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maerch commented on Doing the thing is doing the thing   softwaredesign.ing/blog/d... · Posted by u/prakhar897
dspillett · 16 days ago
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?

Probably. I've been known to spend weeks planning something that I then forget and leave completely unstarted because other things took my attention!

> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags'

I wonder how much these red flags are starting to change how people write without LLMs, to avoid being accused of being a bot. A number of text checking tools suggested replacing ASCII hyphens with m-dashes in the pre-LLM-boom days¹ and I started listening to them, though I no longer do. That doesn't affect the overall sentence structure, but a lot of people jump on m-/n- dashes anywhere in text as a sign, not just in “it isn't <x> - it is <y>” like patterns.

It is certainly changing what people write about, with many threads like this one being diverted into discussing LLM output and how to spot it!

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[1] This is probably why there are many of them in the training data, so they are seen as significant by tokenisation steps, so they come out of the resulting models often.

maerch · 16 days ago
It’s already happening. This came up in a webinar attended by someone from our sales team:

> "A typo or two also helps to show it’s not AI (one of the biggest issues right now)."

maerch commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?    · Posted by u/terabytest
embedding-shape · 23 days ago
> the exact definition of vibe-coding is, I think, yet to be determined

Huh? No, that's been established since Karpathy coined the term; you don't review the code, only use the agent and don't care about how it was done, just about the results.

The actual interesting stuff is how to use LLMs together with a human, to build high quality code. More "augmenting the human intellect" rather than "autonomous robots building for you".

Overall I'd say if someone handed you a specification that named SSE specifically, you created files with SSE in the name, and the implementation talks about doing SSE, yet it doesn't actually do SSE in the end, it's pretty much on par with code in commercial settings, yeah :) But maybe our bar should be slightly above the ground at least? :)

maerch · 23 days ago
> Huh? No, that's been established since Karpathy coined the term; you don't review the code, only use the agent and don't care about how it was done, just about the results.

However, nowadays it is used as a synonym for everything that is somehow generated by an LLM. Regardless of whether it is a spec-driven, carefully reviewed and iterative piece of software or some yolo-style one-prompter with no idea how it was done.

maerch commented on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced   github.com/anthropics/ori... · Posted by u/myahio
riffraff · 23 days ago
I feel that came out wrong but the "maybe" was intended to be a way of saying "no guarantees", to avoid giving people the idea "solve this, get hired".
maerch · 23 days ago
In that case, removing „perhaps“ would have helped a lot. It is not about maybe being hired, but about maybe being interviewed.
maerch commented on GPT-5.2   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg
namesbc · 2 months ago
So the rosy biased estimate is OpenAI is saving 1 hour of work per day, so 5 hours total per-work week and 20 hours total per-month.

With a subsidized cost of $200/month for OpenAI it would be cheaper to hirer a part-time minimum wage worker than it would be to contract with OpenAI.

And that is the rosiest estimate OpenAI has.

maerch · 2 months ago
The closest I come to working with part-time, minimum-wage workers is working with student employees. Even then, they earn more and usually work more than five hours a week.

Most of the time, I end up putting in more work than I get out of it. Onboarding, reviewing, and mentoring all take significant time.

Even with the best students we had, paying around 400 euros a month, I would not say that I saved five hours a week.

And even when they reach the point of being truly productive, they are usually already finished with their studies. If we then hire them full-time, they cost significantly more.

maerch commented on The Cities Skylines Paradox: how the sequel stumbled   selix.net/notes/the-citie... · Posted by u/jhy
dfxm12 · 3 months ago
You can only sell a game once. Once you have your customers' money, you've achieved your goal. What else is there to do? DLC has a hard cap on your possible sales...

You could work on a totally new game, but, I think companies are looking to cut costs by reusing content.

maerch · 3 months ago
Factorio 2.0 seemed to pull it off. I think that as long as users don’t feel misled by a DLC that only adds a few skins, they generally appreciate larger updates to a game.
maerch commented on German industrial output falls to 2005 levels as auto sector craters   ft.com/content/745fff84-2... · Posted by u/tchalla
niffydroid · 4 months ago
But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
maerch · 4 months ago
Exactly this. I thought about getting a T7, but the price is just ridiculous. And it’s not even like you’re paying for quality, there are so many complaints about both minor and major issues.
maerch commented on Birth of Prettier   blog.vjeux.com/2025/javas... · Posted by u/garretruh
harimau777 · 4 months ago
I think it depends on the situation. If it's just not their preference then there's probably no need for a change. However, if it's going to prevent the new person from doing their job then a change is probably justified.
maerch · 4 months ago
People being prevented from doing their job because of code formatting? In my nearly 20 years of development, that statement was indeed true, but only before the age of formatters. Back then, endless hours were spent on recurring discussions and nitpicky stylistic reviews. The supposed gains were minimal, maybe saving a few seconds parsing a line faster. And if something is really hard to read, adding a prettier-ignore comment above the lines works wonders. The number of times I’ve actually needed it since? Just a handful.

Code style is a Pareto-optimal problem space: what one person finds readable may look like complete chaos to someone else. There’s no objective truth, and that’s why I believe that in a project involving multiple people, spending time on this is largely a waste of time.

maerch commented on Vibe engineering   simonwillison.net/2025/Oc... · Posted by u/janpio
waltbosz · 4 months ago
My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect. And I'll waste time debugging it.

But if I give it a code example that was written by humans and ask it to explain the code, it gives pretty good explanations.

It's also good for questions like "I'm trying to accomplish complicated task XYZ that I've never done before, what should I do?", and it will give code samples that get me on the right path.

Or it'll help me debug my code and point out things I've missed.

It's like a pair programmer that's good for bouncing ideas, but I wouldn't trust it to write code unsupervised.

maerch · 4 months ago
> My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect. And I'll waste time debugging it.

> […]

> Or it'll help me debug my code and point out things I've missed.

I made both of these statements myself and later wondered why I had never connected them.

In the beginning, I used AI a lot to help me debug my own code, mostly through ChatGPT.

Later, I started using an AI agent that generated code, but it often didn’t work perfectly. I spent a lot of time trying to steer the AI to improve the output. Sometimes it worked, but other times it was just frustrating and felt like a waste of time.

At some point, I combined these two approaches: I cleared the context, told the AI that there was some code that wasn’t working as expected, and asked it to perform a root cause analysis, starting by trying to reproduce the issue. I was very surprised by how much better the agent became at finding and eventually fixing problems when I framed the task from this different perspective.

Now, I have commands in Claude Code for this and other due diligence tasks, and it’s been a long time since I last felt like I was wasting my time.

maerch commented on Gemini 3.0 Pro – early tests   twitter.com/chetaslua/sta... · Posted by u/ukuina
maerch · 4 months ago
I still have a bad taste in my mouth after all those GPT-5 hype articles that claimed the model was just one step away from AGI.
maerch commented on The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows   nicolasbustamante.com/p/t... · Posted by u/nbstme
maerch · 4 months ago
> The agent follows references like a human analyst would. No chunks. No embeddings. No reranking. Just intelligent navigation.

I think this sums it up well. Working with LLMs is already confusing and unpredictable. Adding a convoluted RAG pipeline (unless it is truly necessary because of context size limitations) only makes things worse compared to simply emulating what we would normally do.

u/maerch

KarmaCake day105May 22, 2014View Original