Hacker News: cejast

New comment by cejast in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

cejast — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:19:33 +0000

That’s my point though? Debugging a 5-minute problem is in the shallow end of the spectrum, the real complexity sits where they lean on their domain experience. Finance and payments software mistakes can absolutely be expensive.

New comment by cejast in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

cejast — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:24:00 +0000

> All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.

Is it really though? Access to information is quicker, but you still need to know what ‘good’ looks like to leverage it effectively. I can prompt my way to a medical diagnosis, but I’d still want to run it by a doctor.

New comment by cejast in "Why developers using AI are working longer hours"

cejast — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 01:15:41 +0000

> More recently, it's "this failed because Claude chose..." No, Claude didn't choose, the person who submitted the PR chose to accept it.

I can relate to this, unfortunately these tools are becoming a very convenient way to offload any kind of responsibility when something goes wrong.

New comment by cejast in "Software factories and the agentic moment"

cejast — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 23:20:10 +0000

This was my reaction as well, a lot of hand-waving and invented jargon reminiscent of the web3 era - which is a shame, because I'd really like to understand what they've actually done in more detail.

New comment by cejast in "Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction"

cejast — Sun, 18 May 2025 12:20:54 +0000

What's even more interesting is that if you turn off watch history, they disable the home feed altogether. They just give up trying to show you anything, which has been great for keeping me off YouTube.

New comment by cejast in "London's National Gallery buys mysterious altarpiece for $20m"

cejast — Sat, 03 May 2025 10:00:28 +0000

That is a very broad generalization. Even if it was 'put into some fund', that equates to a capital investment which can be used to deliver value elsewhere.

Money is complicated - the only way in which I would see it get truly wasted is if you took it out as cash and burnt it. Even then you'll be (marginally) raising the value of all other money left in the system.

New comment by cejast in "Firing programmers for AI is a mistake"

cejast — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 20:04:54 +0000

Unless you have a crystal ball there is nothing that can give you certainty that will continue at the same or better rate. I’m not sure why you took the second half of the comment more seriously than the first.

New comment by cejast in "Firing programmers for AI is a mistake"

cejast — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:49:05 +0000

Nobody can tell you whether progress will continue at current, faster or slower rates - humans have a pretty terrible track record at extrapolating current events into the future. It's like how movies in the 80's made predictions about where we'll be in 30 years time. Back to the Future promised me hoverboards in 2015 - I'm still waiting!

New comment by cejast in "When AI promises speed but delivers debugging hell"

cejast — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 13:47:30 +0000

I don't think it is an illusion. It can remove a lot of barriers to entry for some people, and this is probably what you're seeing in the anecdata.

For example, my brother. He is what I'd refer to as 'tech-aligned' - he can and has written code before, but does not do it for a living and only ever wrote basic Python scripts every now and then to help with his actual work.

LLM's have enabled him to build out web apps in perhaps 1/5 of the time it would have taken him if he tried to learn and build them out from scratch. I don't think he would have even attempted it without an LLM.

Now it doesn't 'code everything' - he still has to massage the output to get what he wants, and there is still a learning curve to climb. But the spring-board that LLM's can give people, particularly those who don't have much experience in software development, should not be underestimated.

New comment by cejast in "My Entire Profession Is Being Automated Away by AI"

cejast — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:35:20 +0000

I went through the process of buying a car recently, and the dealer, before we even begun to negotiate on price, was describing how their pricing system has all 'moved to AI'. I was suspicious, and after querying him about it for a while what he described essentially just boiled down to something a spreadsheet could do.

Now I don't dispute that AI has and will continue to automate jobs away like this. But I do think we are in an era where the lines between 'classic' automation and AI automation are blurred for quite a lot of people and without any concrete details I suspect this case leans more towards the former.

New comment by cejast in "Ask HN: What are some of the most elegant codebases in your favorite language?"

cejast — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 16:01:11 +0000

Go and it’s standard library. ‘Elegant’ is pretty subjective, but it’s a treasure trove of learning how things work under the hood. I’ve learned loads about networking, compression, encryption and more by browsing through it, because the code is super easy to read and understand.

Ask HN: Good resources for programmers to learn about UX/design?

cejast — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 12:49:40 +0000

Whenever I need to build a UI/interface for a side-project, I always feel frustrated that I cannot create anything that looks or feels good to use.

What are your favourite resources to learn about UX/design? Doesn't have to be web-related.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31789362

Points: 40

# Comments: 16

New comment by cejast in "Blockchain Is Not Decentralised"

cejast — Wed, 05 May 2021 19:32:52 +0000

> One feature that cryptocurrencies gain from their decentralised computing design is that they become very robust to potential attacks from national governments.

I was always under the impression that they would be more susceptible to attacks from national governments, since they'll have greater access to the resources needed for a 51% attack.

New comment by cejast in "Show HN: A program to email log files using Go"

cejast — Fri, 18 May 2018 11:31:35 +0000

I thought this was what logrotate was for?

https://linux.die.net/man/8/logrotate

New comment by cejast in "Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?"

cejast — Thu, 03 May 2018 09:41:27 +0000

The worst thing about impostor syndrome for me is knowing whether you're actually suffering from it, or whether you're actually an impostor.

It really is a vicious cycle.

New comment by cejast in "Economics of Minecraft"

cejast — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 09:52:33 +0000

Sounds interesting, where can we play?

New comment by cejast in "Pilosa: open source, distributed bitmap index in Go"

cejast — Wed, 03 May 2017 20:52:11 +0000

This is exactly something I've been looking for to experiment with user segmentation, but crucially for fast, ad-hoc segmentation. Seems to bear some similarity to what Facebook [1] does for its audience insights.

[1] https://code.facebook.com/posts/382299771946304/audience-ins...

New comment by cejast in "Why junior developers are learning bad habits from Angular"

cejast — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 14:42:09 +0000

agreed, some explanation on what's actually wrong here would be nice

New comment by cejast in "Interviewing at a startup"

cejast — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 15:24:26 +0000

I think pre-judging someone, based on them walking in with a suit to your chilled out startup environment, is just as bad as the big corporate companies judging someone for not wearing one.

I mean in the end you're looking for the right person for the job, not their expertise on what to wear, right?

New comment by cejast in "Can't decide what to watch? I built this to help."

cejast — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:13:40 +0000

I'll look into it, I'm getting the same error while the page loads as well however it should work after it's loaded, and you select genres and then click 'Go'.

I probably will add functionality for IMDB/Letterboxd and other services, this was just a quick put-together :)