Hacker News: olafmol

New comment by olafmol in "Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)"

olafmol — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:37:37 +0000

An LLM should not "generate specs", a human should. The LLM can work from the specs. It can never infer meaning from a vague prompt. If so, it will start guessing. Every human that ever did functional specification or information analysis at some point knows this. Or has learned the hard way, something with assumptions and asses ;)

New comment by olafmol in "HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'"

olafmol — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:12:08 +0000

Gitea might be an option also.

New comment by olafmol in "HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'"

olafmol — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:09:25 +0000

Out of interest: what does "better AI integration" mean? Any specific functional or non-functional requirements?

New comment by olafmol in "HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'"

olafmol — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:07:12 +0000

Out of interest: what VCS where you using with CircleCI? (as CircleCI is VCS agnostic)

New comment by olafmol in "Soft launch of open-source code platform for government"

olafmol — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:03:08 +0000

Correction: Gitlab is not Dutch. It has a Dutch co-founder, and was a B.V. for about one year before moving to the US and become an Inc. The original founder is from Ukraine.

New comment by olafmol in "My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs"

olafmol — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:03:18 +0000

Let engineers do Vibe-accounting because, AI.

New comment by olafmol in "GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams"

olafmol — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:20:14 +0000

Debug with SSH(1) is still one of our (CircleCI) most loved and praised features. I really believe that these little QoL features can make a world of difference for sw developers and engineers, and this stays a strong focus for us.

1: https://circleci.com/docs/guides/execution-managed/ssh-acces...

(Disclaimer: i work at CircleCI)

New comment by olafmol in "Ask HN: What CI do you use instead of GitHub Actions?"

olafmol — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:15:11 +0000

This is exactly what my team told me when they switched from Concourse CI to CircleCI. I was surprised, this wasn't really discussed, but the pressure on the team to deliver features was increasing, and they were struggling to much with all the tooling instead of delivering functionality. So they deciced to switch to something not so sexy but dependable and stable. Funny thing, about 1 year later we got acquired by CircleCI :)

I like to compare CircleCI to a Volvo, not the most sexy thing in the world, but when you need something dependable that gets the job done and helps you to focus on what really matters, getting from A to B, it's one of the bettter choices.

(disclaimer, i'm still with CircleCI)

New comment by olafmol in "GitHub is down again"

olafmol — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:08:41 +0000

I think we (CircleCI) are doing quite well: https://status.circleci.com/

New comment by olafmol in "Matrix messaging gaining ground in government IT"

olafmol — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:58:38 +0000

It’s open source right? You know what to do ;)

New comment by olafmol in "Native Instruments GmbH is in preliminary insolvency"

olafmol — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:08:32 +0000

Almost nothing i assume. NI really lost the plot several years ago when the original founders left the company. Crappy after-sales support, lack of product vision and corresponding crappy execution, and a ton of technical debt all over their product-range. Plus competitors made better/right moves, came alongside, and then moved faster and better, leaving NI in the dust. It's sad to see a company that once was leading in several categories now in this state.

New comment by olafmol in "Launch a Debugging Terminal into GitHub Actions"

olafmol — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:33:42 +0000

We (CircleCI) are still there, and doing just fine :) Out of interest, what are you currently missing and what would those "essential" V2 features be? tnx for sharing your thoughts!

New comment by olafmol in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

olafmol — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:26:56 +0000

I'd like to point out that CircleCI is typically faster (and more consistent) than GH Actions, and also offers a free tier (with more free build credits for opensource projects: https://circleci.com/open-source/)

Personally I believe that GH Actions' adoption was mostly a case of "we already use github as our VCS, so we get Actions for free with our MS licenses" combined with "hey, we can easily use all those Actions that people put online" (with all the security and compliancy issues that come with such a YOLO mindset lol)

(Disclaimer: i work for CircleCI)

New comment by olafmol in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

olafmol — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:05:57 +0000

It's not obfuscated. The free plan gives you a max of 5 concurrent self-hosted runners. If you need more you can upgrade your plan: https://circleci.com/pricing/#comparison-table

There simply is no free lunch, somewhere someone needs to spend effort and time on managing the orchestration layer for the runners, and there is also network traffic and storage in play that costs money. If you need a future-proof CI/CD platform, it takes some investment. I agree that the Github "pay per minute" approach doesn't feel right, most people would probably find a "pay per orchestration job" or something more acceptable.

Anyway, there are alternatives out there :)

New comment by olafmol in "GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst"

olafmol — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:34:29 +0000

Agreed that caching needs (and can be, and will be) improved.

New comment by olafmol in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

olafmol — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 21:45:12 +0000

CircleCI does only charge for self-hosted runners generated egress and/or artifact storage:

"Any Network Egress to CircleCI will be charged. At this current time, this includes CircleCI Caches, Workspaces, and Artifacts and will be charged at the normal rate according to your Usage Controls.

The only network traffic that will result in billing is accrued through restoring caches and workspaces, and downloading artifacts to self-hosted runners. Retention of artifacts, workspace, and cache objects will result in billing for storage usage.

Since your builds will not be running on CircleCI's Infrastructure, you will not be charged compute credits"

https://support.circleci.com/hc/en-us/articles/2064321965685...

I think that's fair. In my personal opinion most people started using GitHub Actions because it “came for free with the VCS and/or our MS contract” and it was “good enough for the job”. Now might be a good time to look around at the alternatives again. There is a reason that f.e. CircleCI is doing fully focused CI/CD for 10+ years and is still going strong. Plenty of businesses don’t want to put all their eggs in one (MS) basket, for all kinds of reasons. I guess today one of these reasons became obvious.

Disclaimer: I work at CircleCI.

New comment by olafmol in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

olafmol — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 21:19:25 +0000

This. There are plenty of good/better CICD solutions out there, but it's tricky to compete with "comes for free with our VCS". I guess it's clear now there is no such thing as a free lunch. I feel it's a good thing for the "CICD industry" that people will be looking around to alternatives, and do a honest Total Cost of Ownership analysis.

New comment by olafmol in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

olafmol — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:49:50 +0000

"That said, most teams don't self-host purely to save money"

I think most do. Or at least the infrastructure/compute costs are not coming from their own dept budget anymore ;)

New comment by olafmol in "GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst"

olafmol — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:58:29 +0000

CircleCI made great steps the last few years, f.e. to better support proper DRY working, supporting OPA policies-as-code, VSCode extensions with "dry-run" options.

For some examples of more advanced usecases take a look: https://circleci.com/blog/platform-toolkit/

Disclaimer: i work for CircleCI.

New comment by olafmol in "Ask HN: What's the your best experience with a CI system with code on GitHub"

olafmol — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 22:39:00 +0000

Thanks for clarifying, appreciate it! It's true we don't support all the events that Github exposes, but we believe we support the most common and useful ones. Also, this is not set in stone and expanding all the time, f.e. https://circleci.com/changelog/trigger-pipelines-on-github-p...