jbethune
Cognitive Offloading and the Bill That Comes Due
Re:AirPods 5
on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @09:46PM (#49637304)
I think I'll stick with my pros. Definitely prefer the rubber tips for ear comfort over the plastic on the standard ones.
Re:I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus
on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @09:40PM (#49637247)
Well, not with THAT attitude...
Re:Company Offering '100% Human-Written, Never AI' Medical Research Is...
on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @12:06AM (#49267720)
It's interesting to notice which fields try to garner positive publicity by emphasizing that they DON'T use AI. There is increasing negativity about AI generally but it is quite revealing for an organization to try to make their refusal to use it a big part of their identity. Maybe I can start offering artisanal software development services to go after that sweet hipster dollar - code done 100% by hand, cruelty-free.
Re:Show HN: Verification of Human Understanding of LLM-Generated Work
on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @12:04PM (#48110190)
The SaaS version has a short video demonstrating the UX: https://ninchi.ai
Show HN: Verification of Human Understanding of LLM-Generated Work
https://github.com/jbethune777/ninchi
Built this back in March because of fears my vibe coding was getting away from me. Basically it just analyzes PRs and asks a question to the developer about them to verify understanding. Turned into a larger project with my consulting firm and clients over the last month. Going to leave the original basic implementation open source.
Re:Agentic Coding Is a Trap
on Sunday May 03, 2026 @09:54PM (#48003752)
He's speaking facts. I have had the same concern about excessive cognitive offloading. As others have noted in the comments, AI tools when used correctly, can actually make us smarter and help us learn faster. But that requires a very particular usage pattern that is different from what I see with all the vibe coding going on these days.
I created a project called Ninchi to force myself to read my code and understand it. Recently I began also sharing it to see if there may be a larger need/opportunity. It's a small effort. We need to make a variety of efforts I think to encourage responsible AI usage before we end up drowning in slop.
Re:Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator
on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @12:53AM (#47930571)
Sick. Been meaning to replay Link to the Past.
Re:Men Who Stare at Walls
on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @12:50AM (#47930555)
This is extremely true. The instinct to fill every bit of downtime with a quick bit of doom-scrolling is very hard to kick. It's something I have made a point of working on; giving my mind space to just do nothing and let all sort of mental detritus process itself.
Re:The Beauty of Bonsai Styles
on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @05:00AM (#47846367)
Been living in Japan for a while and have come to appreciate bonsai. There is a lot that goes into it. I love the concept of such an intricate thing being carefully maintained across decades and generations of people.
Re:AI-Assisted Cognition Endangers Human Development
on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @02:51PM (#47783510)
This was a bit word-salad-y but I share the same basic concern. I think more I worry about the tendency toward greater and greater cognitive off-loading to LLMs. My sister told me a story the other day about how she caught her plumber using chatgpt on his phone to fix an issue with her bathroom. I just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff.
Re:Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare
on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @01:50AM (#47761743)
Great work. I like the approach of creating a schema to work with the OpenAPI spec.
Re:Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare
on Monday April 13, 2026 @04:12PM (#47757234)
I would second this. Would be very helpful. Had a fat finger issue a while ago that this would have saved.
Re:Ask HN: Any Interesting Niche Hobbies?
on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @03:30PM (#47695117)
Local urbex and exploration of 'haikyo' areas. Easy for me since I am in Tokyo and it's super walkable. I have taken to just getting on the train and getting off at random stations and walking in a random direction for a couple of kilometers. Every now and then I run into interesting abandoned buildings or neat shrines. Also makes for good exercise.
Re:The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code
on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @03:26PM (#47695055)
Saved. Very useful. Normally I just dig around the Github UI to see what I can glean from contributor graphs and issues but these git commands are a pretty elegant solution as well.
Re:LLM may be standardizing human expression – and subtly influencing ...
on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @11:24AM (#47676822)
Anecdotally I can say this is true both in education and software development. The diversity of approaches and writing styles among junior developers used to be fun to observe and mentor. Now with everyone using AI coding agents there is a same-y-ness to people's work that makes it harder to see what the writer actually knows or doesn't know. A friend of mine who teaches high school English has said the same thing about student work.
Re:Launch HN: Freestyle: Sandboxes for AI Coding Agents
on Monday April 06, 2026 @04:16PM (#47666423)
Congratulations on the launch! Will definitely test this out.
Re:Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb ...
on Monday April 06, 2026 @12:17PM (#47662890)
I think this is a model issue. I have heard similar complaints from team members about Opus. I'm using other models via Cursor and not having problems.
Re:Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work
on Monday April 06, 2026 @12:15PM (#47662856)
Forked. Very cool. I appreciate the simplicity and documentation.
I built a tool that asks developers questions about their own PRs
I’ve been noticing something over the past few months working with engineering teams.With tools like Cursor / Claude, it’s become very easy to ship code quickly — which is great — but I’ve also started seeing PRs where the author can’t really explain what’s going on in their own changes.Not always, but often enough that it made me concerned.I’m not against AI here, I use these tools constantly...
Re:Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers
on Friday March 20, 2026 @05:01AM (#47452131)
This is super cool. Wish I had this back in my sysadmin days.
Re:What is agentic engineering?
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @10:25PM (#47394459)
I think there is a meaningful distinction here. It's true that writing code has never been the sole work of a software engineer. However there is a qualitative difference between an engineer producing the code themselves and an engineer managing code generated by an LLM. When he writes there is "so much stuff" for humans to do outside of writing code I generally agree and would sum it up with one word: Accountability. Humans have to be accountable for that code in a lot of ways because ultimately accountability is something AI agents generally lack.