Hacker News: aryehof

New comment by aryehof in "When I reject AI code even if it works"

aryehof — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 05:04:19 +0000

What concerns me the most is that improvements in software design are at an end. The “big ball of mud”, which really is a problem of modularity and dependencies, will never improve through innovation because the way it is done now is all there will ever be.

New comment by aryehof in "Why I email complete strangers"

aryehof — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:54:05 +0000

Email them because most people these days never receive a personal email from another real human being, instead of newsletters, solicitations, marketing, announcements, notifications and spam.

New comment by aryehof in "The Last Technical Interview"

aryehof — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:23:12 +0000

The solution would seem obvious - decide what you want, then hire the first applicant that qualifies.

Of course, the real issue is that a prospective employer doesn’t know what they want. Our “engineering” industry runs on vibes, heroic effort, fashion and hype-cycles. Someone very smart, enthusiastic, quick learning, flexible and affable is the only real job description.

Combine this with the “supply” side entirely overwhelming demand, having to compete with AI, and experience having no value, and for most software developers the future is bleak until a new more equitable equilibrium is found.

Nevertheless in the meantime, at least one can have solace in collecting the authors “failure stamps”.

New comment by aryehof in "Accenture to acquire Ookla"

aryehof — Sun, 31 May 2026 04:19:14 +0000

> Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI

Is this something being seen across all outsourcers like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys etc?

New comment by aryehof in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

aryehof — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:23:39 +0000

My fear is that durable workflows are increasingly being seen as required for everything, because we need to solve the distributed transaction problem in a micro-services world.

It questions the initial wisdom of creating lots of little independent distributed apps, without regards to interaction between them. Let’s build ever more necessary plumbing and schemes just to enable their interaction.

I am arguing that durable workflows should be a last resort for boundaries you must cross, not a default pattern for every business process.

New comment by aryehof in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

aryehof — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:45:03 +0000

Just looked at it for the first time. My first impression - grey, gray and more grey. Please help brighten our day by adding some color to the page?

New comment by aryehof in "Building Pi with Pi"

aryehof — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:53:20 +0000

To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.

New comment by aryehof in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"

aryehof — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:51:15 +0000

The assumption here is that the profitable price (variable costs) is only the api price. I question that.

Subscriptions can be equally profitable depending on the total actual tokens used across users. Few subscriptions use 100% of their potential, but these memes that subscriptions are unsustainable always seem to assume it to be so.

New comment by aryehof in "Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts"

Fri, 15 May 2026 04:42:32 +0000

Anyone taking part in a meeting these days should state out loud …

“Notice: Any comments made by or on behalf of that are interpreted by AI in this meeting, may not be accurate.”

I do this in every meeting.

New comment by aryehof in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

aryehof — Tue, 12 May 2026 03:33:24 +0000

This seems to assume that all there is, is systems software, tools and frameworks. Why ignore the elephant in the room - business / enterprise / line-of-business software? The case for Rust, Go, Gleam and Zig vastly changes for these versus Java or C#.

New comment by aryehof in "Mythical Man Month"

aryehof — Sat, 09 May 2026 06:18:49 +0000

Salary stays the same. A bunch of others are fired. You’re expected to produce their level of output as well as your own. After all, you’re 10x more productive now?

New comment by aryehof in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

aryehof — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:55:25 +0000

I find Flow really interesting, thanks for pointing it out.

Deterministic workflows using AI to help perform those steps not requiring human input has been an area of interest for me for some time. Particularly interesting how you are using the AI to determine what a step has achieved and the action of the next step.

Combine it with workflow elements that does handle human steps together with a notification/routing/task system would make for a helpful system for so many.

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

aryehof — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:03:10 +0000

Is it possible that the line of thinking really is that "agentic AI" will up for the capability shortfall?

It seems to be the stated expectation, but I find it incredulous that management really would believe that?

New comment by aryehof in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

aryehof — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:56:11 +0000

Vanity titles never make much sense, and now even more people can call themselves “engineers”. I was always at a loss why many weren’t calling themselves “web engineers”. Hey Mom, I used Claude Code today at work so I’m an Agentic Engineer!

New comment by aryehof in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

aryehof — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:18:21 +0000

TOD - Transfer on Death?

New comment by aryehof in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

aryehof — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:42:41 +0000

I like the idea of face-to-face discussions. My only fear is that many of the new generation will say they really prefer that we text or slack instead.

New comment by aryehof in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

aryehof — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:21:27 +0000

> And in practice, they usually only manage people …

I usually differentiate between real managers who exist to make decisions, versus those who manage people. The latter are “overseers” not managers.

New comment by aryehof in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

aryehof — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:14:48 +0000

> I just type what I want to say and hit send. YOLO

Made me smile. Perhaps the new term for making a human hand-written reply is that I didnt use AI … “I YOLOed it”.

New comment by aryehof in "When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing"

aryehof — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:55:07 +0000

I think while developers are moving faster, they are moving more dangerously. Perhaps the rest of the organization holding them back is a good thing?

New comment by aryehof in "When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing"

aryehof — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:21:14 +0000

Its a way to say how long it will take without saying how long it will take.