sltr

Related question: Why is it so expensive to send (or charge) money? At least in the US

Gleam is my new default language and ecosystem. Until last year, I first reached for .NET on new projects. ".NET everywhere" and such. But Blazor apps are huge and slow. These days I often advocate first for Gleam. With Lustre and Tauri it can run anywhere.

Detailed, technical articles appreciated. LLM prose, not.

Agree. A whole tree of comments agreeing with you is not appearing on this post because that's how HN works.

I loathe LLM prose, no matter who posts it. It earns a quick cmd+w.

My prizes for spending the internet points to say this are the joy of resisting normalization of illiteracy and a tacit camaraderie with the hundreds of others who agree but won't comment or upvote.

Backing you up on this. I smelled LLM and hit cmd+w.

Experienced distance runner here. This is not new or mysterious.

> Overtraining Syndrome is where a lack of recovery from training stress results in underperformance, often combined with Mood Disturbances such as reduced Motivation, depression and anxiety

https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Overtraining_Syndrome

Reminds me of "Appeal to Aithority"

> The LLMs says this, so it must be right.

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/

I am also worried about "cognitive debt". I hardly remember what I had Claude do, even hours later. Back in May, I advised of a similar mitigation, citing the "generation effect" as the reason typing the code would make you remember it better:

> For your next ticket or feature, engage with your LLM as you normally would to produce a design and implementation plan, but with that plan in hand, make the mechanical edits yourself...You can expect this to improve your knowledge retention compared to merely reading a diff. You want to go slower now so that later you can go at all.

https://www.slater.dev/2026/05/type-your-code/

Thanks for catching that. Updated my post

It's been on HN for 45 minutes. It's before 9am on the west coast

the punchline: "Refactoring reduces token consumption"

I appreciate the effort to quantify the benefit rather than pontificate. It's worth mentioning Martin Fowler wrote a whole book on refactoring [1], in which he states, "to refactor, the essential precondition is [...] solid tests", which I think is the real benefit here, AI or not. Good tests protect against regressions, whether human or robot. They also help encode the spec, which humans and robots can read.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/refactoring-improving-t...

that's the real tragedy here

can we go after the real perp now?

Fair that motivated reasoning could be at play. Rob's audience is SaaS founders, but whether his listeners remain engaged and his sales funnel full does not influence how genai affects their businesses, and being duplicitous doesn't fit with his character.

The episode was worth my time.

Three days ago, Rob Walling (SaaS investor) refuted pretty convincingly the claim that genai kills SaaS. His life mission and wealth are bound up in SaaS. If he's not scared, nobody should be.

https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...

Since 2002 Richard Stallman has spoken again using term "content" this way.

> using the word as a noun to describe works and communications through which people have expressed themselves adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages all the works by subordinating them to the box that is full.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content

This is the right thing to do

That's an interesting argument. In construction, the larger a project, the more justifiable it is to invest in quality. Is it different than software? I think a better argument against licensure is that it makes small projects too expensive, but I disagree. It shifts not the overall cost, but when cost is paid: "The upfront cost will increase, but a long tail of costs stemming from quality issues will decrease."

I worked for 10 years in medical devices. QMS was business as usual. I think large software projects with millions budgeted should have them. But the difference between a QMS and licensure is a person's signature and their personal commitment to a statement of ethics as well as their accountability and ability to appeal to a professional organization.

I'm glad you mentioned downward market pressure on quality. I agree that is an issue. That's why I advocate for licensure of software engineering professionals, which exerts a counteracting force back up.

https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/its-time-to-license-software-...

It's kind of like the saying "the right note played at the wrong time is wrong." An implementation that works today but could break in the future is wrong. I'm not willing to treat an LLM as an oracle that knows the difference. It certainly hasn't earned that trust.

from the post:

> It was reasonable to be skeptical the first time

It's still reasonable to be skeptical. A few weeks ago a post was discussed here on HN [1] that asked:

> What would have to be true for us to ‘check English into the repository’ instead of code?

to which I replied:

> Code is already the cheapest path to working, correct software. LLMs do not change the calculus because figuring out what to make is the expensive part, not coding it up. Skipping code makes the specification of what to make even more expensive and throws away the tools that keep precision affordable. Programming in English would be more expensive than just using a programming language. [2]

[1] https://annievella.com/posts/finding-comfort-in-the-uncertai...

[2] https://www.slater.dev/2026/05/why-english-will-never-be-a-p...

"when you're looking for things, you find them" - my physician explaining excessive reliance on diagnostic imaging

The job when picking up a codebase made by human or machine always involves reverse-engineering the design intent from code. That's especially hard for LLM-generated code because the path to runtime was so rushed.

> It's more expensive to fix code at runtime than at compile time and at compile time than at design time. Unfortunately, AI rushes people to runtime as fast as possible.

https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/about-that-gig-fixing-vibe-co...

Sorry about the infelicitious timbre. Nope, I'm just a happy customer.

I'm Doug, quoted above. I took Jimmy's excellent course, and when I learned about Command Center, I subbed immediately. I wasn't disappointed. It's a bit like turning your LLM into a graduate of that course.