Hacker News: planb

New comment by planb in "Making"

planb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:15:35 +0000

Of course. But I have been programming for over 30 years and I know that I cannot be an expert for everything. Besides that, maybe my capacity for thinking won’t grow anymore. But my capacity for solving problems just exploded in the last few years thanks to AI.

New comment by planb in "Making"

planb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:44:42 +0000

How do people imagine the process of creating software with AI? Tell it “I need an app where I can send images to friends” and accept the first result?

In your analogy, what I’m talking about is more like talking to a chef with the idea of a novel recipe and describing the ingredients and how you would like it to taste (of course also accepting suggestions).

I would take more pride in that meal than in a standard burger I completely cooked myself - maybe because I know I am able to prepare a great tasting burger and already did so many times. OTOH if this would be the first burger I made in my life I would be immensely proud of it.

New comment by planb in "Making"

planb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:52:56 +0000

Let’s not argue about the meaning of “making”, but that’s a very limited view of how value is created. So in your view the producer or even the director of a movie cannot take pride in it because the actors are the ones doing the work?

New comment by planb in "Making"

planb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:38:28 +0000

But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now. The real discussion does not seem to be about words though but about value. If you find vibe-coded software worthless, you value the process and work that went into it more than the finished end product. I can fully understand this. But it’s just not the way I feel about it.

New comment by planb in "Making"

planb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:20:21 +0000

I know many people agree but I can’t really follow this sentiment. I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM even if I did not write a single line of code for it. I wouldn’t show it around and proclaim what a great programmer I am, because I did not program it, but coding was never the main goal, it was always the means to create the finished end product. When I plan a remake of my garden and then hire a professional landscaping company to build it, I can still sit on my patio in the sunset with a cold beer and be proud of my new cozy environment. I feed the same way about software. My vibe coded guitar tab editor has features that no other software has that I needed and it’s solving a real problem I had. I would never have created it without AI, because I simply don’t have the time besides my job, family and other hobbies (like really practicing playing guitar). So fine, tell me I shouldn’t be proud of it, but don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.

New comment by planb in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

planb — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:20:21 +0000

I’m not sure it’s so simple. I went on a trip with friends this weekend and cut a video from all the short clips we filmed on our phones. Before AI I would have used some song from my music library as the background tune. This time I created a song with Suno that fits the clips and includes some funny anecdotes from our vacation. If I was very talented and had the time, I could have written the lyrics and recorded the song myself (which undoubtedly would be even more awesome), but I can’t do this. So I used AI as a tool to do it for me. Everyone agrees it’s more personal and a better conserved memory of our shared experiences.

New comment by planb in "Write code like a human will maintain it"

planb — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:47:41 +0000

I have good results with this prompt after every larger change: Now do a final code check. Is everything tidy and do the components adhere to the principle of separations-of-concerns. Is everything in an understandable and maintainable state? Do we make any assumptions that may not be true anymore? Is any code left over from previous edits or experiments that does not belong into the codebase? Is the documentation still representing the current state of code?

New comment by planb in "A way to exclude sensitive files issue still open for OpenAI Codex"

planb — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:01:35 +0000

Sound like snake oil. How would this work? The app that the agent is developing needs access to the file, so access to it cannot be blocked. Just because read_file can not access it (I think current harnesses prevent reading .env files already), does not mean the contents will never be seen by the model.

New comment by planb in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

planb — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:38:06 +0000

Sometimes I have weird fantasies about a post apocalyptic world where factories burned down and people have to live with the tech that’s available. No network, just off site solar power or generators, only local devices. I think it’s interesting to think about how far we could get with this.

Does anyone have recommendations for novels, movies or video games with that topic?

New comment by planb in "Open source AI must win"

planb — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:35:22 +0000

This is not about information but about capital. Even if we had free access to the weights of the best models in the world: who would be able to run them?

New comment by planb in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"

planb — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:05:22 +0000

If that’s true, then it will be even cheaper to provide them as a subscription. Following your logic, every company would be running their own data centers instead of using cloud providers.

Nginx Rift Heap-based Buffer Overflow

planb — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:51:05 +0000

Article URL: https://depthfirst.com/nginx-rift

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48137939

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by planb in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

planb — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:31:06 +0000

This will not happen. None of the existing apps people use daily on their phones have any incentive to support this. Social media wants the people to doomscroll, shopping apps and booking sites want to use their own dark patterns to make people believe they get a special discount if they buy _now_ and everything else just wants users to see the ads. Why on earth would they offer convenient hooks for AI chatbots?

New comment by planb in "ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is"

planb — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:08:44 +0000

You're absolutely right! "Why Does This Matter?" was a dead giveaway that this article was not written by a human — it was written by a large language model.

But really: "Why does this matter?" When looking at an article like this, I rarely read the text. This is just fluff no matter if AI-generated or hand written. The info is "there's a LEGO set of that ASML machine" and the picture of that set. That's all I want to know before clicking the back button.

New comment by planb in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

planb — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:56:25 +0000

But there is interesting information in lots of the comments. Like the quote from Ternus about Apple Maps in one of the comments. This gives relevant insight of how he thinks and how he might handle problems when he takes over.

New comment by planb in "Codex for almost everything"

planb — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:41:27 +0000

I’m not doing that. That would be like giving my child shell access to my system.

New comment by planb in "Codex for almost everything"

planb — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:45:42 +0000

Yes, but none of this applies to the local codex agent that runs when I tell it to and has access to my computer. Like: „scan this folder of PDFs and create an excel file with all expenses. Then enter them into my tax software.“ This needs access to very sensitive data and involves a quite complex handling of data. But the only attack vector I see is someone injecting prompts into my invoice files.

New comment by planb in "Codex for almost everything"

planb — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:33:12 +0000

Why would my agent retrieve that lunch menu?

New comment by planb in "Codex for almost everything"

planb — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:07:47 +0000

How many of these threat vectors are just theoretical? Don’t use skills from random sources (just like don’t execute files from unknown sources). Don’t paste from untrusted sites (don’t click links on untrusted sites). Maybe there are fake documentation sites that the agent will search and have a prompt injected - but I haven’t heard of a single case where that happened. For now, the benefits outweigh the risk so much that I am willing to take it - and I think I have an almost complete knowledge of all the attack vectors.

New comment by planb in "Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning"

planb — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:29:46 +0000

Source? But it‘s true that I forgot about the Google Search deal.