Hacker News: johnfn

New comment by johnfn in "Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt"

johnfn — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:06:30 +0000

I remember, when I was younger, printing out MapQuest bike instructions, following them, and getting lost trying to find the next street -- and then feeling incredible when I finally found it. When GPS became so commonplace you could use it on any phone, I realized that the feeling of suddenly realizing where you were was gone forever. Of course you can only feel euphoric about finding a street if you felt at least equally despondent that you couldn't find it, so it's probably a worthwhile tradeoff. I feel somewhat similarly about Spotify. Yes, some things are lost, but you can't honestly tell me you think it was better before, right?

New comment by johnfn in ""No Feigning Surprise""

johnfn — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:55:40 +0000

You seem to be misinterpreting my comment, which can be summarized as "be kind to others and assume best intent".

New comment by johnfn in ""No Feigning Surprise""

johnfn — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:40:20 +0000

This is a sharply negative interpretation of behavior of people who may be acting genuinely, if without social grace. I think few people shocked that you don't know bash are displaying that surprise as a way to keep you in the out-group - I think they are surprised.

I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.

New comment by johnfn in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

johnfn — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:59:10 +0000

Honestly -- the thing that has impressed me the most about Fable is how diligent it is about testing its own changes. I think this is exactly what Simon is picking up here - Fable is absolutely heckbent on screenshotting that darn scroll bar and will stop at NOTHING until it manages it! In my own use I was also impressed how it proactively installed Playwright and set it up to test a FE change. The previous models treated testing more as an afterthought, which I thought was annoying. I always had to tell them to do it, and then sometimes I would get lazy and skip it. I've noticed Fable go to similar extremes when testing other things - like actually deploying my app to exercise new APIs, etc. It makes the results much better. The downside is that tasks take much longer - but that doesn't matter because we were all using worktrees / remote control to do other work asynchronously, right? Right?

New comment by johnfn in "Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

johnfn — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:47:24 +0000

I think Cmux is the incumbent in the "screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty" - any key differentiators here? https://cmux.com/

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?"

johnfn — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:41:32 +0000

I genuinely have a lot of fun coding with AI, possibly more than I used to have coding normally. It’s true that I don’t spend hours on a single problem any more, but I instead spend a lot of time thinking and researching higher level issues like architecture and design. I find this work to be very rewarding because I very much enjoy learning new things. I don’t know if I would call it a flow state in the same way that coding was a flow state, but I definitely have a lot of fun learning. For instance, yesterday I was learning a lot about AWS infra, which I found very enjoyable. Before that I was learning about Fly Sprites, which it turns out are a little broken, but it was still interesting to learn about them. Pre-AI I think coding was slow enough that I would be able to learn a new thing like this once every couple of weeks, because then you'd have to go spend a ton of time on the implementation work. Now the implementation work has compressed and I get to learn new things more often, which is fun.

When I send one agent off to do work I usually begin thinking about some other unrelated problem I also want done, and then I try to spin up a parallel agent to do that as well. The thinking itself is where a lot of the deep work happens for me IMO. I probably spend like 80% of my time thinking, researching and reviewing plans. The other 20% is actually promoting.

I see a lot of people saying that agents trivialize work now - like you just push a button and an answer comes out. This is so far from my experience I actually don’t know how to bridge the gap. If you are not spending a lot of time researching you are likely going to be asking the agent to do things that don’t really make sense.

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?"

johnfn — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:08:20 +0000

It's interesting that the guy providing an actual answer gets downvoted, and everyone saying "it's impossible" got upvoted.

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

johnfn — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:27:19 +0000

This is only "Funny" in the sense that it's "funny" that a high-performing startup can run the entire thing on a single huge Postgres instance and that mysteriously stops working after you hit a certain level of scale. Relationship count scales quadratically as you scale headcount. A single poor relationship can sour an entire team or worse. When your team is 5 people, it's trivial for e.g. the CEO to have the state of all relationships in the company in his head. As a company grows larger it gets harder. Once you surpass Dunbar's number it's virtually impossible. The function of 1:1s is to scale this.

New comment by johnfn in "Claude Fable 5"

johnfn — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:36:03 +0000

I used Fable to see if it could figure out an API or something for the full list of remote-control sessions that I had with Claude Code. It didn't know the API, so it started hacking the Claude Code executable itself to figure that out. Then it noticed it was doing that and it flagged its own approach as a cybersecurity violation.

Kind of hilarious. Hopefully Anthropic doesn't bring down the hammer on me.

New comment by johnfn in "Show HN: Gitdot – a better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust"

johnfn — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 02:33:50 +0000

It is entirely reasonable that you could use AI to build a product with no AI features. Why is that hypocritical? Especially for a product like a GitHub -- it's a reasonable take to say "AI is useful tool to produce code, but I don't want 851 random "Ask AI!" adornments all over my website when I just want to read the code."

New comment by johnfn in "Show HN: Gitdot – a better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust"

johnfn — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:45:21 +0000

This is unfair, and the vibe-coded swipe is unnecessary. Why would anyone continue working on a project if it's not seeing any adoption or interest? Many large successful apps were borne out of sharp pivots - Slack comes to mind.

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

johnfn — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:39:54 +0000

> That can't be true, or else the personal attacks, derisive and incendiary content you're describing wouldn't bother you!

FWIW, I think we agree on almost everything, but just a clarification on this point. I am perfectly fine (in fact I delight in reading) if HN is negative in the flavor of "You are completely wrong, here are sources 1 2 and 3 that show you exactly why you are wrong". I have read plenty of anti-AI writing on HN of that form and enjoyed it. OK, I don't love it when it's directed at me, but everyone needs to be told they are wrong sometimes. But I very strongly dislike "Only an inexperienced person could hold a view like that", i.e. personal attacks.

> No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!

Godspeed :)

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

johnfn — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:03:26 +0000

I'm with GP here, there is nothing to respond in what you actually said because you misunderstood the comment you replied to.

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

johnfn — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:05:30 +0000

Thank you for the very long and thoughtful comment. It's an fun and interesting idea to think about, and I certainly don't mind reading long tangents :) But I want to push back on it a tad: I think it misses my point a little bit. I completely am fine with HN being a negative place - I wouldn't have been here so long if this bothered me! But I don't think all divisiveness is made equal. And in particular, I think the divisiveness on HN about AI feels different than previous divisiveness. I think your argument hinges on how if you are pro-A you are much more likely to notice anti-A sentiment. This is true, but I think the quality of anti-A sentiment differs in this case from the past.

When TypeScript came out and for the first couple of years, I was the biggest TypeScript zealot on the planet. I loved it! There was a point when I typed T that the autosuggestions on iPhone would suggest "Typescript" :-) This all to say: when anti-Typescript sentiment popped up, I definitely noticed it, and it definitely annoyed me. (I still think back on jashkenas saying that he didn't see any point in TS because any good engineer wouldn't make the errors it catches and I just want to throttle him! But I digress...) And there definitely was a lot of it.

But there was a difference in quality between the anti-TS sentiment and the anti-AI sentiment. No one ever attacked my abilities as an engineer for saying I liked TS; no one ever said the things I built with TS were embarrassing or intern-quality like they have with AI. It never devolved into personal attacks the way that anti-AI commentariat pull out when they run out of other arguments.

I'd make a humble suggestion. I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster. I genuinely think it brings down the quality of discourse site-wide. (FWIW, I think the same about pro-AI incendiary content - very low-quality comments about how people are going to lose their jobs / become obsolete without AI should equally well be flagged, removed and banned.)

I know the HN moderator team is incredibly busy and I am very thankful for all you do!

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

johnfn — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:45:49 +0000

Your comment is a perfect example of the low-quality reflexivity negativity AI I am talking about. Yes, of course I built it! Why do I have to defend myself? What does it even mean that I "cheated someone out of a paycheck" -- it's my own hobby project!

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

johnfn — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:11:55 +0000

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the decade+ I have previously been on HN, happily sharing other things I built with other interesting technology -- and many of those things were much worse than what I built with AI!

I did see your thread earlier today and I admit was pleasantly surprised. Maybe HN is turning over a new leaf? I hope so. I honestly considered switching to X it was getting so bad :P

New comment by johnfn in "Hacker News, Sans AI"

johnfn — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:49:05 +0000

Just because some people are contributing to bad discourse doesn't mean that you also get permission to contribute to bad discourse. If you don't like it when people say you're going to be obsolete -- tell them! Don't hop into random spaces where no one is saying that and act negative! This just lowers the discourse quality everywhere. Very few people on HN are saying you are going to be obsolete if you don't use AI (I basically haven't seen a single person say this who hasn't been massively downvoted).

New comment by johnfn in "Hacker News, Sans AI"

johnfn — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:29:10 +0000

If you can find me even a single example of this I’d love to see it.

New comment by johnfn in "Hacker News, Sans AI"

johnfn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:56:59 +0000

It’s interesting how, as someone more pro-AI, I feel the exact opposite way - every comment thread just devolves into people saying AI is stupid (OK, perhaps modulo new model releases from frontier labs, those tend to be fairly positive). Like we had a thread about what your AI workflow is and people were coming in and saying they didn’t have one because AI is bad. Really? Do these people enter threads about what your favorite Rust library is and say they don’t have any and Rust is a bad language?

New comment by johnfn in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

johnfn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:24:17 +0000

I do genuinely wonder if you’re correct that other people will begin to expect it. I feel I was suddenly able to do stunning stuff about a year ago, and I recall thinking this is nice but everyone will catch on to my secret soon and I won’t be exceptional any more. But 12 months have passed and I don’t think this has really panned out yet. Weaker engineers just don’t seem to understand that they can just ask AI things. Eg the other day another engineer spent like 3 hours trying to hunt down a particular line of code so I asked AI and it found it in like 5 minutes. I showed that to him, but then he immediately got stuck trying to find something else for a few more hours, so again I asked AI etc. It’s very baffling.