jakevoytko (u/jakevoytko)

jakevoytko commented on Grok 4 Fast now has 2M context window docs.x.ai/docs/models... · Posted by u/hereme888

I had a failed refactor with Codex recently and I am wondering if context window size is the cause.

jakevoytko · a month ago

With the current crop of LLMs/agents, I find that refactors still have to be done at a granular level. "I want to make X change. Give me the plan and do not implement it yet. Do the first thing. Do the second thing. Now update the first call site to use the new pattern. You did it wrong and I fixed it in an editor; update the second call site to match the final implementation in $file. Now do the next one. Do the next one. Continue. Continue.", etc.

jakevoytko commented on Ask HN: Why are most status pages delayed? · Posted by u/2gremlin181

mirekrusin · 2 months ago

So there is access to "degraded functionality" from start (the "3-15" of "degraded functionality" one) - people are asking why not share THAT then?

Nobody cares about internal escalations, if manager is taking shit or not - that's not service status, that's internal dealing with the shit process - it can surface as extra timestamped comments next to service STATUS.

jakevoytko · 2 months ago

Because the systems are so complex and capable of emergent behavior that you need a human in the loop to truly interpret behavior and impact. Just because an alert is going off doesn't mean that the alert was written properly, or is measuring the correct thing, or the customer is interpreting its meaning correctly, etc.

jakevoytko commented on Taking money off the table zachholman.com/posts/mone... · Posted by u/holman

throw0101c · 2 months ago

I participate in a personal finance sub-reddit, and there is often a question of whether someone should pay off their mortgage (completely, or make some lump sum payments).

The mathematical answer is that if your interest rate is lower than the expected returns of some kind of portfolio you have, than you'll make more money investing.

But I like to bring up what Morgan Housel, author of the book The Psychology of Money, said on paying down his mortgage:

> It just increased our independence, even if it made no sense on paper. So that's another element of debt that I think goes misunderstood. And a lot of that for both of those points is this idea that people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They don't make them in Excel. They make financial decisions at the dinner table. That's where they're talking about their goals and their own different personalities and their own unique fears and their own unique skills and whatnot. So that's why I kind of push people to say like, it's okay to make financial decisions that don't make any sense on paper if they work for you, if they check the boxes of your psychology and your goals that makes sense for you. And for me, extreme aversion, what looks like an irrational aversion today, and I would say is an irrational aversion to debt, is what works for me and what makes me happy, so that's why I've done it.

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/128

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSaRb-iFwPA&t=12m48s

jakevoytko · 2 months ago

Cash flow is another facet of paying off your mortgage early, and I think it’s underrated. Eliminating thousands of dollars from your monthly expenses dramatically increases your flexibility. Since most people have “cash / reserve fund” and “retirement investments (do not touch)” as their major financial categories, it optimizes the one you interact with the most. You don’t need to always make the maximum possible to keep a comfortable amount of cash on hand, which gives you more flexibility to take time off between jobs, or tank a layoff, or take that startup job that pays less (but damn if it doesn’t look fun). Personally I recently bought a second apartment adjacent to my first in order to combine them into a 3br. Paying off the first mortgage years ago was the difference between being able to afford the monthly expenses and not.

Obviously you need to consider both net worth and cash flow when making a decision like that, but don’t underrate the difference that improved cash flow makes!

jakevoytko commented on Build files are the best tool to represent software architecture blogsystem5.substack.com/... · Posted by u/pykello

xyzzy_plugh · 2 months ago

This is only true when the dependency structure is not already apparent. Almost all modern languages solve for this in their import statements and/or via their own package manager, at which point pushing everything up into Bazel is indeed redundant.

If anything this highlights the failure of languages solving for this themselves. I'm looking at you, C++.

It's no surprise Bazel is a hard sell for Rust, Go, Node, etc. because for those languages/ecosystems Bazel BUILD files are not the best tool to represent software architecture.

jakevoytko · 2 months ago

On top of that, the software world has changed dramatically since Bazel was first released. In practice, a git hash and a compile command for a command runner are more than enough for almost everyone.

What has changed in the past ~15 years? Many libraries and plugins have their own compilers nowadays. This increases the difficulty of successfully integrating with Bazel. Even projects that feel like they should be able to properly integrate Bazel (like Kubernetes) have removed it from the project as a nuisance.

Back when it was first designed, even compiling code within the same language could be a struggle; I remember going through many iterations of DLL hell back when I was a C++ programmer. This was the "it works on my machine" era. Bazel was nice because you could just say "Download this version of this thing, and give me a BUILD file path where I can reference it." Sometimes you needed to write some Starlark, but mostly not.

But now, many projects have grown in scale and complexity and they want to have their own automated passes. Just as C++ libraries needed special library wrappers for autotools within Bazel, now you often need to write multiple library compiler/automation wrappers yourself in any context. And then you'll find that Bazel's assumptions don't match the underlying code's. For example, my work's Go codebase compiles just fine with a standard Go compiler, but gazelle pukes because (IIRC) one of our third-party codegen tools outputs files with multiple packages to the same directory. When Etsy moved its Java codebase to Bazel, they needed to do some heavy refactoring because Bazel identified dependency loops and refused to compile the project, even though it worked just fine with javac. You can always push up your monocle and derisively say "you shouldn't have multiple packages per directory! you shouldn't have dependency loops!", but you should also have a compiler that can run your code just like the underlying language without needing to influence it at all.

That's why most engineers just need command runners. All of these languages and libraries are already designed to successfully run in their own contexts. You just need something to kick off the build with repeatable arguments across machines.

jakevoytko commented on Google was down in eastern EU and Turkey novinite.com/articles/234... · Posted by u/nurettin

mrweasel · 4 months ago

One thing I find interesting is that people still react to Google being down, half-way down. ChatGPT was down yesterday, almost no one cared.

jakevoytko · 4 months ago

ChatGPT typically has two nines of availability, it's down regularly.

jakevoytko commented on Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year cnbc.com/2025/08/27/googl... · Posted by u/frays

xenotux · 4 months ago

TLM roles are a trap, but not in that sense. There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once.

It's just a way to ease unsuspecting engineers into management. If you don't suck at management, your team inevitably grows (or you're handed over other teams), and before long, you're managing full-time.

Which means that there are three type of people who remain TLMs in the long haul: those who suck at management; those managing dead-end projects on dead-end teams; or those who desperately cling on to the engineering past and actively refuse to take on more people. From a corporate point of view, none of these situations are great, hence the recent pushback against TLM roles in the industry.

jakevoytko · 4 months ago

I mostly found TLM a disservice to people who reported to TLMs. They didn't have to earn a promotion as both an engineer and a manager at the same time, so many optimized for their own engineering promotion and any managing they did was out of the goodness of their hearts.

jakevoytko commented on Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production? · Posted by u/Satam

bronco21016 · 6 months ago

Won’t this lead to long-term everyone using the same prompt? It seems like this already naturally happens.

jakevoytko · 6 months ago

It doesn’t pick your prompt, just evaluates your response. AFAIK it doesn’t suggest other prompts

jakevoytko commented on Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production? · Posted by u/Satam

miketery · 6 months ago

Doesn't this create a signal problem long term?

If everyone is using it now prompts aren’t a good gauge.

jakevoytko · 6 months ago

It's optional and doesn't generate responses for you, instead just nudging you in better directions. So it's certainly not generating a bunch of indistinguishable profiles. Quite the opposite, it gives people a second chance to expand on their own views or experiences.

jakevoytko commented on Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production? · Posted by u/Satam

jakevoytko · 6 months ago

I work for Hinge, the dating app. We use them for our "prompt feedback" feature, where the LLM gives constructive feedback on how to improve your prompts if it judges them as low-effort or clichéd.

jakevoytko commented on AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/kjhughes

relativ575 · 6 months ago

Huh? Look at the hottest topic at the moment:

https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuc...

and see for yourself if Twitter is dead.

jakevoytko · 6 months ago

I was literally just comparing my Twitter and Bluesky feeds. The only discussions worth reading were on Bluesky.

It's a shame. Twitter used to be the undefeated king of breaking news.