Hacker News: mat_b

New comment by mat_b in "Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen"

mat_b — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 20:04:46 +0000

> Some level of randomness in our thought process is almost evolutionarily required to avoid becoming part of the larger super structure, similar to an ant colony.

Not really. Ants are superorganisms, they share more than half of their DNA with each other. You could think of each ant as being like a cell in a human.

New comment by mat_b in "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"

mat_b — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:43:56 +0000

What's your point? I can't do anything about that. All I can do is deal with the situation as it is right now and wait to see what happens.

New comment by mat_b in "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"

mat_b — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 03:54:49 +0000

It very much is a skill. You wont get good results by asking it to "go do X" and walking away from the desk. You have to know how to use it as a tool to: 1) research the task 2) develop a plan the agent can follow to complete the task 3) check the plan for completeness/issues

After a (potentially long) session of investigation and planning _then_ you let it code. Even just being aware of this process is part of the skill involved (then you have to actually get used to doing it effectively).

New comment by mat_b in "Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy"

mat_b — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:03:16 +0000

This would only move the needle further in the direction of a terrible user experience. This is exactly what we don't want.

New comment by mat_b in "ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector"

mat_b — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:46:30 +0000

> It’s a real tragedy of the commons

Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.

We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.

New comment by mat_b in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"

mat_b — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:35:50 +0000

Personally, I do enjoy it still. I'm able to focus more on architecture and the bigger picture now.

New comment by mat_b in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"

mat_b — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:05:37 +0000

It's writing nearly all of the code where I work. It also reviews all of the code (I review it as well). You still have to guide it and hold its hand though. I dont write code by hand anymore (and haven't in almost a year). The job is now about managing the bots, understanding the architecture and keep everything aligned.

New comment by mat_b in "Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?"

mat_b — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:55:22 +0000

What does your prompting look like for step 3 - pressure test the plans?

New comment by mat_b in "Meta's embrace of A.I. is making its employees miserable"

mat_b — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:56:37 +0000

Except that it's not preventable. Technology is always an arms race. If you don't create it, someone else will, and then they'll have the advantage and subjugate you, so you might as well be the one to do it first. Whatever it is that you're trying to prevent, someone is going to do it if it gives them power.

New comment by mat_b in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

mat_b — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:17:03 +0000

> The agent ran this command: curl -X POST https://backboard.railway.app/ ....

Why did you whitelist curl in cursor? Don't whitelist commands like "bash" or "curl" that can be used to execute arbitrary commands.

New comment by mat_b in "Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI"

mat_b — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:07:58 +0000

It's not as simple as that. The supply is being kept low to enrich housing investors.

New comment by mat_b in "Cursor 3"

mat_b — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:18:03 +0000

Exactly how I feel. If I wanted this agent-centric view without being able to easily see the code I would be using Claude Code.

I use Cursor because agents are not ready to be the ones driving. I need to drive. I still need to understand all the code (and easily browse it) and keep a close watch over what the AI is doing.

New comment by mat_b in "Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2"

mat_b — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:43:08 +0000

I did some experimenting recently and I'm quite convinced that when I use Comcasts DNS they are selling it to advertisers. I've switched to 1.1.1.1 simply because it annoys me that Comcast is doing this.

New comment by mat_b in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

mat_b — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:36:06 +0000

> So, try brainstorming the issue with Claude Code, talk it through so it's on the same page as you, ensure it's done research (web search, docs) to weigh the best solutions, and then enter plan mode so it generates a markdown plan file. From there you can read/review,tweak the plan file. Or have it implement it. Or you implement it.

This is exactly the workflow that works very well for me in Cursor (although I don't use their Plan Mode - I do my version of it). If you know the codebase well this can increase your speed/productivity quite a bit. Not trying to convince naysayers of this, their minds are already made up. Just wanted to chime in that this workflow does actually work very well (been using it for over 6 months).

New comment by mat_b in "California's new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report themselves"

mat_b — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:38:11 +0000

> Killing is bad... killing because you don't like $group is double-bad. Speeding is bad, speeding without a seatbelt is double-bad.

Why would either of those be double-bad? They're the same thing as the original.

If you don't want to wear your seatbelt and you like to risk your own life, then that's on you. Just like riding a motorcycle.

New comment by mat_b in "Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus"

mat_b — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:25:32 +0000

FYI horses are the product of domestication.

New comment by mat_b in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

mat_b — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:18:06 +0000

> we discovered 100s of hallucinated citations missed by the 3+ reviewers who evaluated each paper.

This says just as much about the humans involved.

New comment by mat_b in "60% of Legal Searches Now End Without a Click"

mat_b — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 23:18:28 +0000

How is this a bad thing for them? Now they don't have to pay for clicks from people who aren't interested in their services. People who want to hire a lawyer will still click.

New comment by mat_b in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

mat_b — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 03:42:32 +0000

I have been noticing this myself for the last couple of months. I cannot get the agent to stop masking failures (ex: swallowing exceptions) and to fail loudly.

That said, the premise that AI-assisted coding got worse in 2025 feels off to me. I saw big improvements in the tooling last year.

New comment by mat_b in "Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet"

mat_b — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:43:26 +0000

Haha. Been seeing this comment for at least 20 years now. Some things never change...