The only repos I left on GitHub are forks and one with a bit of public engagement.

Email is one of the most gatekept interfaces in the world.

I am currently taking it.

From the landing page:

> Most of us, when we want to ship a product, we start at the beginning and with the most obvious ingredient: the product. Because when you can create, the act of creating feels most natural and straightforward. But it makes it so easy to end up with a product that nobody wants to buy. And isn't that every new entrepreneur's worst nightmare? All that work, and nobody cares.

People in the trades have a ruthless pragmatism that SV has forgotten.

https://www.slater.dev/2025/08/oil-spills-can-create-jobs/

"...a Pull Request is a delivery. It's like UPS standing at your door with a package. You think, "Nice, the feature, bugfix, etc has arrived! And because it's a delivery, it's also an inspection. A Code Review. Like a freight delivery with a manifest and signoff. So you have to be able to conduct the inspection: to understand what you're receiving and evaluate if it's acceptable as-is. Like signing for a package, once you approve, the code is yours and your team's to keep."

The metaphor has limits. IRL I sign immediately and resolve issues post-hoc with customer service. The UPS guy is not going to stand on my porch while I check if there's actually a bootable MacBook in the box. The vast majority of the time, there's no issue. If that were the same with code, teams could adopt a similar "trust now and defer verification" approach.

The article has a section on Modularity but never defines it. I wrote a post a few weeks ago on modularity and LLMs which does provide a definition. [1].

[1] https://www.slater.dev/2026/02/relieve-your-context-anxiety-...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403560

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

It conflates purpose with outcome. I don't accept the premise that software's purpose is to "automate away other jobs". That may be an outcome, but software's purpose is to enable completely new possibilities. Think bicycles of the mind.

The Apollo guidance computer didn't replace astronauts. It made the missions possible in the first place because no human can continually correct the spaceship trajectory every 250ms for 10 days on end.

We're not receiving some cosmic karma. We're more like cotton pickers after the cotton gin. Someone still has to plow and plant.

https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/its-time-to-license-software-...

https://code.slater.dev/doug/praylist/

I started this desktop and SPA web app in 2018 as a personal project. When YNAB doubled the price in 2021 without adding any value [1] and angered a lot of former YNAB4 users like myself, I renewed my resolve to finish it. In the mean time, Cory Doctorow coined his now-famous term that rhymes with "ensaasification", giving us a framework for understanding what happened to YNAB and how to avoid being treated like royal taxable subjects.

[1] Full story here: https://surebeans.net/blog/2026/02/why-another-budget-app/

To that end, Surebeans has a strong focus on privacy and data sovereignty: storage is completely local in plaintext hledger files, it has numerous import and bring-your-own-cloud sync options. It's a one-time payment with a generous time-unlimited trial. License validation is completely local so it will keep working even afer I bite the dust. The app never hits any server of mine, except the browser version when you check a box to work around CORS when syncing with with GitHub/Gitlab/Gitea/Forgejo.

Sync options include GitHub/GitLab/Gitea/Forgejo APIs, generic git over https, S3, WebDAV, SFTP (desktop-only), and Dropbox.

Import in all the expected ways: CSV, QFX/OFX, YNAB4 budget, nYNAB export, YNAB API, SimpleFIN.

The novel thing about Surebeans is the desktop version can import records from your bank by scraping its website or downloaded file. So you don't need to surrender your bank credentials to a third party like Plaid or to grant them access to your financial data. As far as I know know, no other budget app does scraping right now. To do the scraping, it launches a companion CLI tool called Beanscrape which automates Chromium with Playwright. Beanscrape is free (as in beer), and you can use it for any budgeting app that imports JSON or CSV. Setting it up can be tricky so I created a detailed guide and community forum.

Five years of YNAB costs $654+tax. Surebeans is a one-time $29 while in beta, $79 after that. Single-household license, unlimited devices, perpetual updates.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47196050

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

https://www.slater.dev/2026/02/relieve-your-context-anxiety-...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123786

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

So I've been using cmux for a few hours this morning, and I like it. One thing I'd like to disable is the reordering of tab groups. Currently it shows the most recent notifications on top. This also makes the keyboard shortcut for a given conversation change all the time, which is a cognitive burden for me.