> Helps if/when polluting context with a zillion (mostly unnecessary) tools.
Ugh, I can't help but respond to this one point. The fact that this is even an issue in the current year just tells us how screwed the software field is in a lot of ways. I don't mean that in existential terms, but of how divided we've become in terms of what's happened to human reasoning. On the one hand, you have people who apply deep thinking to develop the sort of approaches you described, and there's the exponentially growing segment of not-even-programmers who seem to never ask themselves whether any of their ideas have any sort of consequences.
Take MCPs for instance. Sure, I guess it can sometimes make sense to have a stateful API that is optimized for agents. Yet, more often than not, these MCPs frontload a ton of context where it's not needed, and solve problems where none existed. Merely sticking an API (MCP) in front of an API (CLI, REST, GraphQL) without a benefit that can be explained in a single sentence is lunacy and demonstrates a real lack of complex thinking.
> tells us how screwed the software field is in a lot of ways
But, you just very clearly described why human software engineers are in higher demand than ever before.
It's always been "screwed" in the sense that everyone else sucks at wielding the power.
What we're actually witnessing is a watershed moment where a lot of technologically illiterate people are getting left behind. Those of us on the literate side are left to fight amongst ourselves and the powers that be for control over the future. We have actually been doing an alright job all things considered (else this conversation wouldn't be happening). Politicians are aging out and we're the adults in the room now.
Your point is valid for individual developers or small teams of technical folks.
However, MCPs are a godsend to anyone trying to manage access to systems (especially SaaS systems) in a large organization that includes a ton of non-technical employees. We use at least a couple of SaaS products where RBAC is severely limited in what it can govern or where API keys do not have any kind of governance so handing one out is basically handing out read/write on the entire system. Being able to configure an MCP to only have read endpoints enabled it a very useful piece of duct tape. Obviously it would be great if the underlying API was just designed with proper governance but that's out of the user's control.
I totally agree. At the same time, nobody should be using Discord anyway, for a variety of reasons. They're one of the least trustworthy online platforms I can think of, and have unfortunately encouraged online ecosystems where you have to "Join our Discord" in order to maybe be heard. I would be delighted if age verification encourage more people to abandon Discord. In a better world, companies like that wouldn't be allowed to become zombie corporations but instead be forced to go out of business.
They'll shut down servers and close your account with no reason provided outside of demanding you add a phone number. It's happened to me a few times, and I was squeaky clean on there even when compared to the way I talk on HN. Didn't matter whether I provided a phone number. I'm not the only one it's happened to. Anyone with friends on Discord should make sure to write down their contact information in case Discord one day decides that they or their community doesn't exist anymore. But do they delete your data? No, of course they don't... they keep it all to themselves!
THIS. Nearly lost several large owned 'servers' on the account, too, due to the phone number demands! Support was awful, making needless month long hoops and ultimately not helping me at all.
Meanwhile Discourse (the open source forum software) has recently added voice and video calling. Matrix is a good option, also.
I have a few years old account. One day they just blocked be out and rudely demanded a phone number.
At the time I had TOTP based 2FA since forever.
Fine, I got myself a burner number (not sharing a real number with creeps and bullies), account tot unblocked. I kept using it.
A week later I deleted a phone number form my account (marked as optional after all), and the account got immediately, immediately blocked, after I saved the changes.
Not to mention it is a total silo that is not indexed by search engines and protected by archive.org - one day when Discords VC money finally runs out, it could all vanish in an instant, destroying communities and a lot of culture.
On one hand, yes, nicotine in many ways does deserve the reputation it's received. Then again, a lot of the blame should go more towards smoking rather than nicotine the substance.
Nicotine is highly addictive, but as you mentioned, the delivery method plays a huge role in its addictive potential, and most people don't realize this. The chances that you'll become addicted to patches is incredibly low. If they were that addictive, then they'd likely be way more effective in helping people quit smoking; in reality, it's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of patch users who successfully end up quitting smoking that way. Even with the highest dose patches, the addiction potential is still relatively low because the patches release the nicotine over a very long period of time and make it difficult or impossible to associate the use of the substance with a ritualistic activity like lighting and puffing on a cigarette.
And yeah, it's not a subject you can really bring up with anyone besides recreational drug users. Very few will be receptive to the idea that nicotine has legitimate uses and can be used without getting addicted.
I, too, have experimented with the patches over the last year. Nicotine is great in a lot of ways, but whether it's a tool or a crutch depends on both the person and the delivery method.
The patches are different, not just because it lacks that same connection to compulsive and ritualistic activity, but it simply doesn't provide the same quick "hit" that makes smoking far more addictive.
On the other hand, someone prone to addictive tendencies probably shouldn't even use the patches. Even the patches can be a gateway to vaping and smoking for such a person. I have simply never been the type to become addicted to any drug or substance, other than the occasional overeating. This isn't to say that I don't have the potential to get hooked on more powerful drugs, but my innate desire to use them is a lot less than I think is average. Even during times where I've habitually drunk copious amounts of alcohol, I've always been able to realize "this kinda sucks so I think I'm gonna stop" and then I just do without really much struggle other than some brain fog for a few days. Similarly, I sometimes use phenibut, and people talk about how easy it is to become dependent on it and how hard it is to get off it, and that hasn't been my experience in the slightest. Someone without a clear objective around how they use substances like that will be much more likely to end up suffering.
That said, the patches are great for focus and anxiety when used in low doses in moderation. I don't necessarily advise that everyone use them as I have, but I also don't think they're anywhere near as harmful as one might assume. I don't feel the need to ever switch to smoking or vapes, or even gums and pouches.
That said, the patches are great for focus and anxiety when used in low doses in moderation
There is almost no good evidence of this. Effect sizes are tiny, if any. Just placebo and anecdotal. The effect is so small it's not even worth it from
This has not been my experience. Obviously there's no way I can disprove a placebo effect, but I don't find myself to be particularly prone to placebo effects or magical thinking. The vast majority of the time,, I don't notice much effect if at all from the "amazing" psychoactives, nootropics, pharmaceuticals, supplements, etc., short of full blown psychedelics and stimulants. Perhaps I'm prone to the nocebo effect. Then again, if I nearly always have the nocebo effect, it would seem odd to me that suddenly I would have the placebo effect with patches. Is it like adderall? No, but I would be stunned if researchers performed a double-blind study of patches on me as the sole subject and couldn't find a measurable difference in my behavior in terms of task persistence.
Without fail, these vibe coded project websites all make themselves look way more ambitious and established than they actually are. A software project could be hours old and it will have a website that, just a handful of years ago, only projects that had been around for a while and with a revenue model would have had. To me, it comes off as so overly persuasive that the only thing I can think nowadays is "what sort of half-baked junk are they trying to sell me?" Today, a primitive website or a mere handwritten README.md is, ironically, a more reliable signal of whether an application is worth considering. At least to me, anyway.
Seriously! Though I prefer GPT models to other frontier models, this shit is confusing. They keep changing the names of these models and they often don't communicate anything meaningful about the model itself, especially with these latest iterations. At least with "mini" and "nano" you understood they generally had differing speeds and "reasoning" capability, but what the hell do "Terra", "Sol", and "Astra" really mean? Which one of them is the effective successor to gpt-5.4-mini? It's hard to tell since the only objective information you'll get is token pricing. Is Terra less capable than Luna because it makes me think of dirt and grass? Or is Luna less powerful because the Earth is bigger than the Moon? Apparently that's the real answer. And why do I even have to think about this? And what comes after Astra? Galactica? Or will they start naming the succeeding models after different candy bars? Should I even care since a new model will get farted out mere days after I figured out what differentiated the last one?
What's unclear to me is who OpenAI thinks they're marketing to with this form of branding. These different models don't really mean all that much to the vast majority of people using their products who aren't developers, and developers aren't helped at all by the way they've been naming said models. Are they merely scared that they'll become irrelevant because Anthropic decided to give their models quirky names like "Opus" and "Fable"?
If OpenAI really wants to give their models names, they should name the generation of model and then have the different sub-models named by purpose or capability level. After all, I wouldn't use Mini for a job that Nano could easily do, and I wouldn't use Nano for a job that the full version of GPT-* necessitates. Similarly, I've had to discover exactly how Luna, Terra, and Sol are appropriate for different complexities and task types. OpenAI could help me skip a lot of those steps and just tell me what each model distillation is good for without causing me to look through their pricing page and make educated guesses. After all, shouldn't they not want me to pay attention to how much they're charging me?
All of this makes the days of frontend framework churn seem quaint and actually preferable.
What models are good at is so subjective it isn't OpenAI's place to really say "Use Sol for X and Luna for Y". They are publishing benchmarks so you can figure out how to best utilize each model. I get that it sucks to have to do this yourself, but eventually there will probably be some type of benchmark that help with discovering a model's strengths and weaknesses
The issue that OpenAI had when they had mini and nano models is that ambiguous the differences between those and everyone just used the base model anyway. I have no idea what type of job mini can do that nano couldn't or vis-à-vis.
I do wonder if it would just be better if they were named 6-small, 6, and 6-big?
> I have no idea what type of job mini can do that nano couldn't or vis-à-vis.
In my experience, Nano won't reliably handle complex open-ended tasks and is mostly suited for very explicit instruction that it can't screw up. It's no different from how there are some chores you can give to kids and there are other tasks you need at least a teenager for. If the decision tree of the task is very clear and conventional, Nano can be cheaper than giving the task to a relatively overpowered model, especially if it's something where the output is rigidly structured. This makes it well suited for skills that essentially run CLI commands and generate output, especially because it is usually faster. Mini is more like a discount version of the base model, and Nano is the dollar store version. Mini is more of a generalist and a fairly good deal if you have a moderately complex task that is conventional, but can be less conventional that what Nano can handle. I mostly used gpt-5.4-mini this year for my side projects because it's a pretty good generalist while significantly saving on costs. It is, however, somewhat dumber than the base model and more prone to ignore or forget rules you give it. I'd have just used a base model, but the low cost of Mini and Nano made them appealing to me. Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but I have hundreds or possibly thousands more in my pocket than many other users because of that.
This workflow I settled into with Mini and Nano didn't map cleanly on to the current generation of model tiers. With the price of Luna, you'd think it would be a replacement for Nano. In a sense it is, yet I didn't find that Terra became the new Mini. Terra is more powerful, better at explaining its own decisions, yet I've also found it to be relatively stupid while charging me more to use it. On the other hand, Luna with its reasoning set to "high" is what I consider to fill the role of Mini, and is good enough such that I no longer use Mini. Sol and Astra are great, but they're pricey. It could be my own brain and its bad perception, but so far I don't get the point of Terra. Luna succeeded at reverse engineering some abandonware with a very complicated licensing and virtualization scheme, and did so over SSH into a Windows VM with only PowerShell on the other end. Terra did such idiotic crap to my flashcards app that I stopped using it for anything after that.
This is why I find OpenAI's naming unhelpful and kind of pointless. I don't really care about the benchmarks that all these models are commonly run against. They're not that useful, IMO. OpenAI could easily give early access to these models, get a ton of feedback, and provide better insight to customers on how these things behave. Even calling Terra "gpt-5.6-overpriced-cheating-dumbass" would be better than wasting my time and money figuring it out myself. But that wouldn't make OpenAI as much money.
A large portion of the HN crowd woefully underrates this aspect of macOS. The types who would get pleasure tweaking their OS and understanding it intimately are overrepresented here, though props to them.
I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever. Windows today is of course abusive to users and shouldn't be used, and as much as I absolutely love Linux as a server OS and for VM appliances, I get no joy whatsoever trying to figure out why the DE stopped working after letting the OS update itself or debugging subpar rendering from the Wayland compositor or X11. (Linux people still tell me this isn't a problem in 2026 but, guess what, my Ubuntu VM hit a black screen a couple days ago after upgrading with no other changes made to the installation, so they're wrong) That and so much graphical Linux software is written with the attitude of "I'm a freak who thinks context menus shouldn't exist so fuck the user and fuck anyone who tells me I'm wrong", yet so many DEs integrate these apps anyway.
The worst thing that macOS has ever overtly done to me is slightly change the look of its interface over the years, which is incredibly minor compared to all the changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE have gone through in the last decade. Does it pull lame crap like phone home? Probably, but these days I assume that just about all software thinks it knows better than I and constantly pings cloud servers. MacOS is not really unique in this regard. I will switch to my own Linux if Apple goes down the road of "use our AI or else", but for now I don't really see the venom towards macOS to be justified when it's incredibly easy to prove that the alternatives are usually very poor.
Oh yeah, and the hardware is excellent. (except for the keyboards which need TPU dam covering them or else dust kills them after a couple years)
> macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever.
Happened to me years ago. No biggie, installed a backup and noticed I had somehow removed the most important directory with all my work files from the the time machine back up. Hardly Apple’s fault, though, but I got complacent with ”it just works”.
Since then I come to conclusion that the saying should go: ”It works - until it doesn’t”. If it os not the OS, it is myself who messes something up.
These days I almost solely use Linux. I have M1 Mini as a media centre connected to TV and I have to use Windows crap at work. Opening my Linux seems like a hig from an old friend in comparison. I might need to read docs and fight with drivers every now and then, but fuck it, I don’t care. Because this one is mine.
It's funny because I wrote my comment this morning and then an hour later my manager told me unprompted about how his work Macbook updated over the weekend and got stuck in a boot loop! I have a feeling the blame might actually be on some IT department configuration going haywire, but it could be Apple's fault for all I know. That was an amusing coincidence.
And yeah, "It works – until it doesn't" is probably the most accurate statement that can be made about all technology. My original comment also can make it seem like I'm taking a dump on Linux, but my gripe is more about Linux desktop environments. Linux absolutely can be a really stable OS, but I've only been able to truly reach that for myself by compiling my own kernel and composing my own desktop environment from barely-related packages. This is where I totally relate to your sense of "fuck it, I don't care because it's mine." Maybe someday I'll end up completely switching to my own Linux OS.
> I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade.
This happened to me once with a Mac upgrade!
And it’s still fewer times than something has happened to one of my Linux machines, by an order of magnitude.
There are little annoyances with Macs and occasional frustrating problems, but after using them side by side with other operating systems for years it’s what I choose for the daily driver.
Most complaints come from people who have become familiar with one OS for a decade and then get angry when they use something else and it’s not the same as their familiar thing. There isn’t much value in those comparisons.
It's things like this that make me imagine what kind of Linux desktop we could have if one of them had the kind of budget that goes towards Windows and macOS. The kernel itself is great and tons of money is effectively invested towards it and its ecosystem. In my humble opinion, it's the Linux DEs that sometimes get really close to being as equally awesome but never quite get there. MacOS is by no means what I consider a perfect OS, but it's reliable enough that I haven't had to think to myself "what if my computer stops working tomorrow because reasons." I know it happens to people, but it seems relatively rare in contrast to the alternatives. The one big exception might be the removal of Rosetta, but developers and consumers have had an abundance of time to migrate to Apple Silicon. In general, macOS respects me enough such that it isn't constantly trying to make me adapt to new ideas. You know something? I hate that I'm practically kissing the rear end of a gigantic corporation that does other things that are anti-consumer and anti-developer. I don't worship Apple. I think GrapheneOS is better than iOS. But I appreciate that their desktop OS causes me the least number of frustrations. And speaking of GrapheneOS, it essentially benefits from Google's budget towards AOSP, and Linux DEs don't have this advantage. Imagine if they did and we had a Linux DE that was as solid as GrapheneOS, and without the BS that comes with Android.
It's been ages since I've looked at System 76. They have quite an impressive lineup of products now! I'll definitely be checking them out the next time I want a personal computing device that's not tied to Microslop or Apple.
Ya wayland v x11. I ended up having to sideload xcfe+x11 just to do 1) video streaming work 2) kicad
one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough
Yeah I hate the term "sideload", but I'm guessing they meant it in the sense that they installed a separate DE within a distro designed around its original DE. Ideally, the DE that ships with a distro should be able to solve problems like video streaming and KiCAD with relative ease in the year 2026. Although I'd be curious as to why exactly that person decided they needed to change their setup in that way, I also can't say I'm entirely surprised that they would end up needing to do something like that.
The idea of a distro being "designed" around a particular DE has always annoyed me too. I'd hear people saying they wanted to try KDE so they wiped Ubuntu and installed Kubuntu instead and it's like, buddy you could have just... installed KDE. I know some specialized distros are really all about shipping a nicely-configured setup for their specific DE, but your old standbys like Debian, Redhat, Arch, Slackware, these are all infinitely flexible.
The idea, I think, is to provide a sense of GUI unity that Windows and Mac mostly provide. While it's nice in principle, the reality is you're going to install other software, and it's often going to use GUI libraries that don't perfectly match or match at all with your Linux DE. Personally, I've never found the need for a system to be designed so heavily around a DE. Like you said, it's entirely feasible and relatively straight forward to download Debian or whatever distribution and install a DE and chances are it will work ask expected. Well, until you perform an update/upgrade and boot to a black screen, but that's a different story. Once you've got your kernel and init system of choice, you can pretty much do anything you want. A premade DE is hardly even needed if you have a modest familiarity with how Linux works. The only downside is the added work from setting it up and debugging it, but people who use Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, MATE, LXDE, and so forth, end up doing that anyway eventually.
It's kinda nuts to me how people can act like Claude is lightyears ahead of OpenAI models. Sure, it's one thing to simply have a preference or claim that Claude does some things better, but in reality they are both about as effective at doing the same job. I've long preferred GPT models because they know better how to shut up and don't seem to overthink as much as Claude, but I'm under no illusions that if OpenAI went belly-up then I couldn't do my job essentially the same with Claude. GPT models have also clearly improved over time in terms of programming. There haven't been any "big bangs" necessarily, but it's really not hard to give the same task to 5.3 and 6 and see which one has better output.
I find that Camp B is a lot more likely to not understand Camp A than the other way around. Both enjoy the outcome of "we made something cool", but Camp A more heavily values the journey to get there, and many in that camp aren't particularly bothered if they didn't actually get there if the journey was good. Camp B was never interested in the journey but absolutely wants an outcome. Unfortunately, the voices of Camp B seem a lot louder, and Camp A can come off like old farts.
The thing about your analogy is that the person in Camp B might seem a bit silly to most people at face value. Even your average person values doing a bit more than sticking to the parking lot in a beautiful national park they may not visit again for decades. The reason I bring this up is that I personally don't begrudge Camp B. How can I not sympathize with people who want to shape reality to their imagination? I understand that.
Where I divorce from Camp B is on the idea that the process behind developing the architecture and the code software is inherently a roadblock and essentially has no value. They produce these specious claims like "code was never the hard part" because they view code as something completely separate from the thing the code produces, which was simply not true because the very nature of code is in describing the thing that it's implementing. The typical Camp B mindset seems to misunderstand or hate this fact of reality, and many of them don't even seem to get that other human minds have other perfectly valid objectives behind the things that they do. There is nothing wrong with becoming a programmer because you enjoy and thrive in the process in writing software, but even before LLMs, we have been increasingly infantilizing that desire because it's not seen as productive or obviously revenue producing. Valuing the process is viewed by outsiders as dilly-dallying when, in actuality, many of the greatest things in not just computer programming but technology and science have been a result of Camp A people investing effort in exploring and executing theory that Camp B has no interest in.
This is why I get pissed off when I hear that "code was never the hard part." It's like, screw you people, my job being paid to write code to satisfy the requirements of my employer/customer was and is hard. What's changed are the requirements; the new requirements are to not give a fuck about quality and sustainability and to maximize speed at which boxes can be ticked for project management. This doesn't mean that making software that's not a piece of shit isn't still a hard problem. There's a dearth of projects built with AI in the last 3 years, the vast majority of which are polished turds that have been completely abandoned by their authors. What does that tell you?
Camp B should, by all means, go ahead and do their thing. I think it's great that technology has made it possible for someone to build an app or a site with no background knowledge or hiring of contractors. What they don't deserve is disrespect Camp A and talk down to them because they find programming to be a nuisance.
Ugh, I can't help but respond to this one point. The fact that this is even an issue in the current year just tells us how screwed the software field is in a lot of ways. I don't mean that in existential terms, but of how divided we've become in terms of what's happened to human reasoning. On the one hand, you have people who apply deep thinking to develop the sort of approaches you described, and there's the exponentially growing segment of not-even-programmers who seem to never ask themselves whether any of their ideas have any sort of consequences.
Take MCPs for instance. Sure, I guess it can sometimes make sense to have a stateful API that is optimized for agents. Yet, more often than not, these MCPs frontload a ton of context where it's not needed, and solve problems where none existed. Merely sticking an API (MCP) in front of an API (CLI, REST, GraphQL) without a benefit that can be explained in a single sentence is lunacy and demonstrates a real lack of complex thinking.
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