Hacker News: mattgreenrocks

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

mattgreenrocks — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:33:25 +0000

Yep. There's also been a relentless push for the past two decades or so to standardize many aspects of software development:

* programming languages (JS)

* frameworks (React)

* open source libraries

* platforms (Web, mostly)

* design systems (shadcn for newer apps)

Guess what makes it easier for automation to come in?

Our need for it to be easy and standard contributed to the success of LLM use in software engineering. I suspect it would have done well without some of those factors, but it may have taken longer.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II"

mattgreenrocks — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:46:09 +0000

I read this paper as trying to be as serious as l the folk wisdom around the anthropomorphization of LLMs. Which is to say: not at all. :)

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:53:54 +0000

Just a small reminder that we aren't wanted ;)

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:52:17 +0000

Makes it much easier to use the Internet less. They're poisoning the ground water of the well, effectively.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:47:07 +0000

I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?"

mattgreenrocks — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:38:41 +0000

How I feel about programming is often a reflection of how I feel about my own internal world because it continues to be a part of my identity. Once I found a job that valued my desire to actually build things, things started to sort themselves out rather quickly.

Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

mattgreenrocks — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:25:02 +0000

The only way many people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their hands on it.

Let them.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Just Use Go"

mattgreenrocks — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:44:36 +0000

I am so over the presumptive blog post tone personally.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:44:43 +0000

That clarifies it...thanks!

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:20:17 +0000

Maybe we can just not give it access to production databases ever?

Not picking on you, but AI maximalism has infected tech to the point where we talk about how to stop AI from deleting prod instead of seeing that giving AI access to prod is a foolish idea to begin with.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:00:26 +0000

The most exasperating thing about the incident is how much of the media either tried to pin it on AI and/or Railway. The whole thing only took place because the guy FAFO’d by having AI work with prod directly.

Yet the narrative was mostly not about accountability for him. If I was a dumbass and deleted prod and wrote a post about it, nobody would care. Put an AI in there and all of the sudden it’s newsworthy. Ridiculous.

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

mattgreenrocks — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:04:37 +0000

The takeaway here is to make this sort of scenario impossible in the future. It’s not hard to make that happen, but it might mean you need to manually interact with prod.

Anything else is just gambling.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

mattgreenrocks — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:56:32 +0000

Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.

The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "GPT-5.5"

mattgreenrocks — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:15:29 +0000

It’s not surprising to me that the same crowd that cheers for the demise of software engineering skills invented its own notion of AI prompting skills.

Too bad they can veer sharply into cringe territory pretty fast: “as an accomplished Senior Principal Engineer at a FAANG with 22 years of experience, create a todo list app.” It’s like interactive fanfiction.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:22:12 +0000

Odd, everyone was insisting this would "democratize" programming though.

Guess it democratizes it if you have money, huh?

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7"

mattgreenrocks — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:18:07 +0000

These people have always existed. Hell, they are here, too. Now they have a new thing to delegate responsibility to.

And no, I don't understand them at all. Taking responsibility for something, improving it, and stewarding it into production is a fantastic feeling, and much better than reading the comment section. :)

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Union types in C# 15"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:14:16 +0000

I’m convinced the comment section hates multi-paradigm languages because you can misuse them. And it has features that may not be needed, which triggers this weird purist mentality of, “gee, it would be so much better if it didn’t have feature X.” But oftentimes that’s just pontification for its own sake, and they aren’t really interested in trying it out. Feature X remains something they won’t use, so it should go.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Explore union types in C# 15"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:00:38 +0000

Yep, up there with ActiveRecord as the finest ORM I’ve ever used. What seals it for me is the low coupling it imposes on entities.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:30:27 +0000

Perhaps we're in an AI summer and a tech winter. Winter is always the time when people hole up, dream, and work on whatever big thing is next.

We're about due for some new computing abstractions to shake things up I think. Those won't be conceived by LLMs, though they may aid in implementing them.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:27:30 +0000

Yeah. Oftentimes get crickets here when I talk along those lines. Can't tell if apathy, learned helplessness, or obliviousness. Regardless, devs seem like an extremely docile labor group based on how they react to this and other economic pressures.