Hacker News: smetj

New comment by smetj in "Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs"

smetj — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:58:26 +0000

Works for me!

New comment by smetj in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

smetj — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:29:54 +0000

> I'm just another off-the-shelf engineer now

You're wrong there. You are capable of judging the outcome of the llm.

> But I don't know what to think about the long-term.

Don't you think it all has taken long enough. When I look back at the beginning of my career and compare what we do now ... I cannot shake the feeling we're essentially still solving he same problems and we have accepted that as being normal. Complexity skyrocketed, (abstraction) layers got added but the needle didn't move exponentially together with that. I think the IT industry as a whole gets what it deserves, thinking that we would remain the maze masters of the mazes we create.

> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession...

I'm looking for 8 (affordable) oak panel doors with the exact same measurements as my current doors so I can replace them. That shouldn't be too hard to find you'd think right?

New comment by smetj in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

smetj — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:49:31 +0000

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

New comment by smetj in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

smetj — Sun, 31 May 2026 12:04:53 +0000

I guess the people not complaining here are the ones who do not immediately upgrade production to latest non-security releases?

New comment by smetj in "Slumber a TUI HTTP Client"

smetj — Fri, 22 May 2026 06:42:01 +0000

That looks great! Will give it a spin during my daily work. Thanks for making and sharing it.

New comment by smetj in "Alert-driven monitoring"

smetj — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:39:55 +0000

Depends on what you are monitoring but let's assume an API endpoint. Collect and monitor the RED metrics with detailed dimensions in combination with blackbox monitoring simulating client transactions as realistic possible and alert only on those 2 types.

When that happens, fire off a battery of diagnostic checks which you have collected over time to pinpoint the cause.

What if the diagnostics checks don't reveal the issue? There is still value since you know these are not the reason so no time is wasted re-evaluating them. Where to get these diagnostic checks from? Well, what's the first thing responding engineers do? Open the CLI and troubleshoot. Those are your diagnostic checks. Collect, automate, capture the domain specific knowlegde and democratize it.

New comment by smetj in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

smetj — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:12:01 +0000

Some years ago I owned a Mercedes CLA which had Android auto controlled using the rotating joystick with push down to select. The experience was perfect. It was fast, could be handled without any distraction, never misbehaved and never detoriated over time. Now I drive a car with touchscreen ... it's bullshit but I guess it looks fancier.

New comment by smetj in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

smetj — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:48:05 +0000

I run Linux. If there's something I'm missing out because of that, then I accept it rather than going through this hell.

New comment by smetj in "Why isn't LA repaving streets?"

smetj — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:43:15 +0000

red tape, regulations, corruption, low pay, inflated prices, a gamed system. Although the topic is unrelated, I came across this the other day ... makes one think https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910

New comment by smetj in "Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop"

smetj — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:42:31 +0000

Generally speaking, the value of these contributions was determined by "proof of work". Time and effort are precious to a human hence its a somewhat self-regulating system preventing huge amounts of low quality contributions being generated. This is now gone. Isn't that an interesting problem to fix?

New comment by smetj in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

smetj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:01:55 +0000

Here's mine: https://smetj.net/

New comment by smetj in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

smetj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:00:32 +0000

Beautiful! Nice work.

New comment by smetj in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

smetj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 08:28:00 +0000

Be it as it may, its aesthetics are so distinct it isn't for everybody. Also a big part of the target audience expecting to buy an utility vehicle have cheaper, proven and more practical alternatives. I guess the fact its not road legal in the EU doesn't help either whilst other Tesla models are quite popular there.

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

smetj — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:02:24 +0000

Its not Github Actions' fault but the horrors people create in it, all under the pretense that automation is simply about wrapping a GitHub Action around something. Learn to create a script in Python or similar and put all logic there so you can execute it locally and can port it to the next CI system when a new CTO arrives.

New comment by smetj in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

smetj — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:25:56 +0000

Its simple. If you require specific software which only runs on Windows, then you cannot use Linux. If that's not the case, the Linux desktop these days is entirely capable of helping you achieve your goals.

New comment by smetj in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

smetj — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:14:54 +0000

Well ... IMO this is literally replacing (entry-level) engineers, but lets agree to disagree on that. Be it as it may ... task automation is also "a product" then not? 5 years ago, this wasn't possible. Now it is, so extrapolate that to the future ...

ps: If you can guarantee the Powerball lottery continues forever, I can give you a guaranteed winning combination.

New comment by smetj in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

smetj — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:46:40 +0000

At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch.

If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is.

- What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing.

- What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above.

- What will that look like 5 years down the road?

I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.

New comment by smetj in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

smetj — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:02:41 +0000

it is happening, just not everywhere at the same time at once

New comment by smetj in "KDE onboarding is good now"

smetj — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:24:22 +0000

This has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop.

New comment by smetj in "Avoid Mini-Frameworks"

smetj — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 13:19:53 +0000

Somehow, somewhere there is a pleasant balance between DRY and non-DRY which is different for everybody. God forbid having a colleague who sees a thing repeating and slaps an abstraction over it at whatever cost because DRY!