Hacker News: conqrr

New comment by conqrr in "Banning AI will not make it go away"

conqrr — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:26:25 +0000

Yeah, AI works great for everyone in vacuum, but works for no one in a group.

New comment by conqrr in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

conqrr — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:48:02 +0000

> My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less. Guess it worked then. I'm happy to take a paycut to never deal with vibecode and toxic environment where every estimate is borked due to agentic coding.

New comment by conqrr in "Don't Take the Black Pill [video]"

conqrr — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:14:17 +0000

This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.

New comment by conqrr in "Why write code in 2026"

conqrr — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:01:08 +0000

All this debate around use LLM or not is tiring and just black and white thinking.

Can I use agents to code a SWE project? yes, with nuances.

Can I write code for a SWE project? yes, with nuances.

Its more options now, I'll write code about projects I deeply care and will use llm at work where its shared slop and forced usage.

New comment by conqrr in "Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)"

conqrr — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:25:23 +0000

3 AI related articles on the front page, but one is busting slop. I'm hopeful.

New comment by conqrr in "How VictoriaLogs Stores Your Logs in a Columnar Layout"

conqrr — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:17:21 +0000

Shameless plug. But poor Indie hacker's log store based on similar concepts. Write logs to durable s3/r2 in parquet and querying with duckdb: https://github.com/amr8t/blobsearch

No expensive indexing or compute needed.

New comment by conqrr in "AI coding at home without going broke"

conqrr — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:09:01 +0000

The big one that's missing as cost cutter. If you are a programmer, stay as close as you can to the code. Define the interfaces yourself and the core logic. You will know exactly what changes you want and know what tier of model to use.

New comment by conqrr in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

conqrr — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:36:49 +0000

Until Claude Sonnet 4, it was Meh no big deal. 4 onwards and Opus was when I was really surprised by the ability. But nowadays, I'm more convinced than ever that using AI for all code is a mistake. The sum total of productivity, although hard to predict, from anecdata seems to be a net negative if AI is blindly used everywhere. Using it at the periphery, observing, debugging etc is excellent aid. I use it at the day job I hate and at personal tasks that I don't have time for. But for personal projects I love, zero.

Coding was never the blocker and was a natural enforcer of quality. Healthy teams with strong opinions on quality will win eventually. I'm more hopeful after the bubble burst, companies will come back slowly to sanity.

New comment by conqrr in "The bootstrapper's EU stack for under €10 per month"

conqrr — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:32:09 +0000

For a bootstrapper's computeless log search solution using Duckdb and s3 compatible store, use Blobsearch (https://github.com/amr8t/blobsearch)

New comment by conqrr in "Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian"

conqrr — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:02:20 +0000

Looks really slick! I've been using Obsidian with git, and am thinking of moving back to the OG solution of simply using a text editor with a git repo. I'm wary of using cloud like google drive or dropbox for sync, especially if I'm using both phone and mobile to edit the same file throughout the day. I doubt using an external cloud really takes care of consistency and there's a possibility of losing data. Me being a developer can take the pain of a button click to git pull and resolve occasional conflicts. To me this is fully solved solution for note taking with tools I already know and trust. Having said that, I'm gonna try Files.md for some inspiration on what I could be missing.

New comment by conqrr in "Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?"

conqrr — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:57:41 +0000

Have you tried freelancing? Curious if that has seen an uptick or fall.

New comment by conqrr in "Agentic Coding Is a Trap"

conqrr — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:43:33 +0000

I've been having the same feeling too. At work, I try to do a hybrid prompt where I fill in things at method level with some placeholder pseudocode and let the prompt fill in the blanks. This helps with remembering and keeping a memory map. But its a lost cause keeping up with other's PRs that are often very verbose and high volume. For a lot of backend programming without a very complex domain, I think this works fine.

But I still want to be in touch with coding by hand and have ventured into systems programming, outside of work, which I feel AI is less useful for currently.

New comment by conqrr in "Full-Text Search with DuckDB"

conqrr — Fri, 01 May 2026 13:28:18 +0000

I started with s3 and moved to R2. Log volumes are low enough that its covered in the free usage tier.

New comment by conqrr in "Full-Text Search with DuckDB"

conqrr — Fri, 01 May 2026 01:23:15 +0000

DuckDB is amazing. It has completely replaced my need of using Cloudwatch or Loki etc for logs. I simply emit parquet to s3 now and use DuckDB to query locally. No HA compute or paying cloud tax for log search.

https://github.com/amr8t/blobsearch

New comment by conqrr in "Ask HN: Why does tech industry not have more co-ops?"

conqrr — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:42:20 +0000

Can't disagree with that. Agriculture, Energy, Grocery, Credit all have co-ops, Yet tech is non-existent.

Ask HN: Why does tech industry not have more co-ops?

conqrr — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:26:46 +0000

Sounds like this should be the default path if AI is really enabling everyone and setting an even field. Why is it just winner (CEO and co) takes all and losers go home?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941048

Points: 28

# Comments: 9

New comment by conqrr in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

conqrr — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:36:47 +0000

just cancelled mine. Only reason to have it was I could get a lot more done with a single prompt. No reason why I shouldn't go to the model provider directly instead.

New comment by conqrr in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

conqrr — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:31:01 +0000

This is a huge concern and I fully agree with the post. Even though one might think I am not fully giving into AI, this was always the case etc. It still affects YOU and everyone else. 1. Software, often, isn't built in vacuum. Lots of companies are shoving AI down throats like it or not. Most Bigtech is heavily using metrics to get to 100% AI generated code. Reviewing is a nightmare. 2. New entrants (new grads etc) are largely AI first and are losing out on the safety and reliability aspects that are enforced automatically when you learn coding without AI.

IMO, teams need to agree on a set of principles on AI usage, concrete examples of where and how to use it. Perhaps its much more useful in parts of your system that's faster evolving and doesn't have too much core logic like testing frameworks etc

Simply discarding it as 'yet another tool' is part of the problem.

New comment by conqrr in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

conqrr — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:49:17 +0000

License makes a lot of sense. Many engineering fields have licenses. Needs to be made mandatory. Tech rapidly evolves which was an excuse. Well, a lot has stabilized now in terms of technologies.

Ask HN: How much AI slop do you deal with at work?

conqrr — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:15:55 +0000

Struggling at work with AI mandates. There is heavy top down push to use AI, this is at one of the large Tech companies in the US. This has me quite depressed. Everyone sends slop for reviews and there is an expectation of 2-3x efficiency even after losing a lot of people. This has caused a lot of bugs and issues. I'm sure a lot of places have the same issue and we have accepted this as a new normal.

But are there places US or ROW that are more sane and let you or the team decide what tool to use? How do I find them? Does going lower in the stack help?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47878425

Points: 2

# Comments: 2