AlexMoffat
AlexMoffat on Hacker News
Listen to your customers but ignore what they say. “Treat your customers like a kindergarten class. If they’re all asking for a snack they’re hungry but perhaps they really need a nutritious lunch instead.”
Claude’s prompt heavily pushes it towards grep. We have an internal cross repo semantic search mcp and to get Claude to consistently use it a skill and prompting was not enough. A pre tool use hook is the answer. Claude will even write one for you if you describe the problem to it :)
It's just you. Something about your comment seems AI-generated. See how that works?
I ask it to write a markdown file describing how it should go about performing the task. Then have it read the file next time. Works well for things like creating tests for controller methods where there is a procedure it should follow that was probably developed over a session with several prompts and feedback on its output.
Posted by
AlexMoffat on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @10:22AM
from the self-post dept.
I worry that because generative AI is based on what already exists and is already popular anything new will have lower adoption that it otherwise would. Even if it's an exciting development and offers benefits over what's out there already if Claude or Codex can't write it how successful will it be? If the biggest productivity gain comes from using AI to regenerate what's already popular how...
As for reasons, in the US it's probably related somehow to trying to get in good with the current administration.
The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
The counterpoint is that if you don’t adopt a framework you end up with a “framework” you built yourselves that people outside your team don’t understand, is generally poorly documented and needs constant work to add features existing frameworks already have. There are common features needed on the FE and common problems to solve, why not at least start with something instead of nothing?
The words you're looking for aren't conservative or reactionary they are bigoted and asshole. Best software engineer I've ever worked with is a woman, the rest had exactly the same range of ability as the men. Overall though a much lower level of entitled ignorance than "guys like us".
Can't you, and shouldn't you, just add appropriate comment / annotation to tell the linter to ignore the next line? That way you make it clear to others reading the code that you know what's going on.
The answer is in the article.
How do you square this with your advice to use S3? Apple bad but AWS ok?
Their comment history supports that hypothesis.
A good definition of power is from Hannah Arendt, it's "the ability to coordinate voluntary collective action". If you can do this you have power because you can't coerce everyone at once all the time.
If wishes were horses beggars would ride.
For what possible reason are you asking that question of anyone?
Saving time by not punctuating your comment?
At least none of the top level comments are claiming the invisible hand would solve this if only there were fewer regulations. Better enforcement and more regulations seem from experience to be the only way.
This post angers some people. These people will explode next week as reading the Sparta and Fremen series will show.
Chili pepper consumption in higher in countries with universal health care?
“Treat your users as you would a class of pre-school children. If they’re all screaming for a snack you don’t necessarily give them one, perhaps a healthy lunch would be better for the underlying need.”
"there simply must be more to the story" === "it's in conflict with what I want to believe"
This is not just a straw man it's a straw giant.
Sounds like a reinvention of Lotus Notes with today’s technology.
All the occasions you mention are covered in the blog. The sarin attack is used to demonstrate that even in the best conditions for the attacker they would not be effective in a military sense against modern first tier armies. As a terror weapon yes but the question is why don’t modern militaries plan to use them. It doesn’t rest on perfect efficiency. At this point the US, for example, doesn’t have the quantity needed for battlefield and no procedures for deploying them.
Distillation using benzene. I remember that. Not something anyone is allowed to do now, and rightly so.