nicksergeant
nicksergeant on Hacker News
Posted by
nicksergeant on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:28PM
from the blog.cloudflare.com dept.
My dream keyboard, if only it could split down the middle for ergonomics :(
I suppose that's also a good point!
Interestingly LLMs are extremely bad at chess position _images_. I have to imagine if you give it positions in text it'd be pretty great but when I was learning chess and pasting images of positions in for analysis I couldn't believe how wrong it was. I actually thought it was looking at the board in reverse but even when pointing out problems it seemed completely incapable of understanding what it was missing (of course... it doesn't really "understand" anything).
LLMs truly are marvels with text but anything spatial seems to really mess it up, somehow.
Posted by
nicksergeant on Thursday June 18, 2026 @08:01AM
from the bloomberg.com dept.
Posted by
nicksergeant on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @04:59PM
from the determinate.systems dept.
Posted by
nicksergeant on Thursday April 16, 2026 @10:18AM
from the quodeq.ai dept.
I'm coming back to Django after a decade of experience with it post-0.96 and having moved to Next.js a few years ago. Going from 1,700 dependencies to 65 total with Django + Wagtail + HTMX.
If you build a house from scratch but you didn't mill the lumber, did you build it from scratch?
If you make a pizza from scratch but you used canned sauce was it from scratch? What if you used store bought dough? What if you made the sauce and the dough but you didn't grow the tomato?
Agree with pretty much everything you wrote here, I guess with the addendum that LLMs can be a part of the learning experience you're describing. It's as easy as telling the LLM "don't write a single line of code nor command, I want to do everything, your goal is to help me understand what we're doing here."
There are always going to be people who just want the end result. The only difference now is that LLM tools allow them to get much closer to the end result than they previously were able to. And on the other side, there are always going to be people who want to _understand_ what's happening, and LLMs can help accelerate that. I use LLMs as a personalized guide to learning new things.
"I mostly don't look at the crap coming out."
This is pretty much my point. I use LLMs to code _and_ to learn. I read everything that comes out. Half of it is wrong or incomplete. The other half saved me a bunch of time and taught me things.
I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past.
I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know existed, writing scripts to churn through tricky data, using specific languages for specific tasks like Go for concurrently working through large numerous tasks, etc.)
Anyone not learning things via LLM coding right now either doesn't care at all about the underlying code/systems, or they had no foundational knowledge or interest in programming to begin with (which is also a valid way to use these tools, but they don't work very well without guidance for too long [yet]).
Ah, thanks! Looks like that was long enough ago that my submission didn't auto-redirect me to the existing conversation (which was what I was trying to do, haha).
Posted by
nicksergeant on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @10:10AM
from the arrow-js.com dept.
I wouldn't let an LLM touch my business's books with a 10 foot pole.
Yeah I think I have the original, and reading this again seems like these new ones are more "touch sensitive". It's a neat idea if they can nail the haptics.
Pretty neat. I have the Clicks keyboard and I just wish the keys weren't so stiff. Too hard to type on, sadly.
Posted by
nicksergeant on Friday January 02, 2026 @10:53AM
from the techcrunch.com dept.
I don't know. I would argue that driving experience and reliability are still very much going to be things in the electric car market. I'm an EV9 owner and we have issues w/ the suspension making it feel sloppy over some bumps. There's going to be a ton of nuance in terms of how all of these different electric vehicles drive, ride, and are experienced. And those are all going to come down to the vehicle manufacturers themselves, not just the technology partner for screens.
Yep. I certainly wanted an R1S, but ended up in an EV9 due to CarPlay plus huge lease incentives. No regrets, and will probably get another after this lease is up.
Meanwhile, the only thing people really want from Rivian is CarPlay / Android Auto support, lol.
It's funny you mention that because the first thing I thought when viewing this page was "is this a loading state? why is everything grey?".
Oh I just pipe the diff into the Claude prompt, so it's only the one call.
Not exclusively - we have a few clients outside of our region, but most of our marketing is centered around local businesses in our area, and probably 80% of our client base are located within a 50 mile radius.
Yep! I built the whole business around slightly higher monthly fees with no (or much lower than typical firms) setup fees. It makes a lot more sense for smaller locally owned businesses.