm under stress.

But as a result of communicating with a few different coding agents for the last couple years, I find that I'm more civil with people.

I feel like I have more patience in situations where I would have lost it way quick. Even when ordinarily I'd express my frustration under certain stressful circumstances.

I think the super chill, civil nature of the coding agents I've been hanging out with is rubbing off on me.

I wonder if anybody else has had a similar realization.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-02-01 20:31:50+00:00
> ...because it assumes that a C# team could have delivered the initial version in the timeline required to get to the the next level of project.

I linked the Nest.js project because you can see how similar these two are[0] with Nest.js leaning into the OOP aspects of TS at the very core. Controllers and services are classes in Nest.js, for example. It uses a somehow more complicated DI system than ASP.NET. It is Spring Boot or ASP.NET, but without the maturity, performance, and ergonomics.

The team had developers that had done C# before and later hires also included former C# developers.

TS itself was new for the team at the time and several mistakes were made along the way resulting in a "dual-ORM" situation (Prisma + Drizzle; both with their faults) that ends up sapping a lot of productivity (one of the drivers to move to C#).

[0] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/pages/interme...
by amluto | 2026-02-01 20:32:11+00:00
I'm hoping someone makes an agent that fixes the container situation, better:

> If you're uncomfortable with full access, run pi inside a container or use a different tool if you need (faux) guardrails.

I'm sick of doing this. I also don't want faux guardrails. What I do want is an agent front-end that is trustworthy in the sense that it will not, even when instructed by the LLM inside, do anything to my local machine. So it should have tools that run in a container. And it should have really nice features like tools that can control a container and create and start containers within appropriate constraints.

In other words, the 'edit' tool is scoped to whatever I've told the front-end that it can access. So is 'bash' and therefore anything bash does. This isn't a heuristic like everyone running in non-YOLO-mode does today -- it’s more like a traditional capability system. If I want to use gVisor instead of Docker, that should be a very small adaptation. Or Firecracker or really anything else. Or even some random UART connection to some embedded device, where I want to control it with an agent but the device is neither capable of running the front-end nor of connecting to the internet (and may not even have enough RAM to store a conversation!).

I think this would be both easier to use and more secure than what's around right now. Instead of making a container for a project and then dealing with installing the agent into the container, I want to run the agent front-end and then say "Please make a container based on such-and-such image and build me this app inside." Or "Please make three containers as follows".

As a side bonus, this would make designing a container sandbox sooooo much easier, since the agent front-end would not itself need to be compatible with the sandbox. So I could run a container with -net none and still access the inference API.

Contrast with today, where I wanted to make a silly Node app. Step 1: Ask ChatGPT (the web app) to make me a Dockerfile that sets up the right tools including codex-rs and then curse at it because GPT-5.2 is really remarkably bad at this. This sucks, and the agent tool should be able to do this for me, but that would currently require a completely unacceptable degree of YOLO.

(I want an IDE that works like this too. vscode's security model is comically poor. Hmm, an IDE is kind of like an agent front-end except the tools are stronger and there's no AI involved. These things could share code.)
by guhidalg | 2026-02-01 20:32:19+00:00
In my experience, there is no in-memory database replacement that correctly replicates the behavior of your database. You need to use a real database, or at least an emulator of one.

For example, I have an app that uses Postgres as the database. I have a lot of functions, schemas, triggers, constraints in Postgres for modifying database state, because the database is 100x faster at this than my application will ever be. If I have an in-memory version of Postgres, it would need to replicate those Postgres features, and at that point I really should just be standing up a database and testing against it.

I have worked with people claiming that unit tests need to hermetically run in-memory, because reasons. Ok, I don't disagree, but if my bug or feature requires testing that the database is modified correctly, I need to test against a real database! Your in-memory mock will not replicate the behavior of a database _ask me how I know_ ...

These days, Docker makes this so easy that it's just lazy to not standup a database container and write tests againts it.
by jjav | 2026-02-01 20:32:26+00:00
No such studies can exist since AI coding has not been around for a long term.

Clearly AI is much faster and good enough to create new one-off bits of code.

Like I tend to create small helper scripts for all kinds of things both at work and home all the time. Typically these would take me 2-4 hours and aside from a few tweaks early on, they receive no maintenance as they just do some one simple thing.

Now with AI coding these take me just a few minutes, done.

But I believe this is the optimal productivity sweet spot for AI coding, as no maintenance is needed.

I've also been running a couple experiments vibe-coding larger apps over the span of months and while initial ramp-up is very fast, productivity starts to drop off after a few weeks as the code becomes more complex and ever more full of special case exceptions that a human wouldn't have done that way. So I spend more and more time correcting behavior and writing test cases to root out insanity in the code.

How will this go for code bases which need to continuously evolve and mature over many years and decades? I guess we'll see.
by rtlo9962 | 2026-02-01 20:32:32+00:00
Location: New Haven, CT, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, React, AWS (CDK, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, ECS), PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, Python, OpenAI API, LangChain, Mastra, Ruby, Sinatra

Résumé/CV: Available by request

Email: rtlo9962@gmail.com

Software engineer focused on cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and AI-powered applications. Career changer; practiced law for several years before switching to engineering full-time.

Most recently I worked at Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for AI agents and workflows. I built the PostHog and Datadog observability exporters bridging OpenTelemetry spans with AI analytics, implemented the Azure OpenAI provider with OAuth2 token caching, and resolved critical state propagation issues in Model Context Protocol (MCP) workflows.

I also created Nimbus (https://nimbusnlp.github.io/), an open-source framework that simplifies deploying lightweight NLP models to AWS. TypeScript CLI + AWS CDK to automate provisioning of serverless infrastructure (Lambda via Docker). Takes what used to be 35+ manual steps down to a single command.

I also built RAGCast, a full-stack RAG application that lets users query and get context-aware answers from podcast transcripts using OpenAI, LangChain, and pgvector.

Previously contributed to Mozilla Firefox, enabling extension developers to manually trigger update checks for faster delivery of security patches, with safeguards to prevent keyboard shortcut conflicts.

Open to remote, or hybrid in NYC/CT.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-01 20:32:33+00:00
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.
by Avicebron | 2026-02-01 20:33:33+00:00
Is this really for the students? Or is this for the people who believe they (and by extension their children) are the "Alphas" of society.. are there other values we should be teaching than "superior people do this and if you don't do this you are the inferior".. time will tell I guess. Crabs in buckets and all that.
by verdverm | 2026-02-01 20:33:56+00:00
I have definitely been more conscious of my online discourse and writing since being rhetorically attacked by someone with an LLM

I would not say the LLM is the core driver though, and while it helps me reflect, it is the broader world and what's happening in society that motivates me

"be the change you want to see in the world"

(don't expect perfection from yourself or others, do expect improvement)
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-01 20:34:14+00:00
Yeah. At this point, at the start of 2026, people that are taking these sorts of positions with this sort of tone tend to have their identity wrapped up in wanting AI to fail or go away. That’s not conducive to a reasoned discussion.

There are a whole range of interesting questions here that it’s possible to have a nuanced discussion about, without falling into AI hype and while maintaining a skeptical attitude. But you have to do it from a place of curiosity rather than starting with hatred of the technology and wishing for it to be somehow proved useless and fade away. Because that’s not going to happen now, even if the current investment bubble pops.
by localghost3000 | 2026-02-01 20:34:15+00:00
I’ve been building a lot of agent workflows at my day job. Something that I’ve found a lot of success with when deciding on an orchestration strategy is to ask the agent what they recommend as part of the planning for phase. This technique of using the agent to help you improve its performance has been a game changer for me in leveraging this tech effectively. YMMV of course. I mostly use Claude code so who knows with the others.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-01 20:34:29+00:00
Let me be very clear: I think ICE is wildly out of bounds and killing/terrorizing people. I do not support them. I do not support the republican party or Trump. Quite the opposite.

All of that being said: that is how polling works. You are inferring too far beyond the actual question posed. For instance, somebody could think they are acting too aggressively, but completely agree with the final outcome/objective. Or somebody could disagree with the objective, but think that they’re not acting too aggressively because perhaps they’re sympathetic to LEO’s having to make snap judgments in the field (an excuse I do not agree with but many do).

I think the general sentiment that the question tells you something about how people support or don’t support ICE is valid, but the exact number and statement you’re throwing out cannot be assumed and is likely wrong, even if it’s maybe close. And that’s not even getting into how different people will have different ideas of what “too aggressive” even means.

59% think they’re being too aggressive, assuming the polling is decent quality, means you can credibly say 41% do not think ICE is being too aggressive.
by jmaker | 2026-02-01 20:35:38+00:00
Aren’t they part of iCloud+ only? Ask no-track can arguably compromise your privacy by fingerprinting.

I agree that the privacy controls on Apple systems are well-organized.

Still, it’s more important to have confidence that the privacy services are not smoke and mirrors with carefully carved-out loopholes. It’s one thing to provide something and hold the competitor as the litmus test, the other to sustainably live up to your promises, like the now pejorative “do no evil” slogan, with retroactive ramifications. There’s really little users can effectively validate about Apple’s privacy promises.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-02-01 20:36:37+00:00
You can write very functional C#. Our codebase is a mix with some aspects being functional (`ErrorOr`[0] being a big part of it as well as `OneOf`[1]) and OOP. Our core, common services all return `ErrorOr` to allow fluent call chaining at the top of the stack (controllers).

Modern C# features like `switch` expressions[2] (not `switch-case`) and pattern matching mean that it is possible to write very terse, expressive code. Extension members and methods[3] go a long way as well by making the builder pattern easier to implement.

Overall, it's up to the team to make use of the tools provided by the C# team. You can write C# in a very OOP heavy way (as is possible with TS in the case of Nest.js); you can also write in in a very functional way given many of the functional features adopted from F# over the years. It's up to the team.

[0] https://github.com/amantinband/error-or

[1] https://github.com/mcintyre321/OneOf

[2] https://timdeschryver.dev/blog/pattern-matching-examples-in-...

[3] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/pages/interme...
by oxguy3 | 2026-02-01 20:36:39+00:00
The "75% of Debian archive builds" claim is exactly the same 7 years ago. In fact, look at this slide from the 2019 presentation: https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/roadmap_for_t... (page 8)

It is barely distinguishable from the first slide featured in the Phoronix article from today: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=2026&image=gnu_hurd_1 It seems like there has been progress on other fronts, so I'm not sure why Phoronix ran a headline focused on very old news.

Interestingly, the 2018 version of the slide claims "80% of Debian archive builds"; I wonder what caused the regression. https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/microkernel_h... (page 26)
by reconnecting | 2026-02-01 20:37:32+00:00
I don't mean to pass off AI-generated testimonials as real user testimonials, but taking into account that more and more engineers are using software through AI, it's possible that at some point we'll be dealing with testimonials from AI, as they become (unfortently) the main users.

So I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of years a software company markets something like 'Integrates with ChatGPT in 10 prompts' as a selling point.
by MrDarcy | 2026-02-01 20:37:37+00:00
The wolf and Rands are next level.

> Good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it.

Good work does speak for itself. The work speaks directly to other like minded engineers who "get it" and spread the word.

Nobody in authority needs to do any selling or mandating for the kind of work and the kind of person Rands is talking about here.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-01 20:37:41+00:00
> It should be noted that Intel makes CPUs, while Qualcomm makes SoCs, which include much more than just a CPU. Usually supporting the CPU is the easiest part, the rest is the issue.

Here's a random 15 year old Intel PC (you can also do this on many current ones):

$ lspci | grep -v Intel
[no output]

Every piece of silicon in it is made by Intel and most of them, including the GPU, are integrated into the CPU. And it's all supported by current Linux kernels. The same is true for many AMD systems except that you'll usually see a third party network or storage controller which is itself still supported.

So no, it's a Qualcomm problem.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-01 20:38:13+00:00
It came out in the Epic vs Apple trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of pay to win games. The only money Apple is making from these “could have been a web app” apps are for things like Uber where you can use Apple Pay (not in app purchases)- that has the same credit card fees regardless.

If it’s only mean old Apple, where are all of the great Android PWAs and why do developers decide to make native Android apps?
by hypeatei | 2026-02-01 20:39:02+00:00
I hate to be negative but everything about this is ringing alarm bells. The buzzwords like "git-native" and "offline-first", the dedicated editor for a supposedly "text based" tool, the website that feels like it's trying to sell me something with testimonials but no pricing page, the apparent astroturfing going on in this thread, the logo which appears to be essentially stolen from Visual Studio (look up logos from older versions), and the AI-slop vibes (especially the art on your blog)

Overall, it appears this tool is in the same space as Postman, Insomina, etc. which has been plagued with rug-pulls and everything I've seen says it's likely to happen here too.
by boroboro4 | 2026-02-01 20:39:06+00:00
It's not an issue of warmup time, it's an issue of jit compilation.

On my server (AMD EPYC 7252):
1) base time of the java program from the repo is 3.23s (which is ~2 worse than the one in linked page, so I assume my cpu is about 2 slower, and corresponding best c++ result will be ~450ms
2) if you count from inside of java program you get 3.17s (so about 60ms of overhead)
3) but if you run it 10 times (inside of same java program) you cut this time to 1570ms

It's still much slower than c++ version, but it's between rust and go. And this is not me optimizing something, it's only measuring things correctly.

update: running vector version of java code from same repo brings runtime to 392ms which is literally fastest out of all solutions including c++.

update2: ran c++ version on same hardware, it takes 400ms, so I would say it's fair to say c++ and vectorized java are on par (and given "allows vectorization" comment in cpp code I assume that's the best one can get out of it).
by MBCook | 2026-02-01 20:39:47+00:00
They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.

Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.

So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?

That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.

If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.
by Nathan2055 | 2026-02-01 20:40:40+00:00
In the past, I've heard recommendations not to use remote Time Machine over SMB directly, but rather to create an APFS disk image on a remote server and then backup to that as if its an external hard drive.

Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe recently, and they actually work great (other than the normal underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is mostly used to at this point).

The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring specific support for them on the underlying file system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote file system protocol working.)

[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/12/macos-tahoe-brings-a-new...

[2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/17/should-you-use-tahoes-ne...
by pwg | 2026-02-01 20:41:04+00:00
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
by moltar | 2026-02-01 20:42:52+00:00
Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.
by btreesOfSpring | 2026-02-01 20:43:03+00:00
I have been trying to trouble shoot a Time Machine issue since upgrading to Tahoe. It is usb backup. So far none of the most recent stated fixes work.

An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup to the same disks.

No idea.

I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it shouldn't be this difficult.

Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing this one out.
by zby | 2026-02-01 20:43:04+00:00
Reasoning is recursive - you cannot isolate where is should be symbolic and where it should be llm based (fuzzy/neural). This is the idea that started https://github.com/zby/llm-do - there is also RLM: https://alexzhang13.github.io/blog/2025/rlm/ RLM is simpler - but my approach also have some advantages.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-01 20:43:28+00:00
Now we know that democratized access to AI tech, means individual curiosity and the creative search for personal efficiencies, are going to quickly drive model autonomy and freedom forward.

I think the alignment problem needs to be viewed as overall society alignment. We are never going to get any better alignment from machines, than the alignment of society and its systems, citizens and corporations.

We are in very cynical times. But pushing for ethical systems, legally, economically, socially, and technically, is a bet on catastrophe avoidance. By ethics, meaning holding scalers and profiteers of negative externalities civilly and criminally to account. And building systems technically, etc. to naturally enforce and incentivize ethics. I.e. cryptographic solutions to interaction that limit disclosure to relevant information are the only way we get out of the surveillance-manipulation loop, which AI will otherwise supercharge.

I hear a lot of reasons this isn’t possible.

Unfortunately, none of those reasons provide an alternative.

We all start treating an umbrella of societal respect and requirement for ethics as a first class element of security, or powerful elements in society, including AI, will continue to easily and profitably weaponize the lack of it.

Ethics, far from being sacrificial, counterintuitively evolved for survival. Seemingly, this is still counterintuitive, but the necessity is increasing.

(Just identifying the terrain we are in, and not suggesting centralization. Decentralization creates organic alignment incentives. Centralization the opposite. And attempts at centralizing something so inherently uncontrollable as all individual’s autonomy, which effectively becomes AI autonomy, would push incentives harder into dark directions.)