You can't close this box you've opened. I hope saving time on keystrokes was worth your democracy freedom and privacy. I'm gonna have fun watching it get ripped away
What a weird thing to say.
Readit Newsjbeninger commented on OpenAI – How to delete your account help.openai.com/en/articl... · Posted by u/carlosrg
Serious question: so what then is the value of using an LLM? Just autocomplete? So you can use natural language? I'm seriously asking. My experience has been frustrating. Had the whole thing designed, the LLM gave me diagrams and code samples, had to tell it 3 times to go ahead and write the files, had to convince it that the files didn't exist so it would actually write them. Then when I went to run it, errors ... in the build file ... the one place there should not have been errors. And it couldn't fix those.
I mean, it's not actually autocomplete. But it serves the same role. I know approximately what I want to type, maybe some of the details like argument-order are a bit foggy. When I see the code I recognize it as my own and don't have too much trouble reading it.
But I use LLMs one level higher than autocomplete, at the level of an entire file. My prompts tend to look like "We need a new class to store user pets. Base it on the `person` class but remove Job and add Species. For now, Species is an enum of CAT,DOG,FISH, but we'll probably turn that into a separate table later. Validate the name is just a single word, and indicate that constraint when rendering it. Read Person.js, CODE_CONVENTIONS.md, and DATA_STRUCTURES.md before starting. When complete, read REFACTOR.md"
With the inclusion of code examples and conventions, the agent produces something pretty close to what I'd write myself, particularly when dealing with boilerplate Data or UI structures. Things that share common structure or design philosophy, but not common enough to refactor meaningfully.
I still have to read it through and understand it as if I'd written it myself, but the LLM saves a lot of typing and acts as a second pair of eyes. Codex currently is very defensive. I have to remove some unnecessary guardrails, but it will protect against rare issues I might not have noticed on my first pass.
I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this way it works okay for me
However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me
Hah. I don't work with (coding) people, so thankfully I don't have that problem
I’m not worried about being a good dev or not but these AI things thoroughly take away from the thing I enjoy doing to the point I’d consider leaving the industry entirely
I don’t want to wrangle LLMs into hallucinating correct things or whatever, I don’t find that enjoyable at all
I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete.
When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself.
YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.
jbeninger commented on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it siddhantkhare.com/writing... · Posted by u/sidk24
I’ve definitely been feeling that shift too. What have you guys found that helps with this? Any habits you use to avoid the constant context switching and decision fatigue?
I've found small features helps. If I ask the ai "do this", I wait 10 minutes for it to be finished, then another 30 understanding what was written
Instead, I start out broad. "I'm thinking of this feature. Let's talk about what components will go into it and where that code will live... Here are my initial thoughts. Let me know if I get anything wrong..."
This puts it in a conversation mode and gets you on the same page, and best of all it's quick. The llm agent isn't searching files and building, it's just giving general opinions
Once I have a good idea of the architecture, I move on to "write this class. Here is an overview of how I would do it", or point the agent to an existing file with the right conventions in place. Once again, if you've done your conversation doesn't take long. 20-second turnaround.
Then it's time to refine. "Move this function here, refactor that"
If you're going to have to understand the code anyway, read it while your writing it. Line by line, function by function, class by class. "Growing" a feature this way keeps you and the llm in sync. It doesn't go off on tangents. And building incrementally keeps you in the loop and in your flow. You don't have 5 things going at once. You have 1, faster.
I've let agents do their thing for a dozen minutes and usually end up having to rewind the whole thing piece by piece to understand what's actually happening
If you're truly vibe coding, maybe you don't have to read the code and can have a dozen agents on a dozen projects. But if you're making Serious Software, I don't see how you can commit code unseen. And in that case, you're not losing anything working incrementally and reading code as it's written?
Can you tell me what was the context that lead you to create this?
Unrelated JSON experience:
I worked on a serializer which save/load json files as well as binary file (using a common interface).
From my own use case I found JSON to be restrictive for no benefit (because I don't use it in a Javascript ecosystem)
So I change the json format into something way more lax (optional comma, optional colon, optional quotes, multi line string, comments).
I wish we would stop pretending JSON to be a good human-readable format outside of where it make sense and we would have a standard alternative for those non-json-centric case.
I know a lot of format already exists but none really took off so far.
I'm in the JS ecosystem pretty regularly and "restrictive with no benefit" is the right description. I use JSON5 now when I have to, which greatly reduces the restrictions. I already have a build step so throwing in a JSON5 -> JSON converter is negligible.
As for FracturedJson, it looks great. The basic problem statement of "either minified and unreadable or prettified and verbose" isn't one I had put my finger on before, but now that it's been said I can't unsee it.
jbeninger commented on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026? · Posted by u/meridion
- MANDATORY: Re-learn focus. I will not self-diagnose but I exhibit ADHD symptoms and I started actively fighting them back (they mostly come from the phone). I am not going to just deny myself access to apps on schedule -- my brain never clicked schedule, not even once in my life -- but through a persistent and sustainable self-change from deep within. It's slow but it's beginning to work.
- MANDATORY: Get more intimate with my Neovim. I've always kind of half-arsed my editors / IDEs, I always found it annoying to become a deep expert. This must change; surface-level skills rob you of productivity. I already am hugely annoyed by my typing speed, which is quite excellent but still not enough to work almost at the speed of thought. I want to achieve something near to these levels.
- OPTIONAL: Integrate closer with one ore more LLM agents for coding. I have not paid for any yet but copying-pasting from a web UI gets tiring. Sometimes you really just want to say "OK, now remove that duplicate test and include that edge case" and see it materialize in 20 seconds. I am not against paying, it's just that so far the paid tiers have not been a blocker. Well, seems like they are now.
- MANDATORY: Prioritize body. I have health conditions and I have a relatively good visibility how to fix them. I regularly end up desperately trying to solve more and more problems on the computer just so I don't get up and start a workout. I started turning this around but it's way too slow and time and age don't wait for anyone.
In general: connect better with myself, forgive myself all the previous mistakes, understand why and how they came to be and remove the root causes, put myself on a better path. And above all: be more true to myself.
I do a lot of local dev using docker. I've taken to adding an image just for agents and using that to make modifications. Agents can install or run anything they need without touching my actual machine. I can also limit what they can read and write.
I can agree this may be a (the?) pivot year, but I don't think it is energy. It is everything. It seems weird to say the death of fossil fuels is 'not that big of a deal compared to...' but when it was only a minor news story that life on ancient Mars is a growing probability, all the political, well, everything, is beginning to look like the norm and I just spent the day talking to an AI to help me code. Well, the death of fossil fuels just seems like it is maybe only a top 10 story of this decade.
I think the point though is it's not a "story". It's a fundamental shift. The shift is subtle and doesn't lend itself to sensationalism.
Entire countries have built their clout on fossil fuels. Wars have been fought. Now any country with a sufficient manufacturing base can be energy independent. And the resource is less controllable by a small group of people.
AI and geopolitics and everything else is huge right now, but they're being bent to the will of the current world order. The article is saying that that world order is going to change.
jbeninger commented on The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023) thecascade.dev/article/le... · Posted by u/loughnane
Counter-counterpoint (from someone who minored in typography): The purpose of a font is to be transparent as glass to the data being transmitted to your eyes. That is why if you notice a font and think it's stupid, the designer has made a mistake. Also if you notice a font because the designer left it in your default Times New Roman, that is a mistake. If a layout artist does a good job, you should never notice a font in the body of text you're reading. You should only notice a font occasionally if they really want to highlight a header or something. The font is a carrier of information - lighting on the stage, not the main actor. And it must never assume the role of an actor unless the designer specifically intends it to.
If you're a coder, you understand this extremely well, implicitly: You set up your IDE fonts and colors in a way that helps you see through the code. You don't want to be looking at letter forms when you're trying to grok something.
This is also the job of designers: Creating typefaces and layouts so that people see through the text, to the meaning.
Leaving your website in the system standard font basically screams "I do not give a shit about what is written here" and also possibly "I run a quacky conspiracy website" and me and most people will scroll past your writing as quickly as possible.
But there is no font that has no connotation. Every font has subconscious meanings to readers. Knowing what these are is important. Times New Roman screams, "I'm still using Windows 98". Whereas Comic Sans screams, "I work in a shitty real estate office". Simple examples. But the art is much deeper than that, because Optima Sans and Univers read very differently to the general public in ways that I could spend another few pages explaining. Every choice you make with type implies something that sits as a layer on top of the text that's written in that typography. But if you do your job well, you make the artisanship transparent, and allow the content to shine.
This is why typography is a bit of a black art, and why it's powerful. It subtly influences people in ways they don't notice and don't understand, while they're absorbing written information. Dig:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...
I was with you up to "I do not give a shit"
What font has been more tested for quick pass-through of data than the default system fonts? To me, this simply screams "This is the main body. You can find your information here"
jbeninger commented on Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come blog.muni.town/personal-d... · Posted by u/erlend_sh
You may like Peergos (creator here) https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media
That looks really promising. It checks a lot of the boxes I already had in mind for such a system, like being able to continue a thread without exposing the whole thing to untrusted parties