Hacker News: thallavajhula

New comment by thallavajhula in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

thallavajhula — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:20:37 +0000

>I think there’s something quietly screwing up a lot of engineering teams. In interviews, in promotion packets, in design reviews: the engineer who overbuilds gets a compelling narrative, but the one who ships the simplest thing that works gets… nothing.

I got emotional reading this. This is way too real.

New comment by thallavajhula in "MacBook Neo"

thallavajhula — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:08:10 +0000

As a Master's student, I didn't have money to afford a MacBook. So, I begrudgingly bought a Dell Vostro 13" at the time. Pretty much all of my friends just got the Dell/Sony/HP laptops and it's not like those laptops were powerful either. They were just pretty much entry level for a price tag of $600-$750. I got mine for $750. This was back in 2009. I had to remove the selection of a Webcam. These companies would pull shit like this, making basic things like a webcam, an add-on. I hated it. IDK what the price tag of a non-Apple laptop is now-a-days and IDK if they still do what they did then, including everything as an add-on, but, I'm so glad Apple released this. This'll be a blessing for students and generally folks who want a high quality laptop without bargaining over which basic add-on to pick, which seemed ridiculous then and feels the same even now.

2009 Me would've LOVED this! I'm so glad Apple released this.

Back in 2013/14 Guillermo Rauch (CEO Vercel) shared a brilliant insight -- develop software on a weak machine and optimize it to work well on it so that when it's used on a powerful machine, it's going to fly. This'll force macOS developers to consider these resource constraints.

New comment by thallavajhula in "AI is making junior devs useless"

thallavajhula — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:50:30 +0000

Just another silly uninformed take.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Ghostty – Terminal Emulator"

thallavajhula — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:45:14 +0000

When Ghostty was publicly announced, I used it for a few months and gave up on it due to the lack of support for the CMD+F feature that I use Terminal.app. This is a critical feature for me while tailing logs on my local. I tried the workaround of capturing the text into a text file and then searching it. It just didn't work for my workflow and dropped it. Ghostty is great otherwise. But, without the CMD+F, it's of no use to me.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

thallavajhula — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:56:10 +0000

I used to have a custom domain setup via Google apps. Google decided to update it to something else (they changed their name several times and I lost track of the name now). I switched to iCloud+ Mail when iCloud introduced their custom domain support a few years ago. I do have notification summaries on my iOS turned on, but that's just a guilty pleasure of mine. The summarization is so bad that it's funny. I literally have the summarization feature turned on to laugh at how bad it is every time I see a new summary. Anyway, I used to be a everything-Google guy. Now, I just spread my app usage across multiple services, which I think is a win for me in the long run instead of being locked in to an ecosystem.

I also got myself out of the most of the Apple products from the Apple ecosystem too. I'm a 1Password user because I didn't want to be part of Google or Apple ecosystems.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

thallavajhula — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:41:41 +0000

I've been trying composer-1.5 on and off and it doesn't come close to Claude's Opus High. The explainability of Claude is just something else.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

thallavajhula — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:30:02 +0000

This is great. I am hopeful that Gemini 3.1 Pro would be great. So far, I'm almost always pulled away from Gemini models by Claude. Having used Claude Opus High for a while now, Claude Opus seems to be fantastic at coding. Even Gemini's comparison chart says so. OpenAI's 5.3-codex is by far the weakest (of the 3) for my coding purposes. Claude Opus really shines at explanations and generating code.

Gemini is almost great. Claude Opus is great. I keep switching among these subscriptions every month to not miss out on any of the offerings for too long; ChatGPT Plus <-> Gemini Pro <-> Claude.

New comment by thallavajhula in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

thallavajhula — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:37:47 +0000

True. That's the case with almost any commodity in life. That's why I was specific about AI.

The difference is, in other sectors, there's no fear-mongering. If you don't use their HVAC, it's fine. Your job isn't getting replaced. The air you breathe in your home isn't going to be fully polluted. You have other options.

With AI though, there's no middle ground. You either use their tool and become extremely successful (so much that you don't know what to do with that much success) or you're out of a job and become obsolete in like the next 3 seconds.

New comment by thallavajhula in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

thallavajhula — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:28:35 +0000

I was reading through the article and waiting for the key info to drop, but nope. It never did. It seemed like marketing fluff. If anything, vibe coding may eliminate some of the B2C SaaSes, but not B2B. If you think an enterprise is going to vibe code a B2B offering that they pay millions for, you're out of your mind.

Here's my general mantra regarding AI: NEVER take suggestions about AI from people who have a vested interest in it. CEOs of companies that train and offer LLMs, Authors of Books about LLMs and AI in general, etc.

This may come off as an unpopular opinion, but this is how I felt after listening to Steve Yegge recently. He has a new book about Vibe coding and he goes on in the interview/podcast to say that the best programmers he knows in the world (the ones better than him and maybe even the top world class programmers), would be equivalent to those of interns in an year, if they don't start vibe coding or use AI. I respect the guy, but damn, this is just peak delusion. He didn't even say it as a hyperbole, he meant it.

According to popular CEOs of companies training LLMs, 2024 was supposed to be the year that would eliminate the need for Junior and mid-level engineers. 2025 happened. Now, we are in 2026.

So yeah, I'm never taking advice about AI from these people ever again.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Welcome to Gas Town"

thallavajhula — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 05:51:34 +0000

IDK why, but I love the name of the project. It sounds so fun and the naming of the entities is very playful. Love it.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI"

thallavajhula — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:00:19 +0000

Aside: The demo shows git commands being run in the CLI. I absolutely hate it when devs use a commit message that says "chore: my first commit from gemini cli" - I get that it's meant for the demo, but in general too, I've seen codebases that enforce these commit prefixes such as "chore", "feat", "bugfix" etc. Is there any real value to that? Besides wasting up the 50 character limit on the first line of the commit message, I don't see anything else being done including those. Also, non-imperative commit messages?! Come on, guys!

New comment by thallavajhula in "Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo"

thallavajhula — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:16:20 +0000

The animations on the landing page are so over-engineered, I love it. The light movement along with the mouse on hover, the movement of the right animation based on the scroll and mouse movement while mousedown activated, the zoom-in as you keep scrolling down. Love this attention to detail on a landing page.

New comment by thallavajhula in "AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions"

thallavajhula — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:27:26 +0000

I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences.

I’ve completely turned off AI assist on my personal computer and only use AI assist sparingly on my work computer. It is so bad at compound work. AI assist is great at atomic work. The rest should be handled by humans and use AI wisely. It all boils down back to human intelligence. AI is only as smart as the human handling it. That’s the bottom line.

New comment by thallavajhula in "AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'"

thallavajhula — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:45:10 +0000

Finally someone from a top position said this. After all the trash the CEOs have been spewing and sensationalizing every AI improvement, for a change, a person in a non-engineering role speaks the truth.

AI is the new UI/UX

thallavajhula — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:41:22 +0000

Article URL: https://iam.mt/ai-is-the-new-ui-ux/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905461

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by thallavajhula in "Making Software"

thallavajhula — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 23:57:03 +0000

When you sign up for the mailing list, you get a response back with status: 200 | created.

chef's kiss Something so basic and yet, so aesthetically pleasing.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Potatoes in the Mail"

thallavajhula — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 23:54:06 +0000

What a nice change of pace reading about random USPS facts here on HN!

New comment by thallavajhula in "Gemini 2.5 Flash"

thallavajhula — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 23:52:26 +0000

At this point, at the current pace of AI model development, I feel like I can't tell which one is better. I usually end up using multiple LLMs to get a task done to my taste. They're all equally good and bad. It's like using GCP vs AWS vs Azure all over again, except in the AI space.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Tianjin robot incident raises alarm over public safety and robotics"

thallavajhula — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 23:24:58 +0000

True. I guess, there has to be a balance to get to a sweet spot.

New comment by thallavajhula in "Tianjin robot incident raises alarm over public safety and robotics"

thallavajhula — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:18:01 +0000

This was one of my major concerns when Elon announced Tesla Optimus. There's a real need for government regulation on the bot specs. I blogged about this a while ago.

Something like:

1. They shouldn’t be able to overpower a young adult. They should be weak. 2. They should be short. 3. They should have very limited battery power and should require human intervention to charge them. 4. They should have limited memory.