Hacker News: wbharding

What does it mean to measure durable change velocity in 2026?

wbharding — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:56:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gitclear.com/blog/measuring_durable_change_velocity_in_2026_prompt_to_production_era

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754866

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Data roundup: Which code models performing best this month (April 2026)?

wbharding — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:54:01 +0000

Article URL: https://bill.harding.blog/2026/04/02/which-models-are-best-this-month-april-2026/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47620666

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New Research: AI Coding Tools Attract Top Performers – But Do They Create Them?

wbharding — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 13:58:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gitclear.com/blog/new_research_ai_coding_tools_attract_top_performers_but_do_they_create_them

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541017

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by wbharding in "GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it"

wbharding — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:58:42 +0000

Show me a Gary Marcus essay, I’ll show you a few new LLM “gotchas” that will be fixed by the next version. Season to taste with self-assured confidence that all these tech goobers really don’t understand how totally overrated AI progress is.

So it has been for 10+ years, so it will be at least 5 more.

New comment by wbharding in "2025 State of AI Code Quality"

wbharding — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:44:49 +0000

It's hard to reconcile how 59% of devs in their survey are "confident" AI is improving their code quality, with prior empirical research that shows a surge in added & copy/pasted lines w/ a corresponding drop in moved (refactored) lines https://www.gitclear.com/ai_assistant_code_quality_2025_rese...

My experience (using a mix of Copilot & Cursor through every day) is that AI has become very capable of solving problems of low-to-intermediate complexity. But it requires extreme discipline to vet the code afterward for the FUD and unnecessary artifacts that sneak in alongside the "essential" code. These extra artifacts/FUD are to my mind the core of what will make AI-generated code more difficult to maintain than human-authored code in the long-term.

What's Missing with AI-Generated Code? Refactoring

wbharding — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 19:47:21 +0000

Article URL: https://thenewstack.io/whats-missing-with-ai-generated-code-refactoring/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43346960

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by wbharding in "My 16-month theanine self-experiment"

wbharding — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:09:52 +0000

Wish more people would report their placebo experiments. I have periodically run them on myself, and am consistently surprised how I have been unable to differentiate substances I thought were helpful (adderall, kratom) end up indistinguishable from placebo over 20+ trials. I guess that my main takeaway was that it is hard to pinpoint when subtle drugs work. My second takeaway was that the data I generated would prob be useful to share, but with no examples anyone cared I opted against. This story inspires me to potentially revisit some of my past placebo tests and show my data.

Visual Studio Code Setup/Use on macOS for Jetbrains Users

wbharding — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 17:59:12 +0000

Article URL: https://bill.harding.blog/2025/02/01/visual-studio-setup-and-use-on-macos-in-2024-for-an-experienced-jetbrains-rubymine-user/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221744

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

AI generated code compounds technical debt

wbharding — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:16:46 +0000

Article URL: https://leaddev.com/software-quality/how-ai-generated-code-accelerates-technical-debt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127686

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Automatic Changelog Generator: free tool for entrepreneurs and GitHub Sponsors

wbharding — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 19:48:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gitclear.com/blog/automatic_changelog_generator_a_free_tool_for_entrepreneurs_freelancers_github_sponsors_and_maybe_you

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42702812

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

We built an automatic changelog generator, in depth

wbharding — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 20:14:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gitclear.com/blog/how_we_built_an_automatic_changelog_generator_for_github_open_source

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659626

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by wbharding in "Dumb TVs deserve a comeback"

wbharding — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:36:29 +0000

I think they’re called “commercial displays” now (no malware subsidy like smart TVs tho)

A 2024 Glimpse into Life as a Google Ads Customer

wbharding — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 16:20:44 +0000

Article URL: https://bill.harding.blog/2024/12/05/google-ads-a-2024-glimpse-into-life-as-a-google-customer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42329567

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Developer tool is 40 years old: can it be improved?

wbharding — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 22:21:50 +0000

Article URL: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/08/05/this-developer-tool-is-40-years-old-can-it-be-improved/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41176046

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Interesting Podcast Idea? Routines and Habits of World-Class Programmers

wbharding — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 15:57:03 +0000

Article URL: https://bill.harding.blog/2024/03/22/podcast-idea-habits-of-world-class-programmers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39791940

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

wbharding — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 18:57:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gitclear.com/blog/linux_touchpad_like_macbook_2023_update_smooth_scroll

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607747

Points: 256

# Comments: 275

"Building a castle" explains why it's nearly impossible to create great software

wbharding — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 19:27:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gitclear.com/blog/building_a_castle_explains_challenge_of_creating_software

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39594829

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by wbharding in "New GitHub Copilot research finds 'downward pressure on code quality'"

wbharding — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 19:12:28 +0000

Original research author here. It's exciting to find so many thinking about long-term code quality! The 2023 increase in churned & duplicated (aka copy/pasted) code, alongside the reduction in moved code, was certainly beyond what we expected to find.

We hope it leads dev teams, and AI Assistant builders, to adopt measurement & incentives that promote reused code over newly added code. Especially for those poor teams whose managers think LoC should be a component of performance evaluations (around 1 in 3, according to GH research), the current generation of code assistants make it dangerously easy to hit tab, commit, and seed future tech debt. As Adam Tornhill eloquently put it on Twitter, "the main challenge with AI assisted programming is that it becomes so easy to generate a lot of code that shouldn't have been written in the first place."

That said, our research significance is currently limited in that it does not directly measure what code was AI-authored -- it only charts the correlation between code quality over the last 4 years and the proliferation of AI Assistants. We hope GitHub (or other AI Assistant companies) will consider partnering with us on follow-up research to directly measure code quality differences in code that is "completely AI suggested," "AI suggested with human change," and "written from scratch." We would also like the next iteration of our research to directly measure how bug frequency is changing with AI usage. If anyone has other ideas for what they'd like to see measured, we welcome suggestions! We endeavor to publish a new research paper every ~2 months.

New comment by wbharding in "What PWA Can Do Today"

wbharding — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 19:08:00 +0000

Sure would be nice if Firefox desktop would join the browsers that support PWAs. We build an app that has been PWA-first, but it is unfortunate that this generally requires users to have a Chrome instance running. Would much rather point people to Firefox, and it seems like it would be to their advantage to give apps a reason to recommend FF, if they built a smoother PWA integration than Chrome.

New comment by wbharding in "Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off"

wbharding — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 16:06:21 +0000

For the poor few still using Evernote, there are many great alternatives now available:

Notion is the obvious one: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-not...

Amplenote was heavily inspired by early Evernote: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-amp...

Reflect is another up and comer: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-ref...

And of course Obsidian has its many evangelists, though the sharing situation with Obsidian leaves something to be desired.