Hacker News: michaelsalim

New comment by michaelsalim in "Show HN: Retrace – reverse debugging for production CPython applications"

michaelsalim — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:04:15 +0000

Congrats to the team for the launch! I helped build a part of this in the past.

The repo is complex but at its core, this is software to record execution without the performance & storage penalty that would usually come with recording all of production.

To do that, they need to make sure that they record anything this is not deterministic, while leaving code that is deterministic to be executed during replay time.

To be honest, I think this is a really hard problem, almost impossible I'd say. There's just so many things that can cause the same execution to cause different results. But last I've seen, the team is slowly squashing each of the edge cases. I think they've now gotten it to be quite stable.

If everything goes well, this is very exciting and I think can revolutionise how we debug production code as an industry. I unfortunately don't run Python code so I can't meaningfully test this. Here's hoping it takes off and one day it'll be ported to the languages I use!

New comment by michaelsalim in "Show HN: adamsreview – better multi-agent PR reviews for Claude Code"

michaelsalim — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:40:29 +0000

Quite a huge one, but here's one :) https://github.com/Vija02/TheOpenPresenter/pull/170

New comment by michaelsalim in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

michaelsalim — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:31:27 +0000

Personally i think the challenge of testing never really changed with AI. You need to know what you want to specifically test before writing/vibe coidng with it. Otherwise it'll just manufacture tests that always passes and are of 0 value.

If some component doest benefit from being extensively tested, then it's still the same today. The difference is now it's so easy to generate something, no matter how useless it is. Worse part is, no one cares. Test passes, it doesn't affect production, line coverage increases, managers think the software is more tested, developers just let a prompt do everything. It's all just testing theatre.

I think E2E is the more important than ever. AI is pretty good at getting the local behaviour correct. So unit tests are of less value. Same can't be said for the system as a whole. The best part is, AI is actually pretty good at writing E2E tests. Ofc, given that you already know what you want to test

New comment by michaelsalim in "Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller"

michaelsalim — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:58:01 +0000

Looking great. I'll give it a try later on once things stabilize a bit. In the meantime, does anyone know what's going on in this space? Seems to me like a lot is changing over the past year. Eg: react-player new version, taken over by Mux. And also I did realize Video.js is sponsored by Mux. And also seemingly different companies working together.

New comment by michaelsalim in "How I'm Productive with Claude Code"

michaelsalim — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:39:23 +0000

Pretty sure they're the same thing. The second link is on how to use swc with nestjs.

New comment by michaelsalim in "OpenAI – How to delete your account"

michaelsalim — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:20:08 +0000

Even when it's not free, you can't even guarantee you aren't being routed to something else

New comment by michaelsalim in "I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard"

michaelsalim — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 01:37:55 +0000

While this is true in many places, i believe it is also quite untrue in many more. For example where I live, it was snowing last week. Quite cold but you can't tell csuse the snow already disappeared by the morning. And then suddenly it was sunny a few days after. Today, it was as sunny as the past few days, but the temperature was quite warm. Couldn't tell just by looking outside.

New comment by michaelsalim in "I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard"

michaelsalim — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 01:27:18 +0000

Others have mentioned why. But I also want to add that feeling the temperature over the window might not tell an accurate picture of how cold/hot it could feel over time. I've had instances where I dressed for how cold it felt, only to find myself freezing because I didn't feel the breeze during that short moment I sticked my head out.

New comment by michaelsalim in "Coding is when we're least productive"

michaelsalim — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:18:05 +0000

I see where you're coming at. But don't underestimate the amount of design work that goes into making a good chair. It probably took more time than your think, which transforms them into the person who can craft the chair

New comment by michaelsalim in "The recurring dream of replacing developers"

michaelsalim — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:57:50 +0000

For me what supports this are things outside of software. If a company or regime wants to build something, they can't just say what they want and get exactly what they envision. If human minds can't figure out what other human wants, how could a computer do it?

New comment by michaelsalim in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

michaelsalim — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:56:44 +0000

https://michaelsalim.co.uk

New comment by michaelsalim in "The next two years of software engineering"

michaelsalim — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 04:00:59 +0000

I do agree that the scale has expanded a lot. But this is true with any other fields. Does that mean that you need to learn everything? Well at some point it becomes unfeasible.

See doctors for example, you learn a bit of everything. But then if you want to specialise, you choose one.

New comment by michaelsalim in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

michaelsalim — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:19:10 +0000

I use pay as you go for this very reason, so the limit is my pocket haha. It does make me conscious to keep it under $20 per month though.

New comment by michaelsalim in "Web development is fun again"

michaelsalim — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 07:44:54 +0000

For most of my AI uses, I already have an implementation in mind. The prompt is small enough that most of the time, the agent would get it 90% there. In a way, it's basically an advanced autocomplete.

I think this is quite nice cause it doesn't feel like code review. It's more of a: did it do it? Yes? Great. Somewhat? Good enough, i can work from there. And when it doesn't work, I just scrap that and re-prompt or implement it manually.

But I do agree with what you say. When someone uses AI without making the code their own, it's a nightmare. I've had to review some PRs where I feel like I'm prompting AI rather than an engineer. I did wonder if they simply put my reviews directly to some agent...

New comment by michaelsalim in "Show HN: Gaming Couch – a local multiplayer party game platform for 8 players"

michaelsalim — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 12:03:58 +0000

I saw this from another post and was going to try it out but lost the link. Thanks for posting here again! Will try it out next time when I have a group of people around

New comment by michaelsalim in "Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options"

michaelsalim — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 10:13:35 +0000

Why wouldn't you want that? Genuinely curious

New comment by michaelsalim in "A simple habit that saves my evenings"

michaelsalim — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:01:27 +0000

If you'll just delete it anyway, i don't think any amount of tooling would help you with that

New comment by michaelsalim in "What’s New in PostgreSQL 18 – a Developer’s Perspective"

michaelsalim — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 22:21:28 +0000

Yes. I was looking for something like this. And I've had people ask me about this before too

New comment by michaelsalim in "Show HN: Signage Sync"

michaelsalim — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:19:00 +0000

What do you mean by queuing inbound and outbound signals?

New comment by michaelsalim in "Why haven't local-first apps become popular?"

michaelsalim — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:01:17 +0000

Never said you shouldn't. Tailscale uses a bunch of different techniques including hole punching for it to work. If that's what you need, go ahead. I opted for Iroh for a few different reasons but Tailscale is an awesome choice too.