dpritchett
dpritchett on Hacker News
The author and his cited examples are folks with decades of experience shipping broadly used OSS so for them it’s probably a lot less of an issue to switch languages, even if the agent is papering over a lot of the details for them in the initial releases.
I’ve also found that Claude and friends are eerily good at using classic Unix CLI tools so I build mine in the same style, not unlike the `gh` CLI from GitHub, though with an agent-first design shape.
Usually I’m returning TSV as a default format and I add a `help-all` subcommand to list every available command at once when needed. Another thing that helps is adding just-in-time context-sensitive hints, such as: user has just run a list query with at least one result. Add a one-liner to the response explaining the command shape for getting the detail view of the first response.
In terms of skill files, I like to have my CLI generate them dynamically at runtime by walking their own current command tree and then feeding that through a text template.
Examples from a public project: https://github.com/radiusmethod/gitlab-kiosk/blob/main/skill...
When a whisper-based agent thinks you’ve stopped talking, it will begin its own reply. If you’re younger, you’re more likely to get interrupted by a bot that’s prematurely decided that you’re done speaking.
That is the usual work of high end programmers, right? Growing codebases as consistent, dependable ontologies?
I feel like most mainstream programming languages do this sort of work for their standard libraries and their official docs. Go and Python come to mind, but plenty others do this reasonably well to the point where one mostly doesn’t need to read the implementation code to effectively use the standard library itself.
I imagine they're going for avuncular but a lot of us as adult engineers receive it as patronizing.
Cucumber-style BDD has been trying to do this for a long time now, though I never found it to be super comfortable.
This sounds a whole lot like Pascal's wager (or Roko's basilisk, if you prefer) for trillionaires.
Sound words out at the smallest level. Practice.
Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”.
Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright.
From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.
It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it?
Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.
An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to
demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb.
I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.
If ADHD-oriented media and discussions provide neurodivergent adults a means to work through decades of internalized shame and anxiety, why get in the way of that?
There may never be a perfect taxonomy of programmer archetypes.
I imagine most of us here can agree that some elevate the craft and ritual to great effect while others avoid such high-minded conceits in favor of shipping whatever hits the expected target this week.
I’ve been both at different points in my career. Usually it’s a response to my environment.
Could be an exit strategy… maybe he’s tired of running a social network and wants to help run governments and fly to space like the other guys.
Maybe for some the appeal of JS is in (hopefully) never having to learn Unix?
I’ve heard several folks say that about Kubernetes, but in my experience the *nix core always resurfaces the second things get weird.
Reminds me of using Ruby ten years ago and having to contend with folks who wanted to default to using the string literal style over another because it was known to be more performant at scale. That awkward stuff surfaces earlier with some languages than with others.
I’d been a huge fan of his for a solid decade, but that post was probably the last one of his I’ll ever read.
The deadpan was so good there I had to stop and double check the origins of Markdown just to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years!
The more skilled I become over the decades the more I prefer either Hickey’s hammock-driven development or a simple kanban setup.
Likely so the phone can charge off of a nearby MacBook which has usb C ports.
Can you describe your process? Do you just hand type import-free HTML and rsync it up to a web server?
I’d make so many syntax errors without at least some sort of lint/build step.
That’a a lot to ask of folks who are spending a third of their waking lives on a shared endeavor.
May as well ask family to stop having opinions on my cooking.
Depending on your chess engine (e.g. a physical board) a player could reasonably move many times without stopping to update the diagram. Maybe I forgot. Maybe I was in a hurry due to schedule problems. Maybe the diagram editor was offline for maintenance but the chess engine was still open so we kept on playing.
This might soon prove to be A Problem for folks who reasonably yet erroneously expected that each responsible player would of course update the diagram immediately after each move.
From the go.mod file:
> module humungus.tedunangst.com/r/watc
Implies a “go get” should pick it up. Likely a git clone of that URL would do.
Agreed, if folks don’t finish reading the paper you can’t very well claim to have made the desired impact.
Agreed! I like grpc for the same reason. If I need to work with REST, a schema-first approach is ideal as it means various client, server, validation, and documentation dimensions are in sync by default.
I get why folks often come at it from the other end and just layer some swagger annotations on top of their existing server code — lack of experience, the dynamicist’s mistrust of typing in general, or maybe they’re in a niche stack without a workable binding generator.
Still, it’s better for everyone if the API provider can pull off the artifact-driven approach.
> Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
The years really do fly by. Looked her up and she’s currently a cofounder at a company that sells an iOS contacts app.
I had to mute the word clubhouse on Twitter to keep from getting too cranky about it.
Avoiding VCs and accounts in their orbit helped as well.
Pihole frequently breaks online tv like Disney+ and Hulu when viewed on our Roku TV. Preload trackers or ads get stuck and the show will never start.