Hacker News: ManuelKiessling

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

ManuelKiessling — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:53:34 +0000

If you cannot be bothered with learning our language, and think that being rich somehow makes our country owe you its citizenship — then yeah, maybe Germany isn’t for you.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Fast Software, the Best Software (2019)"

ManuelKiessling — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 10:36:34 +0000

The article is from 2019.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Reflections on software engineering in the age of AI"

ManuelKiessling — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:28:22 +0000

This is half question, half thought experiment: What exactly is it that makes us think „great, I can delegate coding to the agent, and focus on architecture myself“, instead of „great, I can delegate coding to the agent, and I can delegate architecture to the agent, and I can focus on myself“?

And how many levels up can you construct this sentence before things go south?

What I‘m implying with this question is, of course: What makes us so confident that these things are not also better architects than us?

After all there is a huge corpus on how to architect applications correctly, and that’s in the training data just as much as Python best practices and C++ style recommendations.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids"

ManuelKiessling — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:56:08 +0000

It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter).

Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

ManuelKiessling — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:34:36 +0000

I fully agree with the „AI demands more engineering discipline“ premise.

And I‘ve quickly realized that it’s also much easier to follow that premise.

Not only because agents obviously help with writing documentation, test cases, DX tools, and so on.

But also because it feels so much more rewarding to know that someone — even if it’s just a soulless agent — actually cares to read and use and follow these.

I have always been the guy on the team who would write the tools and documentation, and it’s always been a bit frustrating to know that only half the team would care to read and use and follow them, at best.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Software Architecture Guide (2019)"

ManuelKiessling — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:32:17 +0000

Well it can go in both directions I guess. How to design a system well for the long term is definitely in the training data, and I‘m regularly very content with the suggestions that SOTA coding agents make when asked for it.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

ManuelKiessling — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:48:29 +0000

If I had one unqualified guess free — and boy am I unqualified here — I’d wager it’s those „zero sugar“ stuffs.

No way you can just replace (also very very not good for you) sugar with something else and end up with all the upsides and no downsides.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

ManuelKiessling — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:23:18 +0000

Crazy. On mobile it’s relatively easy to grab the playhead and scrub back and forth quickly over the full length of the video — this shows how the face movements are totally repetitive and constrained to a very limited space and variety.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder"

ManuelKiessling — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:00:56 +0000

I think the main difference, and the angle that makes your approach much more feasible, is that what users of your solution build fully lives „outside“ the core application that they build against, right?

While my approach is that users would modify the core application itself (even if initially in a sandboxed copy), which would be a lot more powerful, but also a lot more complex, with many more hard questions that would need to be answered, like how to deal with data and security and so on.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder"

ManuelKiessling — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:46:25 +0000

What if software shipped with a software engineer?

https://manuel.kiessling.net/2025/11/04/what-if-software-shi...

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)"

ManuelKiessling — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:31:36 +0000

Just bought this one from a Japanese eBay dealer with many very good reviews, so fingers crossed no scam:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/147282358614

Yes, you will pay more than the original price. But once every 30 years or so I don’t give a fuck, I want this because the video showed a man working on it who cared.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

ManuelKiessling — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:32:02 +0000

You probably have other stuff on your mind right now, thus I can understand if you are not in the mood for answering, but I‘m too curious to not ask:

According to the Reuters article, AI use has increased 6x over only three months. How did that feel from the inside? I’m especially curious because Cloudflare is not a toy company, and this is not about some influencer trying to sell me their latest „this changes everything“ bullshit.

So, shifting a company significantly towards agentic AI, and I assume this isn’t simply about „install Claude Code on every desk“: would you say it actually works? Or would you say it’s still more of a bet, and still needs to prove itself as a sustainable long-term strategy?

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

ManuelKiessling — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:15:50 +0000

This is only a tangential question, but anyway: I‘ve read several years ago that since around Photoshop version 4, 99% of the work is about keeping the application UI usable with all these new features, and not about „hard“ technical challenges within the features themselves. Is that true?

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

ManuelKiessling — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:54:01 +0000

Reading only the parts of the post that are not about AI does not instill the sense that Mr Armstrong is the kind of person who would hesitate to say that people are let go because the company wants/needs to save money.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

ManuelKiessling — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:34:50 +0000

You‘ve got mail.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

ManuelKiessling — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:45:22 +0000

Yeah but imagine yourself lying on the floor with your vision being your only sense, plus an info floating in your mind: „fyi, you are no longer upright“.

That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

ManuelKiessling — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:23:17 +0000

What was eye-opening, or rather, sobering for me was when I read an interview with an engineer who explained how incredible difficult it is for a robot to orient itself when it is lying on the floor and wants to stand up.

Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.

A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

ManuelKiessling — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 23:10:41 +0000

Would you mind sharing what you can and want about how the sausage is made? I would love to hear concrete cases where actual leverage is measurable. I‘m asking in good faith, not to attack your standpoint.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud"

ManuelKiessling — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:36:32 +0000

I‘ve built https://github.com/dx-tooling/productbuilding-orchestration for more or less the same use case as Broccoli, but in my case a) the „frontend“ is Slack, not a ticket system (but the agent people talk to in Slack manages the ticket system under the hood), and b) everytime there is a new commit on a PR, a preview system is bootstrapped or updated, and the codebase that is to be previewed explains how it wants to be deployed for preview.

This works really well.

New comment by ManuelKiessling in "Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary"

ManuelKiessling — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:46:24 +0000

(I‘m saying this as someone who uses AI for coding a lot and mostly love it) Yeah, but is that really the same? Compilers work deterministically — if it works once, it will work always. LLMs are a different story for now.