Ask HN: What agent skills are necessary?
I’m an old school dev that has done minimal development assisted by an LLM. I’m interested in giving it a try but don’t know where to start. What skills are necessary or useful when starting out?
justchad
Re:SlopTV: A livestream of AI slop generated from comments, Minimax H3...
on Monday August 31, 2026 @02:52PM (#49513439)
Is this just infiniteslop.ai just on YouTube?
Re:What tech stack do your YC (or non-YC) startups use?
on Monday August 31, 2026 @11:41AM (#49511090)
Ruby on Rails: it's scalable, token efficient, and beautiful to use when you need to write your own code.
Re:Caltrans explores 140mph 'bullet buses' between L.A. and San Francisco
on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @10:23AM (#48193698)
Haven't they spend over $100 billion on a train and have yet to lay track? What makes people think they would ever complete this?
Re:Show HN: PreflightAPI – US airports, weather, NOTAMs and more via o...
on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @08:43PM (#47241913)
Cool product potentially but the landing page jumps all around when the animations at the top are scrolling through the different examples.
Ask HN: SWE to CAD Career Switch
I have been a software engineer for about 15 years and am kind of burnt out. Thinking about switching industries and am curious if anyone has made the switch to a CAD Drafting role? If so how was it, did your background in SWE help with the transition? Just exploring my options at the moment so open to other fields as well if you have any ideas.
Re:Ask HN: Burned out from tech, what else is there?
on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @01:49PM (#46696113)
I’m in a similar situation. I decided after a decade to quit my job and take some time off. I might work on my own company or switch careers entirely. I’ve thought about using the time by going back to school for networking.
Re:Ask HN: Do people splurge when they are unhappy in a high paying job?
on Monday January 05, 2026 @08:57PM (#46507841)
I know I did. I always looked for random things to buy even though I hate owning things.
Re:You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
on Sunday December 21, 2025 @02:16PM (#46347415)
Thanks, I might take you up on that. I’ve mainly been in the work, kids, sleep loop the past decade so I need to find some hobbies and passion projects to work on.
Re:You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
on Sunday December 21, 2025 @01:44PM (#46347122)
This resonates with me right now. I helped build a unicorn startup over the last 10 years but feel empty and burnt out when I’m working now. I feel like I’m wasting my time in exchange for a paycheck. I recently turned in my notice, I’m going on sabbatical. I’m hoping to find my passion and follow that. Finding that is something I’m struggling with though. Anyways, great article!
Re:Ask HN: How difficult will resuming a SWE career be after a sabbati...
on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @12:44PM (#46207971)
That’s a great point about the frontend complexity. Picking it up now is more difficult overall but at least most of the complexity has been decided on and “stabilized” as much as possible.
Ask HN: How difficult will resuming a SWE career be after a sabbatical?
I am at a crossroads, and I'm thinking about taking some extended time off for a sabbatical for like a year or so. I want to know if that will hurt my chances of resuming a career as a software engineer since things are changing so rapidly with AI. For context, I am a Founding Engineer of a successful startup. I have been an engineer for 15 years and plan to continue writing software while on...
Re:OpenAI Signs $38B Cloud Computing Deal with Amazon
on Monday November 03, 2025 @11:19AM (#45800713)
Came to post something with a similar sentiment. It's going to have broad market effects when the circle dealing doesn't work out as intended. OpenAI is losing so much money every quarter that they will undoubtedly have to raise prices I would think and people may not be willing to pay them.
Re:OpenAI Valuation Reaches $500B, Topping Musk's SpaceX
on Thursday October 02, 2025 @01:40PM (#45452863)
That may be but if I could buy stock in either of those two I would definitely prefer SpaceX.
Re:Ask HN: How Do I Get over My Existential Crisis?
on Sunday September 28, 2025 @01:12PM (#45406012)
Have you thought about starting a company? It’s never been easier to start a company for engineers. Granted you need to have a problem to solve but those can be found.
Re:Ask HN: What is the perfect tech stack for web development?
on Wednesday September 24, 2025 @03:57PM (#45365256)
The one you know /s
I love Rails and usually just stick with that since it’s fast to build out features. Laravel would be another in the same vein.
Re:Launch HN: Strata (YC X25) – One MCP server for AI to handle thousa...
on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @11:31AM (#45348459)
This looks very relevant and useful to what I'm working on at the moment. The LLM gets lost in all of the tools we provide for certain actions.
Re:Launch HN: A0.dev (YC W25) – React Native App Generator
on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:26PM (#43017157)
Cursor is quite a bit better as well at not adding erroneous code. Was testing a0 and it kept getting stuck in endless loops of errors. I'm sure they'll improve but it's pretty rough right now.
Re:Illustrating a UI-Less Future with Claude
on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @01:26PM (#42783572)
In Key Takeaways the first bullet increments every second for how much faster AI is than traditional navigation. Not sure if you knew that or not. The execution time also never stops incrementing.
Re:Ask HN: What's Your Morning Routine?
on Monday December 30, 2024 @11:12AM (#42550597)
Wake up, get ready, drink coffee, go to work. I wake up about 8:30 and start work at 9.
Re:Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
on Tuesday December 24, 2024 @10:39AM (#42502571)
I use an app called Dash from Kapelli to access documentation for classes and methods. It’s a game changer, even if using a LSP. I do use copilot though.
Re:Launch HN: FlyCode (YC S22) – Stop losing revenue due to failed pay...
on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @12:56PM (#41997433)
Profitwell does a version of this and they charge a percentage of the recovered funds.
Ask HN: What are the best resources for SWE to PM transition?
I am a software engineer with nearly 15 YOE and as I progressed I have been drawn more and more towards product. I am interested in transitioning to the PM role at a startup but would like to be setup for success upon doing so. What classes, books, courses, etc would you recommend to someone with my background?
Re:Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?
on Sunday October 06, 2024 @12:48PM (#41758384)
Came to say The Selfish Gene for nonfiction. Changed the way I thought about things.
How long is long enough to recover from burnout?
I've been the Founding Engineer of a startup for almost 9 years. Over the course of 9 years I have become extremely burnt out for a variety of reasons. I can't exactly quit the company and don't really want to, but I need to figure out how to recover from burnout. It's affecting my home life, happiness, anxiety, nearly everything. It's to the point where I don't feel capable as a developer...
Re:Launch HN: Slauth (YC S22) – auto-generate secure IAM policies for ...
on Monday December 04, 2023 @09:12AM (#38517424)
I imagine there will be times where the LLM hallucinates or gives too many permissions. I'm sure it is still better than the try and see approach that most humans take when it comes to IAM setup. I'm just wondering if this product becomes irrelevant as Amazon Q rolls out and probably has some of this functionality baked in.
Regardless, anything to make IAM provisioning easier is worth a go as long as you verify the results using a simulator or something.
Re:Ask HN: What is your favorite FOSS WYSIWYG editor?
on Sunday October 22, 2023 @11:13AM (#37976061)
I love TipTap, easy to use and setup even with Rails. I wrote an internal gem (that I should publish) where I can generate TipTap document JSON/HTML from the Rails side of things as well.
Re:BlockSuite: An open-source Notion-like editor with multiplayer support
on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @10:08AM (#36506733)
Looks pretty cool. I noticed a few issues when playing with the Playground like if you do a slash command and select one of the items such as entering "to" and then selecting "Today" it shows the date with "to" as the prefix. Overall a cool project though!
Re:What Is a Vector Database
on Friday May 05, 2023 @10:12AM (#35829479)
I'm bullish on pgvector as well. Now that RDS supports it as well as plenty of other cloud providers it seems like a no-brainer to be able to stick with your existing stack (assuming it's postgres). Andrew Kane is such a prolific open-source maintainer as well.
Transitioning from Software Engineer to PM?
I am currently the CTO of a mid-size company (200+ people) and am getting burnt out on engineering. I am interested in transitioning from engineering to product management at some point in the future.I would like to hear from other engineers that have made the transition to learn more about how it went and how you landed your first gig.