Hacker News: impjohn

New comment by impjohn in "Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy"

impjohn — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:50:46 +0000

That kind of captcha has a very short half life. Software ate the world now AI is eating software

New comment by impjohn in "When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing"

impjohn — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:25:49 +0000

Code gets stale really fast. Re-gathering context and re-aligning on old code is sometimes more painful than starting from scratch.

New comment by impjohn in "When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing"

impjohn — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:24:46 +0000

I'd say there's bottlenecks within the developer processes without even considering org processes. Code review, release, post release ceremonies. Feels like they absorb much of the gained productivity in the coding phase.

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

impjohn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:57:53 +0000

I believe it's ultimately a tug of war between what the business wants (more features, faster, etc) and the engineers want (maintainability, documentation, scalable patterns etc). Engineers rarely win this tug of war. At times it feels like watching a car crash in slow motion. I don't think this trend will meaningfully slow or change, until businesses interests are hit. That may take a while for this cruft to start causing pain. Even then, you may just throw money at the problem, or just live with it. Will companies go bankrupt because of vibe coding? I don't think so, and that's why ai coding is here to stay. My 2 cents

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

impjohn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:48:21 +0000

I believe the economic machine gives an edge to people who do more right things than wrong. Bob does things wrong, but given a 10x amount of output, the balance of right output vs wrong output may still be favored upon by the economy. A speculation, to be sure, we'll have to see how it pans out.

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

impjohn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:43:06 +0000

I think this will become the prevailing sentiment when the dust settles.

New comment by impjohn in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

impjohn — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:11:27 +0000

AI writing feels like putting a michelin course into a blender and drinking it

Big Tech Spends More on Buildings Than Research

impjohn — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:26:05 +0000

Article URL: https://cupellabs.com/big-tech-spends-more-on-buildings-than-research

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47465475

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by impjohn in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

impjohn — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:28:14 +0000

Then this person better bet their entire life savings on them dying, since it would reduce incentive (profit). Crazy thought experiment, gave me lots to think about

New comment by impjohn in "GPT Image 1.5"

impjohn — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:51:18 +0000

This is what struck me as well. I got weird undertones of 'Now you don't even need to have real memories! Just fabricate them.' They even prominently showcase edits of placing you with another person, further deepening disingenuous or parasocial relationships

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

impjohn — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:07:30 +0000

>then tell it to give you the top 10 things wrong with the code, then tell it to fix the five of them that are valid and important.

I would be cautious of this. I've tried this multiple times and often it produces very subtle bugs. Sometimes the code is not bad enough to have 5 defects with it, but it will comply, and change things that don't need to. You will find out in prod at some point.

New comment by impjohn in "Claude for Excel"

impjohn — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 11:40:36 +0000

Crappy spreadsheet is just the codification of business processes. Those are inherently messy and there's lots of assumptions, lots of edge cases. That's why spreadsheets tend towards crappy on a long enough timeline. It's a fundamentally messy problem.

Spreadsheets are an abstraction over a messy reality, lossy. They were already generalizing reality.

Now we generalize the generalization. It is this lossy reality that people are worried about with AI in HN.

New comment by impjohn in "Claude for Excel"

impjohn — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 11:35:26 +0000

>but couldn't care less if it disappeared tomorrow.

Wonder how true that is. Some things incorporate in your life so subtly that you only become aware of them when totally switched off.

New comment by impjohn in "Focus Is Saying No"

impjohn — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 10:49:16 +0000

What were the clues, in hindsight?

I wonder if someone can get scent of 'want you to fail' early, so one can play their cards a bit differently armed with this knowledge.

New comment by impjohn in "OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems"

impjohn — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:42:40 +0000

It's hard to appreciate the difference in 'abundance mentality' between the median US and EU person. It always struck me as an interesting culture difference. While both EU and US grew in prosperity post WWII, I feel the US narrative was quite on another level.

New comment by impjohn in "I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it"

impjohn — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 08:41:08 +0000

Interesting thought. Do you have any anecdotes regarding it? Seems you're basing it off personal experience or something you've heard many times, curious to know what that is

New comment by impjohn in "The role of developer skills in agentic coding"

impjohn — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:55:46 +0000

I've been personally surprised that this doesn't come up more often. Most mature codebases span a decade or more, and especially in the web, there's so many layers of evolving technologies that were introduced during this time, resulting in complex geological layers forming in the codebase as the patterns evolved. That is not only a lot of lines of code, but a lot of nuance as well. Even a basic problem like routing can make these AIs fall flat on their face because of the sheer context and complexities involved

New comment by impjohn in "The role of developer skills in agentic coding"

impjohn — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:52:03 +0000

I believe impact relates to area of circle as defined by the radius. A pyramid is a more hierarchical approach that perhaps was not suited. My 0.02$

New comment by impjohn in "The role of developer skills in agentic coding"

impjohn — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:43:10 +0000

Hm. The 'prompt obedience' was definitely a huge step up, but there's a huge number of acceptable results to an image generation prompt, while for coding usually there a handful, many times just one right solution. So I don't think this parallel here is telling

New comment by impjohn in "A password generator inspired by the Xkcd password spec"

impjohn — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:03:11 +0000

Sadly most websites will scream at you if you don't follow their weird and sometimes arbitrary recipe (exactly one special character). This is great for when it's actually allowed