romankolpak (u/romankolpak)

romankolpak commented on Code has _always_ been the easy part laughingmeme.org//2026/02... · Posted by u/rmason

romankolpak · a month ago

Hire excellent programmers who spent their lifetime learning how to write good code and build systems, and then the code is easy. Hire some bad ones and watch them struggle and fail and learn why maybe coding is not that easy. AI doesn't change this, it just shifts failure modes a bit since the volume of code produced is now larger, and AI-enabled bad programmers are still bad.

I remember a tennis survey where something like 70% of respondents believed they could win a game against a Tennis pro player (I can't find the source anymore, but it was discussed on Andy Roddick's podcast). If you watch Roger Federer effortlessly and elegantly make beautiful shots, it's very easy to fall into this trap and think -- it must be so easy, right?? Are people falling into the same trap watching Claude Code regurgitate CRUD apps for them?

romankolpak commented on Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes Back marmelab.com/blog/2025/11... · Posted by u/vinhnx

romankolpak · 4 months ago

The scope and complexity of the change is crucial here. There is a sweet spot where spec-driven agent offers great value: the change is small and simple enough that you can describe it reliably with a spec (i.e. you have complete understanding how to do it), while implementing it yourself is a lot more work than writing the said spec plus reviewing and correcting the agent.

For me currently this sweet spot is TINY. It's so small that my usage of Claude Code has dropped to almost none. It's simply more practical to let myself have the agency and drive the development, while letting AI jump in and assist when needed.

romankolpak commented on AI Weiwei: What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier hyperallergic.com/1050197... · Posted by u/kome

romankolpak · 5 months ago

Comes to germany, does not like it, makes a picture of a middle finger to Bundestag. This smells like ragebait low effort content I come to HN in order to avoid!

romankolpak commented on If nothing is curated, how do we find things tadaima.bearblog.dev/if-n... · Posted by u/nivethan

romankolpak · 10 months ago

When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.

Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.

romankolpak commented on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding danfabulich.medium.com/al... · Posted by u/dfabulich

nottorp · a year ago

But is that a bad thing?

Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.

And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I'm sure they'll manage alright.

By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...

romankolpak · 10 months ago

How do you make money by developing a web browser? You build this immensely complex piece of software and then have no choice but to distribute it for free. It seems like with the current browser landscape the only viable business model for companies building browsers is to make your money elsewhere while investing some of it into the browser development.

romankolpak commented on OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK openai.github.io/openai-a... · Posted by u/gronky_

davedx · a year ago

I’m seriously considering getting out of IT because of it

romankolpak · a year ago

because of MCP and langchain?

romankolpak commented on Please stop the coding challenges blackentropy.bearblog.dev... · Posted by u/CrazyEmi

romankolpak · a year ago

i think we need to come to terms with the reality of coding challenges in the interview process. i know i hate them personally, and dread having to interview again because i'll need to open leet code and remember how to do stupid shit like DFS on a graph, or manipulating linked lists. at the same time, a job opening for a SWE is opening soon in our company and we'll have to somehow filter people, and the job market is such that we'll get MANY applicants, most of them probably wrong for the job. i will probably end up giving them coding challenges (not necessarily leetcode, but some coding challenge for sure), because i need a way to grasp their problem solving and coding skills. i don't know a better way to do it in a condensed time frame of a 1 hour zoom call.

romankolpak commented on Alexander Grothendieck theguardian.com/science/a... · Posted by u/cyberlimerence

romankolpak · 2 years ago

The stories of geniuses suffering from depression and other mental illnesses sure make remarkably interesting reads. It’s a pity he didn’t get psychiatric help, this could have been a boring story of an aging scientist taking care of his plants.

romankolpak commented on Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now threema.ch/en/blog/posts/... · Posted by u/andrew918277

romankolpak · 2 years ago

I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused.

If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious

romankolpak commented on Goodbye, clean code (2020) overreacted.io/goodbye-cl... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

romankolpak · 2 years ago

this resonates strongly with me because i just had to nuke an abstraction invented by my colleague, which solved a small DRY issue but introduced a big change difficulty issue.

All we had to do is do some repetitive work for values of a dictionary (stringify and lowercase). We ended up having an abstraction of a dictionary with smart value conversion behaviours, which brought pain every time the business wanted some added custom behaviour (e.g. don't lowercase this property, make human-readable that property, etc). Younger me would keep piling up complexity onto this abstraction. Modern me just duplicated some `str(..).lower()` calls, removed the whole thing and went home happy.

u/romankolpak

KarmaCake day195January 22, 2015View Original