Hacker News: kgilpin

New comment by kgilpin in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

kgilpin — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:48:53 +0000

One of the biggest gifts in life is to find a true passion. And for every passion there are two sides to the coin - the joy and the suffering. The agony and the ecstasy. It’s a gift to care so much; and it inspires.

New comment by kgilpin in "Show HN: Fractional jobs – part-time roles for engineers"

kgilpin — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 04:21:37 +0000

Yes. For someone who’s already financially comfortable, it’s nice to be able to stay in the game, keep working with great people, and make some money without having to deal with burnout.

Lots of people in tech like their jobs; they just like other things too. Personally I don’t know why I would want to stop working completely. It sounds boring. I love to build. Why ever stop?

New comment by kgilpin in "Tokens are getting more expensive"

kgilpin — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 01:59:28 +0000

Claude code does utilize both the full Sonnet model and the lighter Haiku model in an automatic way. When you exit a Claude code session, it gives you the stats (tokens, cost, etc). I expect there’s a way to get this in-session as well.

New comment by kgilpin in "Meta announces Oakley smart glasses"

kgilpin — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 16:33:46 +0000

I will miss being able to see people’s eyes.

New comment by kgilpin in "Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts"

kgilpin — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 17:10:28 +0000

Interestingly (to me) the SwiftUI Text element supports Markdown natively via AttributedString.

New comment by kgilpin in "Machine Code Isn't Scary"

kgilpin — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:23:33 +0000

Is it enough to play Human Resource Machine!? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Resource_Machine

Assembly as a game, I loved playing it.

New comment by kgilpin in ""AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing"

kgilpin — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:21:52 +0000

In the US, “Junior” pilots typically work as flight instructors until they have built up enough time to no longer be junior. 1500 flight hours is the essential requirement to be an airline pilot, and every hour spent giving instruction counts as a flight hour. It’s not the only way, but it’s the most common way. Airlines don’t fund this; pilots have to work their way up to this level themselves.

In Europe it’s different.

New comment by kgilpin in "Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored"

kgilpin — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:52:42 +0000

I feel the same way about code generation vs code review. Everyone knows there are deep problems with LLM generated code (primarily, lack of repo understanding, and proper use of library functions).

Deep, accurate, real-time code review could be of huge assistance in improving quality of both human- and AI-generated code. But all the hype is focused on LLMs spewing out more and more code.

New comment by kgilpin in "JetBrains IDEs Go AI: Coding Agent, Smarter Assistance, Free Tier"

kgilpin — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 14:21:51 +0000

In my experience working on JB extensions, Rider is the most different of the IDEs. Most people think of just IntelliJ and that’s the same code base as eg PyCharm. But Rider seems substantially different.

Show HN: OpenTips – Realtime OSS Code Review for Copilot and VSCode

kgilpin — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 20:46:27 +0000

Article URL: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SgtAirRaid.opentips

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698168

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by kgilpin in "America desperately needs more air traffic controllers"

kgilpin — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:00:22 +0000

Today, hacker news solves air traffic control with either:

a) More money

b) Video game technology

To truly get this problem, you really need to be in it. Either as a pilot or as a controller.

Watching threads like this reminds me that I have expertise within a couple of specialized domains and that’s it. Beyond those, I’m a tourist.

New comment by kgilpin in "Build It Yourself"

kgilpin — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:59:11 +0000

I’m curious if the OpenRewrite project has any value to you in keeping your Java stuff up to date?

(I’m not affiliated with it; just curious about strategies for upgrading and maintaining apps that use big frameworks.)

New comment by kgilpin in "Thoughts on a Month with Devin"

kgilpin — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 13:39:50 +0000

This is what’s needed to get the most out of these tools. You understand deeply how the tool works and so you’re able to optimize its inputs in order to get good results.

This puts you in the top echelon of developers using AI assisted coding. Most developers don’t have this deep of an understanding and so they don’t get results as good as yours.

So there’s a big question here for AI tool vendors. Is AI assisted coding a power tool for experts, or is it a tool for the “Everyman” developer that’s easy to use?

Usage data shows that the most adopted AI coding tool is still ChatGPT, followed by Copilot (even if you’d think it’s Cursor from reading HN :-))

New comment by kgilpin in "Thoughts on a Month with Devin"

kgilpin — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 13:33:16 +0000

I just want to note that Copilot is multi model now and can also run Sonnet.

New comment by kgilpin in "Ask HN: Teams using AI – how do you prevent it from breaking your codebase?"

kgilpin — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 19:33:16 +0000

I wrote a SWE bench solver. The SWE bench issues are on mature projects like Django.

The objective of my solver was to get good solutions using only RAG (no embeddings) and with minimal cost (low token count).

Three techniques, combined, yielded good results. The first was to take a TDD approach, first generating a test and then requiring the LLM to pass the test (without failing others). It can also trace the test execution to see exactly what code participates in the feature.

The second technique was to separate “planning” from “coding”. The planner is freed from implementation details, and can worry more about figuring out which files to change, following existing code conventions, not duplicating code, etc. In the coding phase, the LLM is working from a predefined plan, and has little freedom to deviate. It just needs to create a working, lint-free implementation.

The third technique was a gentle pressure on the solver to make small changes in a minimum number of files (ideally, one).

AI coding tools today generally don’t incorporate any of this. They don’t favor TDD, they don’t have a bias towards making minimal changes, and they don’t work from a pre-approved design.

Good human developers do these things, and this is a pretty wide gap between adept human coders and AI.

New comment by kgilpin in "Olympians turn to OnlyFans to fund dreams due to 'broken' finance system (2024)"

kgilpin — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 16:26:59 +0000

Sports is entertainment. It inspires people and brings joy. It brings people together. It sets positive examples of the rewards that can come from consistent effort and teamwork. Athletes are people making the most of the gifts they’ve been given. This is all laudable.

New comment by kgilpin in "I made $100K from a dick joke"

kgilpin — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 15:02:33 +0000

In my kids’ generation (college aged) they all use Facebook Marketplace.

New comment by kgilpin in "GitHub Copilot is now available for free"

kgilpin — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 03:24:38 +0000

FYI supermaven has joined Cursor

https://www.cursor.com/blog/supermaven

New comment by kgilpin in "Devin is now generally available"

kgilpin — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 19:18:09 +0000

People are saying it’s apples and oranges, but with Computer Use taken into account, this seems like a fair question.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/compute...

New comment by kgilpin in "The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding"

kgilpin — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 19:22:33 +0000

I like how you put the context and prompts into the foreground. In so many tools, it’s invisible. We all know that context and prompts are there - the operation of LLMs is well known. Yet tools try and hide this and pretend that they are magic, instead of exposing control points and handles for the developer to use.