Hacker News: ivanech

New comment by ivanech in "Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates"

ivanech — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:22:37 +0000

Hmm in my experience (I've done a lot of head-to-heads), Opus 4.6 is a weaker reviewer than GPT 5.4 xhigh. 5.4 xhigh gives very deep, very high-signal reviews and catches serious bugs much more reliably. I think it's possible you're observing Opus 4.6's higher baseline acceptance rate instead of GPT 5.4's higher implementation quality bar.

The AI-assisted solo technical writer

ivanech — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:44:49 +0000

Article URL: https://buildwithfern.com/post/ai-assisted-technical-writer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555635

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ivanech in "Layoffs at Block"

ivanech — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:41:11 +0000

This feels similar to March 2020 when COVID was in Seattle. “It’s in the US but maybe it’s just a one-off.” We’ll see, I guess.

New comment by ivanech in "List animals until failure"

ivanech — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:09:53 +0000

this was really delightful. The Easter eggs in particular made it feel like someone was actually on the other side

New comment by ivanech in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

ivanech — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:16:00 +0000

I find Opus 4.5 very, very strong at matching the prevailing conventions/idioms/abstractions in a large, established codebase. But I guess I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing so I explicitly ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.

New comment by ivanech in "US Tech Force"

ivanech — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 20:58:33 +0000

I believe the new grad DOGE employees were GS-15s. So yes, it seems likely that they plan to hire at GS-14 or GS-15.

New comment by ivanech in "We tested 20 LLMs for ideological bias, revealing distinct alignments"

ivanech — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:15:20 +0000

tried replicating w/ a slightly different system prompt w/ sonnet-4.5 and got some different results, esp w/ progressive to conservative questions. Prompting seems pretty load-bearing here

The Eames Lounge Chair was always expensive

ivanech — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 18:46:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/eames-lounge-chair-price-history/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45629525

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ivanech in "AI and Home-Cooked Software"

ivanech — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 23:25:48 +0000

AI tools have been so good for me for making home-cooked software. As a new-ish parent, it’s so much easier to do stuff. I don’t need to go into extra-deep focus mode to learn how to center a div for the hundredth time, I can spend that precious focus time on the problems that matter / the core motivation.

The Eames Lounge Chair was always expensive

ivanech — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:12:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/eames-lounge-chair-price-history/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45581790

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The Eames Lounge Chair was always expensive

ivanech — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 13:44:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/eames-lounge-chair-price-history/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45568271

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ivanech in "The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe"

ivanech — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 15:39:18 +0000

I had a good laugh at the image showing that 2018 had a “quality focus”

I think Jonathan Blow gave his “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” talk (much stronger treatment of the subject matter) around that time, also about how software quality was only going down

New comment by ivanech in "Gold Prices Top $4k for First Time"

ivanech — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:31:07 +0000

> Gold has reached all time highs

this is true

> US debt (ie T-bills) selling at all time lows

this is not true unless you’re doing some kind of adjustment. For t bills, us03m yields were much higher 30-40 years ago.

> US equities are at all time highs

this is true

> USD falling day over day, month over month, year over year

if falling means inflation, yes in banal way. If falling means relative to other currencies, that’s the last 9 months or so. Previously the USD was quite strong

> US debt is falling in value because no one wants to buy it

this appears to be the hinge of the argument? It is not true. 10y yields have been down / flat since beginning of 2025 (i.e., price up). also tsy auctions remain well-subscribed / within historical range

New comment by ivanech in "‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]"

ivanech — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:40:54 +0000

I would not debase myself by causing the starvation of children.

Getting into Technical Writing: A Primer

ivanech — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:46:45 +0000

Article URL: https://devinlogan.org/2025/05/23/primer.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44638884

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ivanech in "My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures"

ivanech — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 21:58:25 +0000

Just got it at work today and it’s a dramatic step change beyond Cursor despite using the same foundation models. Very surprising! There was a task a month ago where AI assistance was a big net negative. Did the same thing today w/ Claude Code in 20ish minutes. And for <$10 in API usage!

Much less context babysitting too. Claude code is really good at finding the things it needs and adding them to its context. I find Cursor’s agent mode ceases to be useful at a task time horizon of 3-5 minutes but Claude Code can chug away for 10+ minutes and make meaningful progress without getting stuck in loops.

Again, all very surprising given that I use sonnet 4 w/ cursor + sometimes Gemini 2.5 pro. Claude Code is just so good with tools and not getting stuck.