Hacker News: remich

New comment by remich in "AI is slowing down"

remich — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:35:06 +0000

It's also not $1,500 per month per engineer. It's that per month per engineer per tool. Which means it could easily be at least $3,000 (Claude Code and Cursor) or $4,500 if Codex was also an option on top of those two.

And as you have written on your blog it's a soft cap that can be exceeded with justification.

New comment by remich in "AI is slowing down"

remich — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:32:26 +0000

No reason to doubt his journalistic integrity? He's not a journalist for starters. He's a PR flack who does PR for AI startups on the side while blogging on substack. There is every reason to doubt his journalistic integrity.

New comment by remich in "AI is slowing down"

remich — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:28:29 +0000

Perhaps they aren't, but not currently viable !== always unviable.

New comment by remich in "AI is slowing down"

remich — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:26:09 +0000

Because it doesn't. Not for the tasks where using Opus instead of a lower tier model is appropriate, at any rate. Benchmarks show this, as do revealed preferences of actual users. To believe that Qwen is as capable as Opus at 1/20 the cost you have to believe that every person who does not make the choice to use Qwen over Opus for a given task is some mix of ignorant or delusional. This is certainly an opinion you can hold about other engineers, but it's definitely a questionable one at best.

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

remich — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:42:18 +0000

Fiduciary duty but for AI, interesting. I think there's some potential there, though of course you'll end up confronting the classic sci-fi trope of "what if the system judges what's best for the user in a way that is unexpected / harmful"? But, solve that with strong guardrails and/or scoping and you might have something.

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

remich — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:39:28 +0000

I'm starting to get to the point where I'll only listen to AI energy use critiques if the commentator tells me up front they abstain from all forms of social media, especially video-based social media, first.

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

remich — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:37:03 +0000

Are they? Or do you just mean that it's few and far between that we hear about them? If it's the former, I think there's a much bigger universe of this kind of stuff than most people realize. Otoh, if you're just commenting on the lack of coverage, then, yeah I agree I wish more publicity was paid to small software like this. Maybe we need a catchy term - "organic software"? "Locally grown software"?

New comment by remich in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

remich — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:45:50 +0000

Yeah and then when that library stops being maintained or gets taken over, everything breaks.

New comment by remich in "Eight more months of agents"

remich — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:23:42 +0000

We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons. When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:

(1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and its adherence to conventions and norms (2) Process to impose requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces (3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to implement concrete rewards and consequences

Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better organizations will adapt.

New comment by remich in "Eight more months of agents"

remich — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:13:57 +0000

I think this is an interesting point, my one area of disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place, but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism, where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or experiences.

New comment by remich in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

remich — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:57:54 +0000

Get AWS to actually support pgvectorscale and timescaledb for RDS or Aurora and then maybe... sigh....

New comment by remich in "Let's call a murder a murder"

remich — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:15:51 +0000

What if the instructions they give you would be to submit to them while they assaulted you, sexually or physically? Are you supposed to comply and then challenge them in court later?

That is a thing that happens. Rarely, I suppose, and #notallpolice and all that, but the idea that we should live in a country where everyone just has to "comply" with the instructions or be murdered is ridiculous.

New comment by remich in "Professional software developers don't vibe, they control"

remich — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:20:54 +0000

Okay, I certainly agree with you that different use cases can dictate different outcomes when using AI tooling. I would just encourage everyone who thinks similar to you to be cautious about assuming that someone who experiences a different result with these tools is less skilled or dealing with a less difficult use case - like one that has no edge cases or has greater tolerance for bugs. It's possible that this is the case, but it is just as possible that they have found a way to work with these tools that produces excellent output.

New comment by remich in "Professional software developers don't vibe, they control"

remich — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:56:37 +0000

Have you considered that it's a bit dismissive to assume that developers who find use out of AI tools necessarily approve of worse code than you do, or have lower standards?

It's fine to be a skeptic. Or to have tried out these tools and found that they do not work well for your particular use case at this moment in time. But you shouldn't assume that people who do get value out of them are not as good at the job as you are, or are dumber than you are, or slower than you are. That's just not a good practice and is also rude.

New comment by remich in "Professional software developers don't vibe, they control"

remich — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:47:04 +0000

I have had a lot of success lately when working with Opus 4.5 using both the Beads task tracking system and the array of skills under the umbrella of Bad Dave's Robot Army. I don't have a link handy, but you should be able to find it on GitHub. I use the specialized skills for different review tasks (like Architecture Review, Performance Review, Security Review, etc.) on every completed task in addition to my own manual review, and I find that that helps to keep things from getting out of hand.

New comment by remich in "Professional software developers don't vibe, they control"

remich — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:44:34 +0000

I don't think that anyone actually believes that writing code is only for junior developers. That seems to be a significant exaggeration at the very least. However, it is definitely true that most organizations of this size are hiring people into technical lead, staff engineer, or principal engineer roles are hiring those people not only for their individual expertise, or ability to apply that expertise themselves, but also for their ability to use that expertise as a force multiplier to make other less experienced people better at the craft.

New comment by remich in "Professional software developers don't vibe, they control"

remich — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:41:11 +0000

As a former tech lead and now staff engineer, I definitely agree with this. I read a blog post a couple of months ago that theorized that the people that would adopt these technologies the best were people in the exact roles that you describe. I think because we were already used to having to rely on other people to execute on our plans and ideas because they were simply too big to accomplish by ourselves. Now that we have agents to do these things, it's not really all that different - although it is a different management style working around their limitations.

New comment by remich in "Professional software developers don't vibe, they control"

remich — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:38:16 +0000

I get what you're saying, but I would say that this does not match my own experience. For me, prior to the agentic coding era, the problem was always that I had way more ideas for features, tools, or projects than I had the capacity to build when I had to confront the work of building everything by hand, also dealing with the inevitable difficulties in procrastination and getting started.

I am a very above-average engineer when it comes to speed at completing work well, whether that's typing speed or comprehension speed, and still these tools have felt like giving me a jetpack for my mind. I can get things done in weeks that would have taken me months before, and that opens up space to consider new areas that I wouldn't have even bothered exploring before because I would not have had the time to execute on them well.

New comment by remich in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

remich — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 02:54:52 +0000

Please do. I'm trying to help other devs in my company get more out of agentic coding, and I've noticed that not everyone is defaulting to Opus 4.5 or even Codex 5.2, and I'm not always able to give good examples to them for why they should. It would be great to have a blog post to point to…

New comment by remich in "GPT-5.2"

remich — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 02:21:06 +0000

Any particular papers or articles you've been reading that helped you devise this? Your experiments sound interesting and possibly relevant to what I'm doing.