Hacker News: ianmarcinkowski

New comment by ianmarcinkowski in "Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers"

ianmarcinkowski — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:25:58 +0000

Coworker seriously asked "since we're generating most of our code now, who is actually reading all of the code?" We're at a small company, but the urge to trust The Oracle is almost spiritual with some people IMHO.

I read 90%+ of the code I generate by reviewing it like I would a junior developer. I'm heavily vibe-coding a new feature right now and it's going to get a thorough reading as soon as GitHub's PRs start working again

New comment by ianmarcinkowski in "I'm So Tired of Ads"

ianmarcinkowski — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:33:26 +0000

You-know-it-when-you-see-it might be a good boundary. It's different for everyone, surely.

Personally I find the Protect The Children charity workers and anti-abortion protesters in large city squares to be right on the line of "mind mild-assault."

TBH the charity people are worse than the anti-abortion protesters because they force images of unfortunate kids into my mind and makes me feel bad. The anti-abortion people are almost quaint to me.

New comment by ianmarcinkowski in "I'm So Tired of Ads"

ianmarcinkowski — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:28:43 +0000

I started using a self-hosted RSS reader (which is how I found your article) with curated lists of things. I used to read Google Chrome's feed articles but they are a trash fire of bullshit now.

Next, I'm going to try search indexing my own version of a very small Internet and possibly leaving Firefox because they are becoming nearly as dong-thirsty as Chrome.

My dad called me yesterday in a tiff because some crazy idiot on a random streaming app he somehow downloaded to his Samsung phone was trying to convince him to listen to a song on Spotify and he couldn't even figure out how to follow the directions in the ad. Or maybe it was Samsung AI making something up? Or maybe he's been hacked and it wasn't even my dad? I can't even tell anymore.

This coincided with the 80th ducking permission/password/2fa popup of the day on my phone, so I was cooked.

New comment by ianmarcinkowski in "Why the smart home bubble popped"

ianmarcinkowski — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:17:49 +0000

For me, they just never did anything useful. I have light switches that work nicely. If voice transcription + LLMs + conversational AI had been good in 2017 I might have used my google home speaker, but the quality of the interactions was so extremely awful that I couldn't even get my google home to play music consistently.

New comment by ianmarcinkowski in "Does anybody like React?"

ianmarcinkowski — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:12:21 +0000

My journey. Raw PHP + SQL Queries -> Python + server-side rendered HTML -> Ruby/Python APIs + ugly JS frontends -> Python + EmberJS (remember that?!) -> Go/Ruby/Python/I don't care anymore + React.

My problems with React are more about JS/TS and how other devs (it's never me! I swear!) can write terrible code that passes tests and isn't readable or maintainable. The JS Tradeoff is that we can handle rapidly evolving web landscape, but we have to deal with NPM and supply-chain hacks periodically. shrug

I am fine with the complexities of events, hooks and re-renders in React because we want to build interactive programs and nothing comes for free. Data fetching libraries like Tanstack Query solve one of the hardest problems of cache invalidation/re-rendering.

React was the thing that made me actually enjoy making interfaces for users. I just want to build stuff.

I experiment a bit with HTMX for my super simple single-page tools with some basic javascript, Next.js is nice but kind of thirsty to get you to use Vercel, I like Flask-Admin for really simple tools that must render a page from a server-hosted application.

New comment by ianmarcinkowski in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

ianmarcinkowski — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:13:18 +0000

My low value comment. This feels directionally correct to me. The problems I've been struggling with in my dev job for the past 6 months have been 80% maintenance/legacy code interfering with new feature development.

Some of our developers are overly aggressive about using AI and I've started going down that path because I need to keep up and actually enjoy the flow of working with AI in my IDE.

I put a lot of work into keeping my area of the codebase understandable and coherent but I do not see that from the others on our team. I'm not perfect but I and extremely sensitive to incoherent, or un-grok-able at a glance.

Anyway, I like the novel (to me at least) framing of this article!