I would imagine that for a non-engineer trying to code it would be quite useful / deliver a better result / less liable to end up in total mess. But for experienced engineers it quickly felt like overkill / claude itself just gets better and better. Particularly once we got agent swarms I left GSD and don't think I'll be back. But I would recommend it to non coders trying to code.

But now we're scaling, so need to figure out how to do a technical interview again. But... man, all my technical interview methods feel obsolete / inadequate. Seems pretty silly to not let a candidate use Cursor/Claude when I would 100% be expecting them to use it every day. But also if we just vibe something together it'll be darn hard to figure out what they actually know.

Looking for a process for mid to sr level.

Anybody feel like they've figured this out yet?

- "Take a look at this PR / codebase" doesn't age well, because "claude make me a powerpoint that ELI5s this codebase" is better.

- Simple coding puzzle was never very good, but at least showed they could type. All of this is just LLM fodder now, do I really care?

- Complex system debug / comprehension type questions are always hit-or-miss in my experience. I feel like any setup I do to make a tough to solve problem will be trivial for Claude, so doesn't feel authentic either.

- System design at ~whiteboard still feels reasonable / CS basics.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44389544

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Context: I run a FF company (https://prefab.cloud/)

There are multiple distinct benefits to be had from feature flagging. Because it's the "normal" path, most FF products bundle them all together, but it's useful to split them out.

- The code / libraries for evaluating rules. - The UI for creating rules, targeting & roll outs. - The infrastructure for hosting the flags and providing real-time updates. - Evaluation tracking / debugging to help you verify what's happening.

If you don't need #1 and #2 there, you might decide to DIY and build it yourself, but I think you shouldn't have to. Most feature flag tools today are usable in an offline mode. For Prefab it is: https://docs.prefab.cloud/docs/how-tos/offline-mode You can just do a CLI command to download the flags. Then boot the client off a downloaded file. With our pricing model that's totally free because we're really hardly doing anything for you. Most people use this functionality for CI environments, but I think it's a reasonable way to go for some orgs. It has 100% reliability and that's tough to beat.

You can do that if you DIY too, but there's so many nice to haves in actually having a tool / UI that has put some effort into it that I would encourage people not to go down that route.

Saying gRPC hides the internals is a joke. You’ll get internals all right, when you’re blasting debug logging trying to figure out what the f is going on causing 1/10 requests to fail and fine tuning 10-20 different poorly named and timeout / retry settings.

Hours lost fighting with maven plugins. Hours lost debugging weird deadline exceeded. Hours lost with LBs that don’t like the esoteric http2. Firewall pain meaning we had to use Standard api anyway. Crappy docs. Hours lost trying to get error messages that don’t suck into observability.

I wish I’d never heard of it.

It's particularly worth taking a look if you have a postgres table that has the potential to become enormous.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41926585

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I remember spending an extra $30 to at 2am to overnight "Gripe Water" in the hope that it would get my kid to sleep. #takeMyMoney

I hope 2024 is the year where we realize that if we make the log levels dynamically update-able we can have our cake and eat it too. We feel stuck in a world where all logging is either useless bc it's off or on and expensive. All you need is a way to easily modify log level off without restarting and this gets a lot better.

Feels like 100 years ago.

Just got meta glasses. Curious whether they'll steal another 15% of my traffic. Primarily the "looking up a random fact for my kids" volume.

If you’re lookin for a book that has absolutely kept this sense of wonder, “Immune” by Philipp Dettmer has this in spades. Highly recommended.

we screwed around with it on a live stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/3YhBoox4JvQ?si=dkni5LY3EALnWVuE...

If you're writing something that will run on someone's local machine I think we're at the point where you can start building with the assumption that they'll have a local, fast, decent LLM.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39855186

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I won't spoil the surprise, but I did end up with one takeaway that I'll remember going forward when diagnosing.

1. Some of these are primarily updated in a UI, some are driven from some other system. Flags are customer UI, but Auth is often customer's customer (admins setting RBAC) or derived from SAML Role / etc.

2. There are very different personas / different blast-radiuses for different changes. This means that there should be different interfaces for the creation and administration of the different type of things.

3. Different scales. Dynamic configuration / feature flags are great, but you don't want the rule payload to be GB, which you would have if you tried to store fine grained permissions inside it. Zanzibar is awesome and should be available to more people.

4. It would be best if we could all agree on the names & types of these objects. I think schema files and code-generation are underused.

5. My inclination is that entitlements are just feature flags under the covers, but that there's enough different that a custom UX is warranted.

6. It's easy to add a ton of latency to applications with this stuff. First we spend 50ms getting the user... then we go get the billing for 50ms... then we get the entitlements for 50ms... There are big gains to be had by having this solved holisticaly.

hmu anytime jdwyer at prefab.cloud would love to hear your thoughts.

I'm really interested in getting stronger opinions here about how to set people up for success. Being the founder of a feature flag company I feel like I'm a rope dealer.

I'm really interesting in providing good authorization primitives as well. This is kinda the whole reason/vision for why Prefab exists. If you have an authorization tool and a separate feature flag tool and a separate billing tool. You're going to be tempted to do some weird un-holy things. If you can use one provider for it, then we can really help when it comes to putting things in the right place. My dream is that you can type user.can_do?(:thing) and get back a response that has checked the authorization, ff & entitlements system and gives you a clear and comprehensible answer.

Sooo many usage based pricing things out there (ironically with totally non-transparent pricing), but I agree that it doesn't feel like the right solution has been built yet.