Hacker News: ChicagoDave

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

ChicagoDave — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:25:17 +0000

The interactive fiction community seems to have a subset of hardcore anti AI hobbyists. Partly at stolen artistic IP, but also the coding half of text adventures is viewed as art just as much as the story and writing.

I’ve selected a path where I think building tools with AI is fine. But I want people to play my games knowing I created all of it.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

ChicagoDave — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:56:08 +0000

https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2026/04/07/harness-en...

https://loiane.com/2026/04/harness-engineering-missing-layer...

https://devarch.ai/

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

ChicagoDave — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:37:54 +0000

There’s a small group of established architects talking about harness engineering, but I’m not sure anyone is actually listening to them.

And those same architects are quietly extracting real productivity from GenAI.

And even this write up skips that info by waving, “Some people…”

New comment by ChicagoDave in "How much can you delegate to agents?"

ChicagoDave — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 23:50:16 +0000

I work on my MacBook in direct terminal sessions or in a container with no safeguards.

I save the container for well-planned units of work that can easily be repeated and validated on a branch.

I use direct sessions when I expect and the plan dictates that Claude might go off target and I need to hold the steering wheel.

Fable has increased my use of the container option.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world"

ChicagoDave — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 23:42:13 +0000

GitHub is fine. The thing that’s changed is that we’re unlikely to need large teams anymore. Merging code will be easier and if planned properly (using AI planning skills), the work can be broken up with clear boundaries.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Introduction to Data-Oriented Design [pdf]"

ChicagoDave — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:57:32 +0000

Domains should own their data and some data objects can be split between domains.

Data first is fine for simple systems, but lead to chaos for complex systems.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)"

ChicagoDave — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:37:30 +0000

I’ve been postulating that knowledge of old school principles like Method One along with test driven development and domain-driven design are the external factors allowing a subset of teams to succeed.

Absent those skills, the agile movement is flailing with GenAI.

Chord Version 1 – A new IF modeling language for parser web games

ChicagoDave — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 02:59:11 +0000

Article URL: https://sharpee.plover.net/chord-version-1/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030762

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ChicagoDave in "I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI"

ChicagoDave — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:50:34 +0000

That study…I would have agreed with the group at that time. Up until December, I was vocally skeptical that GenAI could be used for anything more complex than a “departmental” app.

Opus and similar models completely invalidated that skepticism, especially when context windows increased.

In the last two weeks I designed and deployed a new programming language that compiles in a browser. Impossible in the before times.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "I think you might be fooling yourself with AI"

ChicagoDave — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:54:38 +0000

These people keep citing that survey from 2025.

That kills all arguments from the article instantly.

December 2025 through today GenAI has become massively better. I’ve built things with Claude in contracted spans of time that would have been man-years in the before times.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "John C. Dvorak has died"

ChicagoDave — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:31:06 +0000

I discovered Visual Basic 1.0 from his back page Info World column. Still have the manuals and floppy disks.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Towards a harness that can do anything"

ChicagoDave — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:09:57 +0000

It adheres to the full scope of skills, agents, and my custom gates. I’d hate Claude without it.

https://devarch.ai/.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Towards a harness that can do anything"

ChicagoDave — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:00:49 +0000

I think domain specific harnesses are already surpassing generic harnesses. I also think software development is its own domain.

My harness is a Claude Code plugin with its own brainstorming, adr, and planning skills with associated review and interview skills. Behavioral testing related to acceptance criteria is built in. Everything in my harness is gated to prevent ratholes.

I recently inflated a docker container to execute a set of work with Claude in unsafe mode and immediately saw problems with everything it was doing…and then I realized I had not installed my harness.

Running Claude without an engineering harness is like driving a car without brakes or a steering wheel.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says"

ChicagoDave — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:20:22 +0000

I’m still amused at how many people will lick the boots of any oligarch/startup toad.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "YouTrackDB is a general-use object-oriented graph database"

ChicagoDave — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:41:25 +0000

I played around with Neo4j and only ever found two domains where it excelled.

- custom app security

- social media

I also think cypher is a brilliant way to query a graph.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says"

ChicagoDave — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:31:41 +0000

Does anyone at OpenAI know how to run a business?

New comment by ChicagoDave in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

ChicagoDave — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:29:01 +0000

Shipped version 2.2 of my Interactive Fiction platform Sharpee with Phrase Algebra.

Designing a new DSL (Chord) that compiles to Sharpee (Typescript).

https://sharpee.plover.net/

New comment by ChicagoDave in "I love LLMs, I hate hype"

ChicagoDave — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:24:09 +0000

A lot of people died from Covid and if not for mRNA technology and extraordinary caregivers a lot more deaths would have occurred. That’s hype where it truly belongs. Don’t mix AI hype with Covid conspiracy theories.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

ChicagoDave — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:21:35 +0000

They are also the most expensive operational data stores and the younglings know almost no SQL or set theory.

Schema management is the single worst part of deployments.

If I build on DynamoDB vs RDS I can save 10x.

New comment by ChicagoDave in "What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?"

ChicagoDave — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:49:52 +0000

I extracted my books from my kindle over a year ago. Never buying books from Amazon again. EPUB on iOS works great.