Hacker News: lazy_afternoons

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

lazy_afternoons — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:49:43 +0000

I know it isn't the original flow state but I get lost in conversations with Claude even when slow.

I have a couple of terminals open and work on at max 3 things.

A main task, an exploration task and another prompt/skill improvement or documenting an issue (or a proposal)

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

lazy_afternoons — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:35:20 +0000

A non technical domain expert might usually lack thought clarity. They might know what is right once they see it but they seldom know how to reach there, even with AI. They will write themselves into slop in 3 days.

The real moat I believe is the ability to hold the the problem in the head, isolate it and mentally design a way to structurally solve it iteratively.

Very few people have it. Much less common with domain experts.

I would rather bet on educating domain to the engineer than teaching a domain expert to architect software.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)"

lazy_afternoons — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:24:40 +0000

I once worked for a unicorn (1B valuation) company where there were there were <35 engineers and all of them reported to the technical founder.

No mangers, no product managers, no appraisal (30% hike or out)

The rule was "I will treat you like an adult and you have to act like one"

Easily the best company I worked for and best Colleuges.

But I have seen this model hiccup once it reached ~70 engineers.

May be because of the structure or may be it's difficult to hire more such engineers India. Might scale better in SF.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

lazy_afternoons — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:01:26 +0000

Surprised to see HN being bearish on this.

I have 10 years of experience. I am a reasonable engineer. I can tell you that about half of the hype on twitter is real. It is a real blessing for small teams.

We have 100k DAU for a consumer crud app. We built and maintain everything in-house with 3 engineers. This would have taken atleast 10 engineers 3-4 years back.

We don't have a bug list. We are not "vibe coding" , 2 of us understand almost all of the codebase. We have processes to make sure the core integrity of codebase doesn't go for a toss.

None has touched the editor in months.

Even the product folks can raise a PR for small config changes from slack.

Velocity is through the roof and code quality is as good if not better than when we write by hand.

We refactor almost A LOT more than before because we can afford to.

I love it.

Name your projects something fun

lazy_afternoons — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:07:47 +0000

Article URL: https://substack.com/inbox/post/181413808

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255560

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

lazy_afternoons — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:39:31 +0000

If true, this is the funniest thing I have seen an LLM generate.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Programming peaked"

lazy_afternoons — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:09:17 +0000

Wait until he discovers vercel and nextjs.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "School cell phone bans and student achievement"

lazy_afternoons — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 10:18:12 +0000

I am reasonably confident that Smart Phones will take the route of cigarettes.

Restricted to adults over 21 years of age.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Why I stopped using JSON for my APIs"

lazy_afternoons — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 05:51:53 +0000

IIRC from the red wild boar book, JSONs biggest win is that it got the adoption.

Getting everyone to agree on a standard was/is/will be the tougher part.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "All it takes is for one to work out"

lazy_afternoons — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 09:57:02 +0000

Completely Agree.

Both Romans and Mongols have lost/retreated many battles. They just had to regroup and raise another army over and over again. Some of their opponents could not even afford the war even after winning over them multiple times.

The other sides simply were more fragile, where you were defending and once your city falls, you are done.

Avoid risk of ruin. Keep the ability of taking multiple shots with upside in your favor.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "We're learning more about what Vitamin D does"

lazy_afternoons — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 02:51:02 +0000

There is a 5000 years old epic called Ramayana which dedicates a significant part of it to a conversation between the protagonist Ram and his guru, agastya.

The summary of that entire conversation is this:

If you ever feel demotivated, defeated or dull just pray to the sun or go into the sunlight.

This message was repeated dozens of times over and over with various metaphors.

I think they were trying to hammer the point that sunlight solves a lot of issues.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "You should write an agent"

lazy_afternoons — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:52:32 +0000

Seriously, what is the advantage of tools at all. Why not implement custom string based triggers.

First of all, the call accuracy is much higher.

Second, you get more consistent results across models.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Auraphone: A simple app to collect people's info at events"

lazy_afternoons — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:58:53 +0000

I built exactly this in 2016. I realised that Bluetooth requirement from both parties is too much friction.

It worked way better with a QR code.

That way there is proof of presence and the recieving person need not have the app installed.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Show HN: Autism Simulator"

lazy_afternoons — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 02:52:54 +0000

This is pretty interesting.

I wonder why in my 30 years of lived experience (in India), I never met or heard of anyone being autistic or needing meds for mental health, even amongst the software engineers. But this seems to be fairly prevalent in the US.

It might be under diagnosis but medical services and pharma are extremely cheap and fairly competent, at least for the engineers.

May be they don't openly talk about it due to stigma.

I can't imagine what they would go through here, it's a extremely social culture where you are socially forced into group festivals, gatherings and frequent visits from relatives.

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production?"

lazy_afternoons — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 16:03:05 +0000

We use it for lead quality assessment, detecting bad language, scoring language on subtle skills etc

Pretty much 5-6 niche classification use cases.

You're not buying a discount. You're buying a behaviour

lazy_afternoons — Sun, 25 May 2025 16:18:50 +0000

Article URL: https://ravitejakanta.substack.com/p/youre-not-buying-a-discount-youre

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088863

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "Round Rects Are Everywhere"

lazy_afternoons — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 03:26:32 +0000

Loved it. Will remember this everytime I add "rounded" in tailwind. :)

New comment by lazy_afternoons in "What to Learn? Cpp vs. Go"

lazy_afternoons — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 15:43:53 +0000

what about systems like game engines and softwares like figma. People still use cpp there. Do you see go or go-like languages taking more in this space ?

What to Learn? Cpp vs. Go

lazy_afternoons — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 03:58:46 +0000

I have less than 10 yrs of exp and primarily focused on web, JS(node, react) and kotlin.

Now I want to try my hand in building low level stuff like parsers, small KV stores and some network programming.

Go seems to be more approachable for my goals but I have the FOMO of not learning to manage memory. I want to be able to work on performance critical stuff later.

I used some Cpp in college and I went through some tutorials (learn go with tests) in GO. I like them both.