Hacker News: holtkam2

New comment by holtkam2 in "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain"

holtkam2 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:37:43 +0000

How do you have such stunning confidence that you're replying to someone who knows 'nothing about' the subject matter? Maybe he's a neuroscientist.

I think YOU are the one showing stunning confidence in something you know nothing about (op's area of expertise. Unless you know them personally. Then ignore me).

New comment by holtkam2 in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

holtkam2 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:43:30 +0000

It doesn’t need to be perfect - it just needs to be as effective as a human CEO… luckily, many human CEOs suck at their job

New comment by holtkam2 in "Meta faces 'astronomical' consequences as legal fight reaches critical moment"

holtkam2 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:27:43 +0000

At a certain point, can a judge just please rule that Meta has lost its right to do business in the United States? It repeatedly ignores rulings and has lost credibility when it claims that it will change its practices. I don't see why they 'need' to exist. Another, more responsible social media platform company would quickly spring up in its place if it were dissolved.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

holtkam2 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:08:47 +0000

I have bought every generation of Xbox since the original (I had it in 2005). This is a dealbreaker for me. Won’t be buying their next gen system.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

holtkam2 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:57:06 +0000

My rule is: I only let AI code for me, I don’t let it think for me.

Since writing is thinking, coding is thinking since coding is writing. That means any time I am not certain how I’m gonna implement some feature or bug fix, I have to code it myself because that’s the only way I can force myself to think through it. Only when I get to a point where I’m line “ok I know exactly what to do now- all that’s left to do is type it out” that’s when AI can be employed - essentially as a autocomplete.

This is only for projects where I will be held responsible for outcomes and must understand how it works. For hackathon / personal projects, I vibe away.

I also use AI to brainstorm at the outset of the task when I don’t know where to start at all.

Is this inefficient? My take: no. It’s maximally efficient. Over the long term it gives me an edge over any teammates who just vibe code everything because I actually, you know, understand how stuff works. I become the guy who can save the day at 3am when the team’s business critical app goes down. I become the guy that gets pulled into meetings so the suits can ask “is this possible?”. I see opportunities and problems before my teammates because I have a relationship with our code and system that they never took the time to develop or think about.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Severance"

holtkam2 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:47:55 +0000

Yall are missing my point - you don’t gotta replace the upper management - they will continue to hold the responsibility for outcomes and problems like they do today.

There will just be like 75% fewer of those individuals because they all can do so much more per head

New comment by holtkam2 in "Severance"

holtkam2 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 02:22:41 +0000

Can someone make an AI agent to target automating tasks of upper management already so they feel the pain as well?

You don’t need to even replace them outright, just make your agent so effective that [big tech company] requires fewer VPs and GMs etc.

Modern frontier LLMs are incredibly good at all types of knowledge work - this should be possible with enough elbow grease

New comment by holtkam2 in "Predictive Speculative KV Replication for Bursty LLM Inference"

holtkam2 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 02:18:31 +0000

Awesome animations!

New comment by holtkam2 in "Situational Awareness down 67% in July in AI stock rout"

holtkam2 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:42:18 +0000

That question is probably what inspired someone to create the first ever derivatives market

New comment by holtkam2 in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

holtkam2 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:03:14 +0000

Great piece, but it misses the elephant in the room: the lion's share of economic benefit from refactoring will come from the fact that it makes it easier for humans to understand. That means 3am pages get resolved faster, fewer bugs will end up in prod, and your team can ship faster than your competition - gaining a leg up in the market. Most importantly, folks will be more comfortable accepting responsibility and ownership of a system when they understand it... this means that if/when something goes wrong, people will more quickly jump in and fix it, and when things could be better, folks will jump in and improve it.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Punch yourself in the face with reality"

holtkam2 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:22:06 +0000

Claude code? Who’s talking about Claude code? I am talking about generative AI. It has been better than humans at coding for years. It is also currently much better at things like taste, stakeholder communication, and literally everything else conceivable. Yet here we are and employment is pretty much unchanged. It’s a paradox imo.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Claude Opus 5"

holtkam2 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:24:20 +0000

The final user-facing responses are usually a tiny fraction of the total tokens used over the course of a given conversation turn. When you're doing any real work, reasoning and tool uses constitute the overwhelming majority of the tokens in / out... not the final user-facing response.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Punch yourself in the face with reality"

holtkam2 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:20:17 +0000

This guy's head will explode when he realizes that AI has been better at coding than humans for years and yet software engineering employment % has barely twitched...

New comment by holtkam2 in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

holtkam2 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:29:11 +0000

If you want to fully understand / contribute to / fully leverage the most powerful technology humanity has ever devised (AI), you must learn to read and write code. That’s the only reason anyone should need.

New comment by holtkam2 in "The unbearable cheapness of open weight models"

holtkam2 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:49:16 +0000

If you used a time machine to go back to 2021 and showed someone the best open source LLMs from 2026 they would surely say “yeah that’s AGI”

New comment by holtkam2 in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

holtkam2 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:44:20 +0000

This is the way. But also - keep your head up - your mindset matters more than you think. If you consider yourself a victim of your circumstances with no agency, this will be harder for you. So get your mentality right. Something along the lines of 'this is an exciting new era and I'm well prepared to master this new domain like I have many times before'.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence"

holtkam2 — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:00:54 +0000

The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

holtkam2 — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:55:49 +0000

at a certain point you're gonna need to change your benchmark because this will end up in the model's training set

New comment by holtkam2 in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

holtkam2 — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:33:08 +0000

I wish I could upvote this twice. We (devs) really REALLY need to consider on-device compute before going to the cloud for LLM inference.

New comment by holtkam2 in "Hallucinations Undermine Trust; Metacognition Is a Way Forward"

holtkam2 — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:24:15 +0000

IDK if the author's 'metacognition' needs to be a feature of the LLM itself.

I could imagine a harness that 1) reads LLM output 2) uses a research sub-agent to attempt to verify any factual claims 2) rephrase the main agent's output such that it conveys uncertainty if the factual claim cannot be independently verified