Hacker News: duncanfwalker

New comment by duncanfwalker in "The Death of Scrum – Built for a slower world, performed by those who left"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:35:51 +0000

I have been feeling that something - a few things - has to change about Agile rituals given a team is using Claude extensively. I haven't yet found any thoughtful writing on the topic.

The most obvious impacts have been shorter synchronous conversations for planning and refinement because so much more specification is written. I've also found myself doing more spiking.

The thing is, all the changes I see to Agile are matters of degree, not fundamental breaks with the Agile manifesto or tradition. I'm not sure whether that's because a) all that's needed is tweaks or b) because the existing way of doing Agile is so in-grained that it's hard to see that it doesn't fit today's reality.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "CSS as a Query Language"

duncanfwalker — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:02:43 +0000

Reminds me of seeing this presented at a conference years ago https://github.com/braposo/graphql-css

It was a joke but I really like the way it pointed out how we copy and reapply patterns in different contexts and that might enable unexpected things.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Ask HN: Why there are no actual studies that show AI is more productive?"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:39:02 +0000

I would assess the directionality and rate of the trend. If it's getting better fast and we don't see a limit to that trend then it will eventually pass whatever threshold we set for adoption.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Ask HN: Why there are no actual studies that show AI is more productive?"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:45:38 +0000

It's not so valuable to assess the current state - what the impact of using AI is today. From personal experience it feels like overall impact on productivity was not positive a couple of years ago, might be positive now and will be positive in a couple of years. That means by assessing the current state of impact on product where just finding where we are on that change curve. If we accept that trend is happening then we know at some point it will (or has) pass the threshold where our companies will fall behind if they're not using it. We also know it takes a while to get up to speed and make sure we're making the most of it so the earlier we start the better. That's the counter arguement that we could wait for a later wave to jump on but that's risky and the only potential reward is a small percentage short-term productivity gain.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Demand for UK Food Bank Up 15% Year on Year"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:17:56 +0000

Spending is paid for out of tax and all those people will have paid tax. Paying less tax than someone else doesn't make a free rider. Deliberately opting out of an obligation while taking from the group makes a free rider.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Blending SQL and Python with Sqlorm"

duncanfwalker — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 20:18:57 +0000

I guess it's more clear that it should be a to statically readable value? eg you shouldn't do things like use arguments to build the str

New comment by duncanfwalker in "QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system"

duncanfwalker — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 10:11:18 +0000

This is spot on. I'd love it if it was possible to get the integration with the QGIS ecosystem. It could open source integrations or even a commercial offering that just joins things up in a cohesive way just something that enables a more smooth collaboration model.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system"

duncanfwalker — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 06:23:25 +0000

Any tips on smoothing the transition between the two that mean work isn't duplicated?

New comment by duncanfwalker in "QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system"

duncanfwalker — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:11:19 +0000

That's an insightful nuance. I've seen you just create divisions in organisations because while it is a really fully featured desktop application, it implies a way of working that doesn't play well with the cloud, which creates barriers between experimenting and production.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Using Claude Code SDK to reduce E2E test time"

duncanfwalker — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 19:08:50 +0000

As other comments have said, I'd prefer other solutions to get by all the tests to run faster. It would be interesting to see if it could be used to prioritise tests - get the tests more likely to fail to run sooner.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 18:33:47 +0000

Oh god, this has just made me reflect that we're in the golden age of generative AI - not in technology terms, in user experience terms. We're in the period where the major products are competing against each other before they switch into enshitfication mode. You're certainly right, there's going to be ads in the answers and probably worse. I'm imagining companies paying to introduce ideas as subtle subtexts to millions of unrelated answers or platforms deliberately engineering the ux to maximise understanding of our drives and preferences purely so it can be sold.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore"

duncanfwalker — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 07:35:46 +0000

I wonder whether we'll be able to look back on this period in 10 years time and save definitively whether the wide spectrum of responses to LLMs was perception or real feature of our differing jobs.

Think of AI as Immortal Intelligence – Geoffrey Hinton Talk Video (July 2025)

duncanfwalker — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 20:16:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031782

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by duncanfwalker in "The two versions of Parquet"

duncanfwalker — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 12:23:36 +0000

+1 you're paying for the governance as much as you're paying for the code.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "The two versions of Parquet"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 21:12:30 +0000

At the start of your comment I thought the 'issues like this' were going to be the 4 year discussions about what is and isn't core.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Developer's block"

duncanfwalker — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 10:08:10 +0000

I think a lot of this is addressed by having a definition of done and more generally being explicit about quality expectations. You don't need to worry whether to polish the readme or add cross-compilation if you conscious about your quality expectations and the drivers behind them - there is no single 'best' project.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Instrumenting Next.js with runtime secret injection"

duncanfwalker — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:10:22 +0000

It's true that anything that can go wrong will go wrong but I wouldn't use that as a maxim to direct designs - risk is one trade-off and it's significance varies.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:47:14 +0000

I really like it. I particularly like that you've resisted the temptation to include SQL itself or the jq queries in the DSL.

The validation piece makes it feel a bit a bit like the Rails mindset for people who work better in FP.

I'd make a could of suggestions for the docs: Maybe a bit more discussion of how we'd test our webpipe code. I see why you've called them 'middlewares' but, maybe the term 'macros' or 'pipeline functions' might avoid confusion with express/connect middlewares

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Instrumenting Next.js with runtime secret injection"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:22:21 +0000

I think it depends on the API - we do this with AWS Secret Managers. I haven't seen it fail but if did it would only effect new instances coming into service so I think we'd have to be pretty unlucky for it to have a noticeable impact.

New comment by duncanfwalker in "Keep Pydantic out of your Domain Layer"

duncanfwalker — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 13:06:44 +0000

Yeah, I'd agree with that. Validation rules are like an extension to the type system. Invariants are useful at the edges of a system but also in the core. If, for example, I can be told that a list is non-empty then I can write more clean code to handle it.

In Java they got around the external-dependency-in-the-core-model problem by making the JSR-380 specification that could (even if only in theory) have multiple implementations.

In clojure you don't need to worry about another external dependency because the spec library is built-in. One could argue that it's still a dependency even if it's coming from the standard library. At the point I'd say, why are we worried about this? it's to isolate our core from unnecessary reasons to change.

I get that principled terms it's not right but, if those libraries change on API on a similar cadence to the programming language syntax, then it doesn't impact in practical terms. It's these kind of pragmatic compromises that distinguish Python from Java - after all, 'worse is better'.