Hacker News: variodot

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

variodot — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:14:48 +0000

I'm threading this now and have paired AI-assisted development with woodworking knowledge. Partially chose to work on this because I wanted to build in a domain that the models might have a tougher time understanding.

Parallels and interests overlap everywhere between programming and woodworking; decisions about tooling, tolerances, sequencing, and what can be easily fixed later.

The models get rectangles pretty well and has been fun exploring a parametric casework planner for my own shop.

New comment by variodot in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

variodot — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:31:25 +0000

For me, it was during an on-going incident in a failing IoT OTA service which was growing in priority; taking two items I was unfamiliar with and bolting together new OTA mechanism via alternative SMS provider. I'd never developed in .NET ecosystem before and happened to gain access to another team's Twilio account in a prior week, so took a shot, planned interfaces to extract and implemented alternative Twilio implementation + feature flag

Normal software instincts plus access to a different service flushed the buildup of OTA's and lives on as a fallback mechanism. Amazed me going from idea to execution faster than I could have ever dreamed of even on-boarding myself to the area or environment.

New comment by variodot in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

variodot — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:02:30 +0000

Diving deeper into woodworking and knocking out a few cabinetry/storage projects with the work-in-progress up at at https://shopspec.io

New comment by variodot in "GPT-5.5"

variodot — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:30:09 +0000

I’ve had a similar experience building a geometry/woodworking-flavored web app with Three.js and SVG rendering. It’s been kind of wild how quickly the SOTA models let me approach a new space in spatial development and rendering 3d (or SA optimization approaches, for that matter). That said, there are still easy "3d app" mistakes it makes like z-axis flipping or misreading coordinate conventions. But these models make similar mistakes with CSS and page awareness. Both require good verification loops to be effective.