Hacker News: sltr

New comment by sltr in "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"

sltr — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:38:01 +0000

Backing you up on this. I smelled LLM and hit cmd+w.

New comment by sltr in "The Mysterious Syndrome Destroying Endurance Athletes"

sltr — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:37:41 +0000

Experienced distance runner here. This is not new or mysterious.

> Overtraining Syndrome is where a lack of recovery from training stress results in underperformance, often combined with Mood Disturbances such as reduced Motivation, depression and anxiety

https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Overtraining_Syndrome

New comment by sltr in "Don't be a meat proxy"

sltr — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:34:05 +0000

Reminds me of "Appeal to Aithority"

> The LLMs says this, so it must be right.

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/

New comment by sltr in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

sltr — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:12:47 +0000

I am also worried about "cognitive debt". I hardly remember what I had Claude do, even hours later. Back in May, I advised of a similar mitigation, citing the "generation effect" as the reason typing the code would make you remember it better:

> For your next ticket or feature, engage with your LLM as you normally would to produce a design and implementation plan, but with that plan in hand, make the mechanical edits yourself...You can expect this to improve your knowledge retention compared to merely reading a diff. You want to go slower now so that later you can go at all.

https://www.slater.dev/2026/05/type-your-code/

New comment by sltr in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

sltr — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:05:30 +0000

Thanks for catching that. Updated my post

New comment by sltr in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

sltr — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:56:22 +0000

It's been on HN for 45 minutes. It's before 9am on the west coast

New comment by sltr in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

sltr — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:55:44 +0000

the punchline: "Refactoring reduces token consumption"

I appreciate the effort to quantify the benefit rather than pontificate. It's worth mentioning Martin Fowler wrote a whole book on refactoring [1], in which he states, "to refactor, the essential precondition is [...] solid tests", which I think is the real benefit here, AI or not. Good tests protect against regressions, whether human or robot. They also help encode the spec, which humans and robots can read.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/refactoring-improving-t...

New comment by sltr in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

sltr — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:55:58 +0000

that's the real tragedy here

New comment by sltr in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

sltr — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 03:09:27 +0000

can we go after the real perp now?

New comment by sltr in "Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It"

sltr — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:37:32 +0000

Fair that motivated reasoning could be at play. Rob's audience is SaaS founders, but whether his listeners remain engaged and his sales funnel full does not influence how genai affects their businesses, and being duplicitous doesn't fit with his character.

The episode was worth my time.

New comment by sltr in "Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It"

sltr — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:42:14 +0000

Three days ago, Rob Walling (SaaS investor) refuted pretty convincingly the claim that genai kills SaaS. His life mission and wealth are bound up in SaaS. If he's not scared, nobody should be.

https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...

New comment by sltr in "I Stopped “Creating Content”"

sltr — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:38:02 +0000

Since 2002 Richard Stallman has spoken again using term "content" this way.

> using the word as a noun to describe works and communications through which people have expressed themselves adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages all the works by subordinating them to the box that is full.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content

Who You Gonna Call

sltr — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:49:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.slater.dev/2026/07/who-you-gonna-call/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983191

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sltr in "Moonshot AI suspends new subscriptions due to Kimi K3 demand"

sltr — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 19:07:40 +0000

This is the right thing to do

Another reason to get attached to Surebeans

sltr — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:41:17 +0000

Article URL: https://surebeans.net/blog/2026/06/getting-attached-to-surebeans/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48679573

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by sltr in "The Optimal Amount of Slop Is Non-Zero"

sltr — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:22:17 +0000

That's an interesting argument. In construction, the larger a project, the more justifiable it is to invest in quality. Is it different than software? I think a better argument against licensure is that it makes small projects too expensive, but I disagree. It shifts not the overall cost, but when cost is paid: "The upfront cost will increase, but a long tail of costs stemming from quality issues will decrease."

I worked for 10 years in medical devices. QMS was business as usual. I think large software projects with millions budgeted should have them. But the difference between a QMS and licensure is a person's signature and their personal commitment to a statement of ethics as well as their accountability and ability to appeal to a professional organization.

New comment by sltr in "The Optimal Amount of Slop Is Non-Zero"

sltr — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:07:00 +0000

I'm glad you mentioned downward market pressure on quality. I agree that is an issue. That's why I advocate for licensure of software engineering professionals, which exerts a counteracting force back up.

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

The Optimal Amount of Slop Is Non-Zero

sltr — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:54:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.slater.dev/2026/06/the-optimal-amount-of-slop-is-non-zero/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632724

Points: 15

# Comments: 4

New comment by sltr in "When I reject AI code even if it works"

sltr — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:41:21 +0000

It's kind of like the saying "the right note played at the wrong time is wrong." An implementation that works today but could break in the future is wrong. I'm not willing to treat an LLM as an oracle that knows the difference. It certainly hasn't earned that trust.

New comment by sltr in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

sltr — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:18:27 +0000

from the post:

> It was reasonable to be skeptical the first time

It's still reasonable to be skeptical. A few weeks ago a post was discussed here on HN [1] that asked:

> What would have to be true for us to ‘check English into the repository’ instead of code?

to which I replied:

> Code is already the cheapest path to working, correct software. LLMs do not change the calculus because figuring out what to make is the expensive part, not coding it up. Skipping code makes the specification of what to make even more expensive and throws away the tools that keep precision affordable. Programming in English would be more expensive than just using a programming language. [2]

[1] https://annievella.com/posts/finding-comfort-in-the-uncertai...

[2] https://www.slater.dev/2026/05/why-english-will-never-be-a-p...