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MartijnHols commented on Ask HN: How to deal with long vibe-coded PRs?    · Posted by u/philippta
throwawayffffas · a month ago
> How would you go about reviewing a PR like this?

Depends on the context. Is this from:

1. A colleague in your workplace. You go "Hey ____, That's kind of a big PR, I am not sure I can review this in a reasonable time frame can you split it up to more manageable pieces? PS: Do we really need a DSL for this?"

2. A new contributor to your open source project. You go "Hey ____, Thanks for your interest in helping us develop X. Unfortunately we don't have the resources to go over such a large PR. If you are still interested in helping please consider taking a swing at one of our existing issues that can be found here."

3. A contributor you already know. You go "Hey I can't review this ___, its just too long. Can we break it up to smaller parts?"

Regardless of the situation be honest, and point out you just can't review that long a PR.

MartijnHols · a month ago
Telling a new contributor no thank you is hard. Open source contributors are hard to come by, and so I’ve always dealt with PRs like this (albeit before AI days but from people who had never written a line of code before their PR) by leaving a message that it’s a huge PR so it’s going to take a while to review it and a request to make smaller PRs in the future. A couple of times I ended up leaving over a hundred review comments, but most times they were all fixed and the contributor stuck around with many better PRs later.
MartijnHols commented on Can you smuggle data in an ID card photo?   informatykzakladowy.pl/pi... · Posted by u/edent
MartijnHols · 7 months ago
One thing to consider is that if you were to succeed in placing hidden text/image on an ID card, it may fail manual forgery checks at airports and police stations. One of the many ways IDs are checked is with different types of lighting[1]. This might have made this stand out as an artifact, which could result in an officer doubting its legitimacy.

[1] https://www.airport-suppliers.com/supplier-press-release/the...

MartijnHols commented on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button   nuejs.org/blog/large-scal... · Posted by u/tipiirai
pier25 · 8 months ago
So what stack are you using with React?
MartijnHols · 8 months ago
Depends on the project. For websites I like to use a statically generated Nextjs site served by nginx[1] and for SPAs Nginx that serves a Vite-built static bundle with a backend that’s in whatever language the backend team chose.

[1] https://martijnhols.nl/blog/how-much-traffic-can-a-pre-rende...

MartijnHols commented on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button   nuejs.org/blog/large-scal... · Posted by u/tipiirai
maccard · 8 months ago
React and the react ecosystem fail at many of the criteria you’ve listed. You might argue “that’s not reacts fault” but when I look at a website that takes 15+ seconds to load its content on a gigabit connection , I’m never surprised when it’s react. Lots of sites have massive issues with rendering performance, scalability and maintainability even with react.

What react does do is give you a clean separation of concerns across team boundaries and allow for reusable components . But the cost you pay for that is a boat load of overhead, complexity, maintainability concerns, and react specific edge cases

MartijnHols · 8 months ago
A 15+ second load on a gigabit connection is impossible to have anything to do with the React library, as React is only kilobytes big and has no impact on the host.
MartijnHols commented on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button   nuejs.org/blog/large-scal... · Posted by u/tipiirai
troupo · 8 months ago
> If Preact truly was as feature complete as React, it would be used by everyone by now

That's a false logical conclusion.

Preact (and others, like Svelte and Solid) are not only "as feature complete as React", they don't need some of the features of React (hooks are unnecessary when you have proper reactivity) and they are better at certain features (like SSR).

People using or not using them has nothing to do with feature completeness.

MartijnHols · 8 months ago
Fair enough. The quoted statement doesn't hold outside the context of the argument that Preact has feature parity. You can build the same apps with Preact and those others, you just need to sacrifice other things.
MartijnHols commented on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button   nuejs.org/blog/large-scal... · Posted by u/tipiirai
whstl · 8 months ago
I understand your answer is in good faith, but it still sounds like the same generic answer given when someone questions the engineering quality of any other popular product or service.

The fact is that plenty of teams are mature and professional and yet most software still suffers from bloat, slowness, bugs. Why would React be different?

Preact, for comparison, is only 5kb or so, and has almost 1:1 feature parity. It's not fully drop-in without the compat, and even experienced React devs can nitpick about it, but that's not the point: the mere fact that it exists and gets the job done is enough to raise doubts about the need for React to be quite big.

Does React need to lose weight? Maybe, maybe not. But I don't think it's good to shut down those discussions.

MartijnHols · 8 months ago
I think the same generic answer _does_ apply to most mature projects. Libraries like these should be approached like discussions about starting over in mature software projects; "this time we'll do it correctly", or "this framework is much simpler". This applies very much to libraries such as these.

When the complexity is low, projects are easy to learn, maintain and handle. That really makes them seem better and have advantages – advantages like a much reduced bundle size. But these new setups just don't do the same thing. It's a shell of what the old project did, as it's missing solutions for hundreds of edge-cases and other requirements that were tackled by the mature many-year old project that is maintained by some of the best developers. I'm sure React has a bit of bloat, but I'm willing to trust the React team that the vast majority of it is there for a reason. It might also be the cost of building on top of a very mature solution.

Would you not shut such a discussion down when someone new in the team proposes a complete rewrite?

Preact does not have 1:1 feature parity, if it had it would have been much more widely used (who wouldn't want a free filesize reduction?). Preact has plenty of issues, which is why it isn't as widely used.

MartijnHols commented on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button   nuejs.org/blog/large-scal... · Posted by u/tipiirai
afavour · 8 months ago
Compare React and Preact:

https://preactjs.com/

I use Preact often and very, very rarely run into an issue that justifies React being almost 20x the size.

MartijnHols · 8 months ago
If Preact truly was as feature complete as React, it would be used by everyone by now – it's old enough for most teams to be aware of it. The fact that it isn't widely used is case in point.
MartijnHols commented on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button   nuejs.org/blog/large-scal... · Posted by u/tipiirai
andrewingram · 8 months ago
Yeah, I think both these are true:

1. React is bigger and slower than it needs to be. There are likely better choices today. 2. Most websites will be bigger and slower than they need to be due to the endless September of new devs, and the rarity of being given space to focus on size/performance. As React is popular, it means even if React was tiny and fast, these websites would still be slow.

MartijnHols · 8 months ago
Why would React be bigger and slower than it needs to be? It's a very mature project with a professional development team behind it, I'm sure we can trust them to tackle whatever unnecessary bloat they may have. I think we should be able to trust that anything that is in there serves a purpose, and that it serves hundreds of niche edge-cases that someone will eventually run into but are non-obvious until it's widely used.

These kinds of statements are only true if you're willing to sacrifice in other areas such as maintainability, security, stability, compatibility, accessibility, extensibility or something similar.

MartijnHols commented on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button   nuejs.org/blog/large-scal... · Posted by u/tipiirai
Cthulhu_ · 8 months ago
I don't think the "a button in X is 40% heavier than an SPA" is a fair comparison; including a framework will add weight, but these frameworks are not intended for single components. Compare apples to apples, then we can make a fair comparison.

That said, how does Nue compare to htmx and other frameworks leveraging the modern web standards?

MartijnHols · 8 months ago
There is no such things as a true apples to apples comparison for libraries such as this. They all cherry pick something and ignore a ton of things such as:

  - accessibility
  - amount of libraries with plug-and-play solutions to common problems
  - security
  - scalability
  - rendering performance
  - maintainability
  - browser support
  - browser extension interference
  - hundreds of other niche edge-cases that someone will eventually run into but are non-obvious until it's widely used
React is really well-thought out and well made by hundreds of professional contributors that have worked on it for years. The premise that hobbyists can make a better overall solution in less than 8 months is strange. At best they can make a smaller solution, but it will have to sacrifice in other areas.

MartijnHols commented on Et Tu, Grammarly?   dbushell.com/2025/03/29/e... · Posted by u/dbushell
echoangle · 9 months ago
How would this work? They are injecting CSS into your page, but you can't inject anything into the extension UI from a website. The only thing you could do would be to emulate the extension UI in your website, but for that you don't need to inject anything. You can just copy the design.
MartijnHols · 9 months ago
The article mentions they inject a web component. I imagine a bad actor could add something to that. In this case at the very least the author could add a "I hacked your Grammarly extension" text just via CSS, but I'm sure you can go much further, even more so with other extensions (eg password managers).

u/MartijnHols

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