peteforde (u/peteforde)

peteforde commented on The Day the Telnet Died labs.greynoise.io/grimoir... · Posted by u/pjf

peteforde · 4 hours ago

The scope of this CVE and the response to it are genuinely wild.

It's crazy to think that some dude is singlehandedly responsible for ultimately ending the telnet era in such a definitive way.

One for the history books.

peteforde commented on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com/articles/... · Posted by u/weaksauce

lanstin · a day ago

Things that claude code/vibe coding is great at:

1. Allowing non-developers to provide very detailed specs for the tools they want or experiences they are imagining

2. Allowing developers to write code using frameworks/languages they only know a bit of and don't like; e.g. I use it to write D3 visualizations or PNG extracts from datastores all the time, without having to learn PNG API or modern javascript frameworks. I just have to know enough to look at the console.log / backtrace and figure out where the fix can be.

3. Analysing large code bases for specific questions (not as accurate on "give me an overall summary" type questions - that one weird thing next to 19 normal things doesn't stick in its craw as much as for a cranky human programmer.

It does seem to benefit cranking thru a list of smallish features/fixes rapidly, but even 4.5 or 4.6 seem to get stuck in weird dead ends rarely enough that I'm not expecting it, but often enough to be super annoying.

I've been playing around with Gas Town swarming a large scale Java migration project, and its been N declarations of victory and still mvn test isn't even compiling. (mvn build is ok, and the pom is updated to the new stack, so it's not nothing). (These are like 50/50 app code/test code repos).

peteforde · a day ago

I just don't get it.

Why do all of that when you can just keep a tight hold on an agent that is operating at the speed that you can think about what you're actually doing?

Again, if you're just looking to spend a lot of money on the party trick, don't let me yuck your yum. It just seems like doing things in a way that is almost guaranteed to lead to the outcomes that people love to complain aren't very good.

As someone getting excellent results on a huge (550k LoC) codebase only because I'm directing every feature, my bottleneck is always going to be the speed at which I can coherently describe what needs to be done + a reasonable amount of review to make sure that what happened is what I was looking for. This can only work because I explicitly go through a planning cycle before handing it to the agent.

I feel like if you consider understanding what your LLM is doing for you to be unacceptably slow and burdensome, then you deserve exactly what you're going to get out of this process.

peteforde commented on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com/articles/... · Posted by u/weaksauce

swordsith · 2 days ago

good take, I wish opus 4.6 wasn't so pricy its great for planning.

peteforde · 2 days ago

I've been using 4.6 to do planning, and then switching to 4.5 for agent/debug.

4.5 sticks to a 200k context window, which is how you keep costs sane.

peteforde commented on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com/articles/... · Posted by u/weaksauce

franciscop · 2 days ago

I've seen some discussions and I'd say there's lots of people who are really against the hyped expectations from the AI marketing materials, not necessarily against the AI itself. Things that people are against that would seem to be against AI, but are not directly against AI itself:

- Being forced to use AI at work

- Being told you need to be 2x, 5x or 10x more efficient now

- Seeing your coworkers fired

- Seeing hiring freeze because business think no more devs are needed

- Seeing business people make a mock UI with AI and boasting how programming is easy

- Seeing those people ask you to deliver in impossible timelines

- Frontend people hearing from backend how their job is useless now

- Backend people hearing from ML Engineers how their job is useless now

- etc

When I dig a bit about this "anti-AI" trend I find it's one of those and not actually against the AI itself.

peteforde · 2 days ago

If you keep digging, you will also find that there's a small but vocal sock puppet army who will doggedly insist that any claims to productivity gains are in fact just hallucinations by people who must not be talented enough developers to know the difference.

It's exhausting.

There are legitimate and nuanced conversations that we should be having! For example, one entirely legitimate critique is that LLMs do not tell LLM users that they are using libraries who are seeking sponsorship. This is something we could be proactive about fixing in a tangible way. Frankly, I'd be thrilled if agents could present a list of projects that we could consider clicking a button to toss a few bucks to. That would be awesome.

But instead, it's just the same tired arguments about how LLMs are only capable of regurgitating what's been scraped and that we're stupid and lazy for trusting them to do anything real.

peteforde commented on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com/articles/... · Posted by u/weaksauce

peteforde · 2 days ago

Daily agentic user here, and to me the problem here is the very notion of "vibe coding". If you're even thinking in those terms - this idea that never looking at the code has become a goal unto itself - then IMO you're doing LLM-assisted development wrong.

This is very much a hot take, but I believe that Claude Code and its yolo peers are an expensive party trick that gives people who aren't deep into this stuff an artificially negative impression of tools that can absolutely be used in a responsible, hugely productive way.

Seriously, every time I hear anecdotes about CC doing the sorts of things the author describes, I wonder why the hell anyone is expecting more than quick prototypes from an LLM running in a loop with no intervention from an experienced human developer.

Vibe coding is riding your bike really fast with your hands off the handles. It's sort of fun and feels a bit rebellious. But nobody who is really good at cycling is talking about how they've fully transitioned to riding without touching the handles, because that would be completely stupid.

We should feel the same way about vibe coding.

Meanwhile, if you load up Cursor and break your application development into bite sized chunks, and then work through those chunks in a sane order using as many Plan -> Agent -> Debug conversations with Opus 4.5 (Thinking) as needed, you too will obtain the mythical productivity multipliers you keep accusing us of hallucinating.

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

alexalx666 · 3 days ago

In my experience, often the libs provided by manufacturers are thin wrappers over physical interface setup and communication in the form of a single header and cpp file. Isnt it easier to just use them instead of generating differently phrased copies of them?

peteforde · 3 days ago

The vast majority of parts do not have libraries provided by a manufacturer.

Instead, you get a datasheet (if you're using a well-known part) that contains a list of registers which you need to either write functions against or hope someone on GitHub has done the work for you.

Some display modules do come with sample code that you can build (on a good day) to test things out, but these are almost always half-baked and feel more like HELLO WORLD than something you'd use as a cornerstone of your product development.

Other parts come with sample code that is explicitly designed to work with an expensive $200 "dev board" that you're supposed to use to generate the code you're intended to drop into your project. It's just my opinion, but I'd rather use an LLM for this and skip the dev board stage.

The reason libraries like Adafruit Graphics exist is precisely because the code that comes with the display panels they sell is usually less helpful than if it didn't exist.

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

peteforde · 4 days ago

I have been using Cursor w/ Opus 4.x to do extensive embedded development work over the past six months in particular. My own take on this topic is that for all of the chatter about LLMs in software engineering, I think a lot of folks are missing the opportunity to pull back and talk about LLMs in the context of engineering writ large. [I'm not capitalizing engineering because I'm using the HN lens of product development, not building bridges or nuclear reactors.]

LLMs have been a critical tool not just in my application but in my circuit design, enclosure design (CAD, CNC) and I am the conductor where these three worlds meet. The degree to which LLMs can help with EE is extraordinary.

A few weeks ago I brought up a new IPS display panel that I've had custom made for my next product. It's a variant of the ST7789. I gave Opus 4.5 the registers and it produced wrapper functions that I could pass to LVGL in a few minutes, requiring three prompts.

This is just one of countless examples where I've basically stopped using libraries for anything that isn't LVGL, TinyUSB, compression or cryptography. The purpose built wrappers Opus can make are much smaller, often a bit faster, and perhaps most significantly not encumbered with the mental model of another developer's assumptions about how people should use their library. Instead of a kitchen sink API, I/we/it created concise functions that map 1:1 to what I need them to do.

Where I agree with the author of this post is that I feel like perhaps it's time for a lot of libraries to sunset. I don't think replacing frameworks is the correct abstraction at all but I do think that it no longer makes sense to spend time integrating libraries when what you really need are purpose-built functions that do exactly what you want instead of what some library author thought you should want.

peteforde commented on IsoCoaster – Theme Park Builder iso-coaster.com/... · Posted by u/duck

jtokoph · 8 days ago

it seemed to me like the park entrance building was just decoration

peteforde · 8 days ago

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Not saying you're wrong!

peteforde commented on Soldering Prototypes with Enamel Magnet Wire (2020) tomverbeure.github.io/202... · Posted by u/hasheddan

michaeljx · 9 days ago

Any recommendations on pre-cut wiring kits?

peteforde · 8 days ago

Yes, actually!

Depending on the complexity/situation/mood/need for permanence I use some combination of double-headed (male) jumper wire and pre-cut breadboard wires. I buy my jumper wire as tear-off ribbons because sometimes I need 14 in a row for a GPIO bank or similar.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005202872082.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003219096948.html

Jumper wires are the fastest and easiest to work with, but as complexity grows things quickly get out of hand visually and spatially.

Pre-cut wires are great, though I have some hot takes. First, for a long time I would carefully remove them from previous projects for reuse. I now believe that this is objectively bad because they grow brittle and become harder to re-insert. Instead, think of them like sandpaper, which has an obvious point of diminishing return. Throw them away as you use them up and order more when you're running low.

My main beef with pre-cut wires is that for reasons that anger me every time I think about it, they all come in lengths that increment by one 2.54mm unit up until about 10 lengths, at which point they start jumping to arbitrary lengths. So you end up either a) using two wires to cover a distance or b) with an overly long wire that you need to manage.