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Coding agents can now write code that works and passes tests, the author argues. They still can't judge how software should fit together, or make it debuggable and maintainable. That makes engineering fundamentals matter more than before.
A short position statement from an experienced engineer on what still needs human judgement once agents write the code.
Chris Burnell lists interactive features that plain HTML now handles without JavaScript, including popovers, modal dialogs, exclusive accordions, invoker buttons, lazy images and find-in-page reveals. He adds that several native form controls are still too buggy or inaccessible to rely on.
A practical inventory you can apply right away, honest about which native controls are still too buggy to rely on.
Mark Dominus walks through the seven books he keeps within reach of his desk. They are a 4th-edition Roget's Thesaurus, Thomas Browne's prose, the Decameron, From Frege to Gödel, Orbis Pictus, an NIV Bible and the Belles Heures. For each he explains why he keeps it close and what it has fed into his writing.
A warm, idiosyncratic reading list that shows how old books keep feeding a writer's craft.
A developer says AI has made software work feel pointless, like playing a game with cheats switched on. Many HN commenters said they feel the same. The most common answer was to work for the joy of it and stop tying your worth to a career AI can undercut.
A raw question that drew one of the most thoughtful threads of the week.
Raphael Bauer argues that Postgres with extensions can replace Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, ClickHouse, Neo4j and a vector database. His advice is to start every new need in Postgres and add a dedicated system only when Postgres measurably falls short.
A strong "start with Postgres" argument; the thread maps where it breaks down.
Ben Balter wrote his 576-page book in Markdown in a Git repo and built it like software. The setup has about 30 custom prose validators, 20 LLM audit lenses and 2,204 test cases. Fourteen parallel CI jobs turn one source into five store-ready formats.
Shows how far engineering practice can carry a long piece of writing, docs-as-code taken to its limit.
David Horn argues that software engineers keep reinventing older disciplines under new names. Managing AI coding agents, he says, is just program management. He thinks engineers should read the classic books on it instead of rediscovering waterfall the hard way.
A short provocation with a reading list attached.
Has any company tried AI coding and then gone back to writing code by hand? Hacker News found almost no clean cases. A few startups keep AI out of their core code on purpose. One founder is weighing a rewrite without it. The headline examples, Ford, IBM and Commonwealth Bank, were rehiring after layoffs, not dropping AI.
A useful reality check: the thread separates real reversals from layoff rehiring.
Rick Manelius adopts "AI;DR", short for "AI; didn't read", as a personal rule. If someone sends him AI output they didn't bother to review and edit, he won't bother to read it. He accepts fully generated text in some settings, such as customer support.
A short rule of etiquette for AI-written messages, and a busy thread about it.
Daniel Vaughn got tired of prompting coding agents in long English sentences. He built Huzzah, an experimental editor where an LLM regenerates real code from freeform pseudocode on every save. The pseudocode stays in the repo as a human-written record of intent, mapped line by line to the code it produced.
An unusual take on AI-assisted coding, with a working prototype to look at.
IKEA names its products with real Swedish words chosen by category, such as place names for sofas and men's names for bookshelves. Each name must pass a check for bad meanings in other languages. The company names 2,000 to 3,000 new products a year.
Pure fun: naming as a design system with rules.