Hacker News: jonnycoder

New comment by jonnycoder in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering"

jonnycoder — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:05:44 +0000

This is a great point. I find myself in the middle, where I appreciate and look up to past coworkers who were way better than me at attention-to-detail, but I have a tendency to focus on delivering actual results quickly with maintainable and easy to read code. A lot of engineering teams go into their own world on adhering to best practices with no eye on inefficiencies in the process that causes days of delay because it makes them feel better. I definitely believe in shift-left (findings bugs early saves a lot more time than finding them in production). I believe in balancing fast delivery with quality/process.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's"

jonnycoder — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:12:35 +0000

Technology in the form of computers, cell phones, and AI have been getting cheaper and better. Access to information is another one but that requires agency to take advantage of and get the benefits. This could be personal health, starting/running your own business, using ai to help create ads for your business, etc.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

jonnycoder — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:36:30 +0000

I spent the last 6 months building Elk Finder (https://elkfinder.com) and just launched a few weeks ago. It's a mapping web app similar to onX Hunt, except I have specific layers for finding ideal elk habitat in September and October (the primary archery and rifle hunting months).

New comment by jonnycoder in "Claude Opus 4.8"

jonnycoder — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:12:27 +0000

No, no it's been pretty easy with software engineering. I work on two types of projects and it's very easy to ask claude for a plan, then have gpt 5.5 rip it to shreds and find legit issues, and vice versa. If both 5.5 and claude 4.8 can independently create a plan and both find no critical or high issues, then we will be at that point.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

jonnycoder — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:19:53 +0000

I had a similar idea. I picked 10 lbs of morels last year, first time picking. It was a recent burn area from 8 months prior. I was just back out to the same area and there are no morels, but lots of small orange cap looking mushrooms. chatGPT pro said first year is the best and then it drops off on the second year. I might try a much higher elevation spot in a week or two, but it really sucks. Last year I was finding morels on southeast facing slopes. I'm sure north slopes produced later on as I saw people coming off the hill when I drove by.

New comment by jonnycoder in "I want to live like Costco people"

jonnycoder — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:42:33 +0000

It's a gimmick only for those who get sucked into buying things that they don't need. I've been a Costco shopper for decades, and sure have succumbed to some useless stuff, but my Costco list is 90% the same month to month. I get appalled when I see the same items on my list, that are smaller and in a pack of 1 instead of 2-4, for more money at other stores. If electronics were just like food, it would be like seeing a Macbook Pro for $2000 everywhere but it was $799 at Costco.

New comment by jonnycoder in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

jonnycoder — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:08:05 +0000

Are you ok with ciggarete smoke then if you are ok with marijuana smoke?

New comment by jonnycoder in "Show HN: Skrun – Deploy any agent skill as an API"

jonnycoder — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:10:39 +0000

This is clever and provides a clean alternative to using custom plugins and mcp servers for doing code reviews.

For example, with the degradation of Claude in the past 1-2 months, I am always asking Codex to review Claude's plans and vice versa and I get excellent results that way.

Also, making a skill an API call allows for easy deployment if the security around tool calling could be isolated in an ephemeral sandbox.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

jonnycoder — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:55:31 +0000

I agree, I use codex 5.4 xhigh as my reviewer and it catches major issues with Opus 4.6 implementation plans. I'm pretty close to switching to codex because of how inconsistent claude code has become.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

jonnycoder — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:53:46 +0000

Everything in our life is a black box, but I agree that depending on non-deterministic and sporadic quality black boxes is a huge red flag.

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

jonnycoder — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:51:01 +0000

I do the same but I often find that the subtasks are done in a very lazy way.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder"

jonnycoder — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:40:54 +0000

Yea I went through my global claude skills and /context yesterday because claude was performing terribly. I deleted a bunch of stuff including memory and anecdotally got better results later on in the day.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Why I'm Not Worried About Running Out of Work in the Age of AI"

jonnycoder — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:58:44 +0000

It’s shifting for knowledge workers too, we just need to pivot. I have had many app ideas for a while and now ai lets me build them quickly. Access to education and knowledge led to your advanced eduction, now access to cheap/fast building leads to products execution. Use your phd brain to come up with a well researched idea/plan and then go execute.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Despite Doubts, Federal Cyber Experts Approved Microsoft Cloud Service"

jonnycoder — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:54:30 +0000

Thanks I will try that!

New comment by jonnycoder in "Despite Doubts, Federal Cyber Experts Approved Microsoft Cloud Service"

jonnycoder — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:36:06 +0000

Their support team likes to sit on things for a while too. I'm on day 4 of waiting for Azure to approve my support request to increase Azure Batch vCPUs from default of 4 to 20 for ESv3 series. I signed up last week and converted to a paid account. I'm going to use Google Cloud Batch today instead.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems"

jonnycoder — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:37:57 +0000

I tend to agree. I spent a lot of time revising skills for my brownfield repo, writing better prompts to create a plan with clear requirements, writing a skill/command to decompose a plan, having a clear testing skill to write tests and validate, and finally having a code reviewer step using a different model (in my case it's codex since claude did the development). My last PR was as close to perfect as I have got so far.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

jonnycoder — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:23:48 +0000

That's pretty cool. I'm working in maplibre myself and your json maps seems like it could also be used to demo a workflow or tutorial in a mapping product.

New comment by jonnycoder in "LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first"

jonnycoder — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:59:08 +0000

Prompting is just step 1. Creating and reviewing a plan is step 2. Step 0 was iterating and getting the right skills in place. Step 3 is a command/skill that decomposes the problem into small implementation steps each with a dependency and how to verify/test the implementation step. Step 4 is execute the implementation plan using sub agents and ensuring validation/testing passes. Step 5 is a code review using codex (since I use claude for implementation).

New comment by jonnycoder in "MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%"

jonnycoder — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:27:58 +0000

It feels like the late 1990s all over again, but instead of html and sql, it’s coding agents. This time around, a lot of us are well experienced at software engineering and so we can find optimizations simply by using claude code all day long. We get an idea, we work with ai to help create a detailed design and then let it develop it for us.

New comment by jonnycoder in "Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use"

jonnycoder — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 23:12:09 +0000

I like your website design, especially the two-column layout in most sections once I get past the hero image (full size screenshot). I found myself looking at all the images. The downside is that I did not really get any motivation to try it out or really understand how it could help me.

I am a backend software engineer so I'm always on the lookout for a way to easily and simply create a professional looking landing page. Therefore I'm always asking the question... is there a template I can choose from and just start filling it in? Just yesterday I found a figma template hosted on figma.site and I used chrome devtools to edit the hero text and navbar and got instant results .. as in I sort of liked it. Typography, spacing, use of color, detailed data presentation (ie bullet points, 2 column layout, etc), and fill-in images are my starting point (as an amateur designer). I could spend hours tweaking a design but I would rather just copy some existing component designs and call it a day. Hope this helps.