Hacker News: efields

New comment by efields in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

efields — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:50:31 +0000

"Evals and vibes" can I put that on a t shirt?

New comment by efields in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

efields — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:05:29 +0000

I literally don't know how compilers work. I've written code for apps that are still in production 10 years later.

New comment by efields in "Show HN: enveil – hide your .env secrets from prAIng eyes"

efields — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:39:21 +0000

This looks like standalone Doppler (not a bad thing).

New comment by efields in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

efields — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:29:24 +0000

Wow: the Sinclair ZX81 launched in the UK in 1981 for around £49.95 as a kit (£50) and £69.95 assembled, making it incredibly cheap, and later in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 for $99.95 (kit) or $149.95 (assembled)

Cheap for a 1980s computer, now pennies. Wild.

New comment by efields in "I’m leaving Redis for SolidQueue"

efields — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:24:40 +0000

SolidQueue is great. Rails 8 is great. Monoliths are great. Most of the time.

New comment by efields in "This is not the future"

efields — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:22:21 +0000

Humans making the most of the situation they're in is inevitable.

New comment by efields in "Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?"

efields — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:16:46 +0000

I maintain a few rails apps and Claude Code has written 95% of the code for the last 4 months. I deploy regularly.

I make my own PRs then have Copilot review them. Sometimes it finds criticisms, and I copy and paste that chunk of critique into Claude Code, and it fixes it.

Treat the LLMs like junior devs that can lookup answers supernaturally fast. You still need to be mindful of their work. Doubtful even. Test, test, test.

New comment by efields in "Programming peaked"

efields — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:02:29 +0000

Postgres and Sublime user here. Life is pretty good!

New comment by efields in "Google Antigravity"

efields — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:29:11 +0000

Thanks. Actually did use my personal account and got the issue nonetheless.

New comment by efields in "Google Antigravity"

efields — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:33:33 +0000

MacOS/Safari User here. Stuck on 'Setting Up Your Account' once I've authorized it in the browser. /shrug

New comment by efields in "Winamp clone in Swift for macOS"

efields — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:19:37 +0000

Foobar2000… now there's an app I haven't heard of in (checks calendar) nearly 20 years. Glad it's still kicking.

New comment by efields in "Why is there no Uber for plumbing/HVAC? (and why there ought to be)"

efields — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:16:32 +0000

That depends. We got one paid for by the seller of our house and in the first year it paid for an HVAC repair and plumber. I renewed it once for $600/year and wound up getting our refrigerator replaced in-kind, probably a $1500-2000 machine.

I decided my luck had run out and so I _did not_ renew it again, and we haven't had any other issues that _would have been covered_ since then, so I think I played my cards right.

I don't think they are a scam, but they are an insurance product, and insurance products have a lot of detail that need to be understood before you can decide whether it meets your needs or not. It's not a panacea to home-ownership woes.

New comment by efields in "Claude for Excel"

efields — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:44:27 +0000

This. I work in Pharma. Excel and faxes.

New comment by efields in "Claude Skills"

efields — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 20:58:40 +0000

same same

New comment by efields in "303Gen – 303 acid loops generator"

efields — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:42:53 +0000

What would be the level of effort to get some midi transport controls and BPM sync in here, now that browsers support MIDI to some degree?

New comment by efields in "Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome"

efields — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 14:39:43 +0000

In a week, Claude Code and I have built a PoC Rails App for a significant business use case. I intend to formally demo it for buy-in tomorrow after already doing a short "is this kind of what you're looking for?" walkthrough last week. From here, I intend to "throw it over the fence" for my staff, RoR and full-stack devs, to pick it apart and/or improve what they want to in order to bring it from 80-100% over the next two months. If they want to rewrite it from scratch, that's on the table.

It's not a ground-breaking app, its CRUD and background jobs and CSV/XLSX exports and reporting, but I found that I was able to "wireframe" with real code and thus come up with unanswered questions, new requirements, etc. extremely early in the project.

Does that make me a 10x engineer? Idk. If I wasn't confident working with CC, I would have pushed back on the project in the first place unless management was willing to devote significant resources to this. I.e. "is this really a P1 project or just a nice to have?" If these tools didn't exist I would have written spec's and excalidraw or Sketch/Figma wireframes that would have taken me at least the same amount of time or more, but there'd be less functional code for my team to use as a resource.

New comment by efields in "Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?"

efields — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 14:42:46 +0000

Same, lately.

New comment by efields in "The death of partying in the USA"

efields — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 14:50:13 +0000

This feels right. More than anything, it's the function of the Internet.

New comment by efields in "Someone at YouTube needs glasses"

efields — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:44:58 +0000

I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.

I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.

They know what they're doing. Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.

New comment by efields in "A 10x Faster TypeScript"

efields — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 19:29:31 +0000

Sublime Text has been my main since at least then as well. I can _see_ the lag in VSCode.