jwilliams

Joined 18 years ago

Karma
5,713
Submissions
1,772
Member since
Aug 11
http://jonathannen.com

jon at the domain above

Founder at pyn.ai and cultureamp.com

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
You want to do task X and discover you need cable Y. You go to find cable Y missing, then discover a new one is $55 and 2 days delivery. Never again.
Comment · 5 months ago
> The mentality shift of renting vs. owning the gpus is huge. When renting, each experiment costs money and I had to ask myself is it worth it. When owning, it feels like not running experiments is costing me money.

I feel like there is some very deep generalizable wisdom buried here.

Comment · 5 months ago
Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).

We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.

If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.

Comment · 5 months ago
Agree.

We have a bunch of tools - specs, code, tests. All of these really are models of the end outcome we're trying to capture.

You could just build something, see if you're right and then build it again. If that seems ridiculous, what makes a spec special that it can work first time?

Why we've not done this historically is code is annoying and (was) relatively expensive. You can rough out a spec document and get feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders -- after all, they can all read a document.

If you can use AI to explore a problem space and get feedback directly, that's definitely a whole new tool in the kit.

Comment · 5 months ago
tsz looks impressive. Congrats!
Comment · 5 months ago
> Claude Code navigates a codebase the way a software engineer would: it traverses the file system, reads files, uses grep to find exactly what it needs, and follows references across the codebase. It operates locally on the developer’s machine and doesn’t require a codebase index to be built, maintained, or uploaded to a server....

> Agentic search avoids those failure modes. There's no embedding pipeline or centralized index to maintain as thousands of engineers commit new code. Each developer's instance works from the live codebase.

The frame of "the way a software engineer would" and the conclusion seem at odds. I'd love to be schooled otherwise?

I use autocomplete/LSPs all the time and they're useful. That's an index? Why wouldn't Claude be able to use one? Also a "software engineer" remembers the codebase - that's definitely a RAG. I have a lot of muscle memory to find the file I need through an auto-completed CMD+P.

It doesn't need to particularly be real-time across thousands of engineers -- just the branch I'm on.

It's rare that I'd be navigating a codebase from first-principles traversal. It would usually be a new codebase and in those cases it's definitely not what I'd call an optimal experience.

Comment · 5 months ago
I wish they'd have done this in a separate Codex app. On desktop I greatly prefer having Codex separate from ChatGPT... As compared to Claude, which is growing so fast and adding features so quickly it seems bolted together (I get why they do it, integrations/MCP-wise).

This specific feature is more akin to Remote Control in Claude. You could already kick off Codex Cloud tasks (although it's just a little more fiddly to do so).

If you can move to Codex Cloud (or "Claude Code for the Web"), I think it's the superior approach. Start it there, and just pick it up from the PR if necessary.

Comment · 5 months ago
I've worked on plenty of code where the original author is long gone. Not sure that holds water at all.
Comment · 5 months ago
I've personally had people talk about token leaderboards at their work. Amazon and Meta did have ones, but I'd take with a decent grain of salt.

We all know it's such an insanely gameable metric you'd be insane to actually use it...

Comment · 5 months ago
> It’s Still Your Code... AI maximalists will read this section and scoff. They’re already vibe coding everything and have little to no idea what the generated code looks like.

This frames the argument like a dichotomy. And to be honest, using the Social Media "vibe-coding" as a strawman risks anchoring against something that's a mirage.

There are plenty of good engineers getting good results whilst accepting code-ownership as a continuum.

> If Claude goes down tomorrow, can you still do your job?

This is a valid counterpoint, but doing software is already a tricky set of dependencies. The answer here isn't automatically "you need to be able to do everything". It could simply be also use Codex.

I think the overall point is well made, I just don't agree with the absolute framing. There are things you can hand over AI safely. Even if you start small and increment it'll have a decent impact.

Comment · 5 months ago
Are you specifically pointing at a different experience between free + paid? Or just that the free version is unimpressive?

I'm using paid on TypeScript and it's genuinely terrific. Subjectively I think it has the edge over Opus.

I'd be surprised if OpenAI is hamstringing the free version. That would seem crazy from a GTM PoV. If anything the labs seem to throttle the heavy paid users.

Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
"AI attribution by default" was an intentional feature, but there were also bugs. This is why the post is so unclear.
Comment · 5 months ago
Are they apologizing? Was it a bug? Why did they make this decision and what's the end goal? It's so unclear from the message - as evidenced by a lot of the responses.
Comment · 6 months ago
The other huge problem is you never tell the user what they'll get out of the tour. People will invest in a tour if they understand the reward (and "learning" can't be the reward).

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton