jmull (u/jmull) - Readit News

jmull commented on Parse, Don't Validate (2019) lexi-lambda.github.io/blo... · Posted by u/shirian

d0liver · 6 hours ago

I think, more generally, "push effects to the edges" which includes validation effects like reporting errors or crashing the program. If you, hypothetically, kept all of your runtime data in a big blob, but validated its structure right when you created it, then you could pass around that blob as an opaque representation. You could then later deserialize that blob and use it and everything would still be fine -- you'd just be carrying around the validation as a precondition rather than explicitly creating another representation for it. You could even use phantom types to carry around some of the semantics of your preconditions.

Point being: I think the rule is slightly more general, although this explanation is probably more intuitive.

jmull · 5 hours ago

Systems tend to change over time (and distributed nodes of a system don’t cut over all at once). So what was valid when you serialized it may not be valid when you deserialize it later.

jmull commented on Eight more months of agents crawshaw.io/blog/eight-mo... · Posted by u/arrowsmith

jmull · 8 hours ago

Regarding the shift away from time spent on agriculture over the last century or so..

> That was a net benefit to the world, that we all don't have to work to eat.

I’m pretty sure most all of us are still working to have food to eat and shelter for ourselves and our families.

Also, while the on-going industrial and technological revolution has certainly brought benefits, it’s an open question as to whether it will turn out to be a net benefit. There’s a large-scale tragedy of the commons experiment playing out and it’s hard to say what the result will be.

jmull commented on I am happier writing code by hand abhinavomprakash.com/post... · Posted by u/lazyfolder

afavour · 2 days ago

I think this comparison isn’t quite correct. The downside with carpentry is that you only ever produce one of the thing you’re making. Factory woodwork can churn out multiple copies of the same thing in a way hand carpentry never can. There is a hard limit on output and output has a direct relationship to how much you sell.

Code isn’t really like that. Hand written code scales just like AI written code does. While some projects are limited by how fast code can be written it’s much more often things like gathering requirements that limits progress. And software is rarely a repeated, one and done thing. You iterate on the existing product. That never happens with furniture.

jmull · 2 days ago

Exactly.

How much is coding actually the bottleneck to successful software development?

It varies from project to project. Probably in a green field it starts out pretty high but drops quite a bit for mature projects.

(BTW, "mature" == "successful", for the most part, since unsuccessful projects tend to get dropped.)

Not that I'm not AI-denier. These are great tools. But let's not just swallow the hype we're being fed.

jmull commented on I am happier writing code by hand abhinavomprakash.com/post... · Posted by u/lazyfolder

jmull · 2 days ago

> The process of writing code helps internalize the context and is easier for my brain to think deeply about it.

True, and you really do need to internalize the context to be a good software developer.

However, just because coding is how you're used to internalizing context doesn't mean it's the only good way to do it.

(I've always had a problem with people jumping into coding when they don't really understand what they are doing. I don't expect LLMs to change that, but the pernicious part of the old way is that the code -- much of it developed in ignorance -- became too entrenched/expensive to change in significant ways. Perhaps that part will change? Hopefully, anyway.)

jmull commented on Beyond agentic coding haskellforall.com/2026/02... · Posted by u/RebelPotato

Narciss · 2 days ago

I did a bit of digging into why you think agentic coding is “not there yet”, and I think you are bashing a tool you have very little experience with and are using a bit wrongly.

Nothing wrong with that, except that as opposed to any other tool that is out there, agentic coding is approached by smart senior engineers that would otherwise spend time reading documentation and understanding a new package/tool/framework before giving conclusions around it with “I spun up Claude code and it’s not working”. Dunno why the same level of diligence isn’t applied to agentic coding as well.

First question that I always have to such engineers is “what model have you tried?” And it always ends up being the non-SOTA models for tasks that are not simple. Have you tried Claude Opus?

Second question: have you tried plan mode?

And then I politely ask them to read some documentation on using these tools, because the simplicity of the chat interface is deceptive.

jmull · 2 days ago

It doesn't look like you addressed issues raised in the article. E.g., see the "my experiences interviewing candidates" section where we can see this isn't just a problem of the author's (just one example in one section of an article that covers various things).

I always wonder what the purpose of posting these generic, superficial defenses of a certain form of LLM-based coding is?

jmull commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk

jmull · 3 days ago

> Since [a few months ago], things have dramatically changed...

It's not like we haven't heard that one before. Things have changed, but it's been a steady march. The sudden magic shift, at a different point for everyone, is in the individual mind.

Regarding the epiphany... since people have been heavily overusing frameworks -- making their projects more complex, more brittle, more disorganized, more difficult to maintain -- for non-technical reasons, people aren't going to stop just because LLMs make them less necessary; The overuse wasn't necessary in the first place.

Perhaps unnecessary framework usage will drop, though, as the new hype replaces the old hype. But projects won't be better designed, better organized, better through-through.

jmull commented on Sins of the Children asteriskmag.com/issues/07... · Posted by u/maxall4

komadori · 23 days ago

This short story is set in the same universe as Tchaikovsky's excellent "Shroud" novel and in fact it's the same ship. I wonder where it sits in the chronology because I think the ending of Shroud surely permits an interesting sequel.

jmull · 23 days ago

I would think before. This would be one of the vaguely referenced previous places they had found to exploit (in Shroud). I think FenJuan appeared in Shroud as well, with a vague backstory that nevertheless seems consistent with this story.

jmull commented on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes reuters.com/world/america... · Posted by u/jumpocelot

throw__away7391 · a month ago

That's because the WWII generation who created these institutions and laid the groundwork for many of these change were still around for all that time. Around 2016 the last remaining members passed away. Now we have the boomers in charge and they are at long last able to enact all their fantasies without restraint in their final few years before they too pass.

jmull · a month ago

The "blame is on the boomers" idea is rather poorly supported by facts or even rational ideas.

jmull commented on Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS github.com/bellard/mquick... · Posted by u/Aissen

simonw · 2 months ago

Down to -4. Is this generic LLM-dislike, or a reaction to perceived over-self-promotion, or something else?

No matter how much you hate LLM stuff I think it's useful to know that there's a working proof of concept of this library compiled to WASM and working as a Python library.

I didn't plan to share this on HN but then MicroQuickJS showed up on the homepage so I figured people might find it useful.

(If I hadn't disclosed I'd used Claude for this I imagine I wouldn't have had any down-votes here.)

jmull · 2 months ago

I don't know why people are downvoting your comment, but it could be considered a low-effort post: here's (a link to) something I prompted AI with, here's (a link to) what it produced (the whole repo).

I would guess people don't know how you expect them to evaluate this, so it comes off as spamming us with a bunch of AI slop.

(That C can be compiled to WASM or wrapped as a python library isn't really something that needs a proof-of-concept, so again it could be understood as an excuse to spam us with AI slop.)

jmull commented on Log level 'error' should mean that something needs to be fixed utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

jmull · 2 months ago

I encourage people to think a few moments about what to log and at what level.

You’re kind of telling a story to future potential trouble-shooters.

When you don’t think about it at all (it doesn’t take much), you tend to log too much and too little and at the wrong level.

But this article isn’t right either. Lower-level components typically don’t have the context to know whether a particular fault requires action or not. And since systems are complex, with many levels of abstractions and boxes things live in, actually not much is in a position to know this, even to a standard of “probably”.