This is interesting. He seems to imply that the AI will just provide the solution. He's concerned that the process of getting to that solution is the important bit. But I can see two versions of "process".
A.) The actual steps of the proof, which I assume the AI would provide.
B.) People, while working toward a solution, finding novel properties/methods along the way that open new avenues of research + new open problems.
Does B.) actually happen? Would knowing the solution to a problem stymie the process of finding new open questions? I would assume finding a solution may unlock other problems too. So maybe on balance it's not really bad?
I guess in the end, I'm just making the obvious case "the future is uncertain in the face of AI".
Well the argument is that B is no longer sustainable because of the scenario you describe in A. If you do a bunch of work on Navier Stokes but then OpenAI gets all the press, then what was the point?
Can you use postgres as a state store for a distributed application?
It seems this article is trending toward that view: If you can maintain transactional consistency along with application workflow state, then would this generalize to maintaining distributed application state in general?
The follow-up would be: Would this be preferable to Valkey/Redis?
Yes you can - usually I think it's advisable to wrap postgres in a shim application to provide a consistently defined surface you can control but postgres can absolutely serve as the authority node on data correctness.
As to which technical solution would be optimal there are a bunch of factors to consider and I think preferences around features could lead you to a variety of options. Postgres is excellent as long as you're minimizing the amount of data piping directly through it or operating at a reasonable scale.
This is an aside, but I'm really struck by how many people on HN use Windows (based on repeated mentions I've seen in comments). I've worked for a pretty wide range of companies over the last decade and only one, maybe two companies even had any people that worked on Windows machines. I haven't worked at a company where devs used Windows in 15 years (and even that company eventually switched to linux).
As I've gotten deeper into LLMs/AI roles even Macs have seemed to start having equal share compared to devs running full Linux setups.
Is this just a sign of that a larger and larger portion of HN users are working for large corporations? I honestly can't even remember that last time I saw a serious developer pull out a Windows laptop.
While we're doing anecdotes: I essentially never meet people who own an iPhone, and I've lived (3 months+) in a huge number of countries and cities. The handful people who do are American; bubbles exist :)
For a long time, high end graphics and games was mainly done on Windows and Visual Studio. I'm from that world, and only made the Linux transition last year November after Microsoft forced everyone's hand.
Shows how different countries are. In Australia the vast majority of people seem to have an iPhone, with Android being the outlier (at least in the major cities, I can't speak to rural areas). In the workplace it's far more common to see devs running Mac's than Windows, obviously there's pockets where you still see Microsoft but it seems pretty rare amongst engineers these days here. People will say I'm living in a bubble but I'm a consultant that hops around all sorts of clients so if I am it's probably a bubble of being in a city (Melbourne in my case).
I'm a professional C++ dev working in games, and windows is used everywhere , from games themselves to the network infrastructure(I've worked for 3 of the largest games publishers too).
Windows really has a fantastic support for C++ and rendering programmers imho, the tooling is world class and Visual Studio has no match as an IDE. Even if somehow my tools worked on Mac or Linux I'd still pick windows out of sheer convenience of using it for work.
But as things stand - all major console toolchains are windows only. If you're making a game for PlayStation, Xbox or Switch, you have to be on windows.
I've been a developer for more than two decades. I've worked at four employers during that time, and all of them had significant fractions of devs using Windows. Not vouching for the idea that any of them are "serious" though. I've never worked at a prestige employer or FAANG or anything. Just boring businesses of different sizes. Some are software, and some just do software. But Windows has always been everywhere.
If you work at a company with well over a hundred employees, you're likely to see at least half of them on windows and devs may get an option of Windows or Mac... and IMO, Windows + WSL + Docker is actually slightly better than the Docker experience on Mac. There's plenty that I really do hate with Windows though. I'd rather run Linux but most corp environments just don't have the tooling for it.
I've likewise had a lot of variation from big corp to startups in companies in different sectors, and it seems to really depend on the org and what platform their managemetn likes. Windows companies usually offer a choice, but if management likes Apple then it's so common to get forced onto a Mac (and often with a dismissive "nobody wants to use windows" comment which really pisses me off). There's usually a small population using Linux if they can get away with it. When devs are given a truly free choice (with no cultural pressure) between windows, mac, linux, a relatively common split I see is about 40% linux, 40% mac, 20% windows.
One thing to consider is non-office whether remote or personal projects.
A lot of devs like gaming. Gaming is more simple on windows. Gaming PCs are usually high spec. High spec is good for most coding.
That's why I use windows quite often. My laptop is Linux, but when I'm running heavy models I'll still remote into my main Windows PC, which I also use for gaming.
Though in terms of workplaces - sure, I reckon you're on the money. Big corps often still force windows onto their Devs.
HN definitely has an older crowd, but additionally I've noticed HN is increasingly dominated by Europeans from 5am-2pm PST. "American" HN seems to kick off around 3pm-10pm PST now.
Even the HN dataset on HuggingFace shows that most engagement on HN is now during non-US hours [0] and drops off as Europe goes to sleep.
> I've worked for a pretty wide range of companies over the last decade and only one, maybe two companies even had any people that worked on Windows machines. I haven't worked at a company where devs used Windows in 15 years (and even that company eventually switched to linux).
I think that your range of companies was much less wide then you think.
> I honestly can't even remember that last time I saw a serious developer pull out a Windows laptop.
I use Windows on my home PC simply because it's such a versatile setup thanks to native GPU support, game support, and WSL2. It feels like I can do almost everything on one machine with little to no compromise. If I didn't care about games I'd probably load Linux onto it, but WSL2 gets me most of what I want from both worlds without needing to do that.
Windows laptops suck ass compared to an MBP. Windows desktops are pretty nice, you just need to do a lot of first time setup to remove all of the cruft and make sure you have a local user account etc. But for a typical dev building a desktop every 5 years or so that isn't a big deal.
Most of large engineering orgs use niche software built for windows. CAD, CAE, many don’t have Linux or Mac versions.
See - solidworks, Siemens simcenter, ansys… to name a few.
Engineering orgs have to build infrastructure around this and are forced to choose Microslop
My biggest client right now is about 2/3 Windows 1/3 OS X in the dev team. It was very surprising to me, but I think I freak then out with my maximised tiled iTerms on multiple screens...
I set up mine with WSL and used a Linux terminal over xserver. Once you have a decent unix shell (and a good terminal) it's fine. VSCode etc work fine. This was 2020ish, things might've gotten easier now.
But I do prefer a Linux or Mac for development, just because it's so much less hassle to set up.
Windows developers who don't set up a good terminal environment... I honestly don't know how they manage.
I don't think coding is solved in the way they claim, but certainly solved in some way for many people. I don't write code by hand anymore, everything is through claude/codex/pi.
Still requires lots of work to shape the output correctly, but it's still crazy to me that I literally don't write code any more. And in that way, coding is solved for me.
Coding is probably solved, at least to a large extent, but that doesn't mean engineering is solved too.
This is like someone saying that the wright brothers solved sustained/powered human flight, and another person saying "well if that's the case, why do planes still crash? obviously flight isn't solved.". Well, there are always improvements, but planes can fly and llm's can code.
"I think we're going to start to see the title 'software engineer' go away. And I think it's just going to be maybe builder, maybe product manager, maybe we'll keep the title as a vestigial thing." — Boris Cherny
They been claiming more than just “coding is solved” for a while now.
Regardless of what? Programming is solved, I hear, with all the 100x productivity PhD-level automated coding loops they have going. Don't make excuses for them when they disprove their own bullshit.
Anthropic's and OpenAI's products are janky and their services are unreliable, but they have incredible product-market fit and revenue growth. They deserve a ton of credit for getting the big things right.
The risk for them is that someone matches their products while also having non-janky products and reliable services.
Distributed systems infrastructure, especially, is much less forgiving of vibe coding than application code. Coding agents are not even close to being good enough to design and build large-scale systems the way expert humans can.
There is nothing wrong with using agents to help write infrastructure code, but these systems have a way of punishing anyone who builds things they do not fully understand.
I'd love to see either Anthropic or OpenAI really step up their infrastructure game.
> I'd love to see either Anthropic or OpenAI really step up their infrastructure game.
It's worth noting that OpenAI's official uptime numbers are significantly better than Anthropic's:
99.9x% for API/Codex, versus <99.5% for Claude API/Claude Code.
I'd obviously like OpenAI's numbers to be higher too, but this is one reason it really annoys me when the head of Claude Code goes on podcasts implying that software engineering as a whole, not just the act of writing out code, is basically solved.
One wonders why hasn't months of presumably near-unlimited internal Mythic solved the issues unrelated to hardware shortages yet.
100%. It really depends on the application domain and system complexity.
I see a lot of people speaking about a 10x productivity improvement and so on. When I work on hobby projects, I do see that. Just last weekend, I set up a hobby project that I've been thinking about for a while. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me at least a week to implement manually, but instead, it took me three hours.
But some of the systems I have to work on during the day are so big and complicated that you can spend multiple days on a small feature or even just tracking down a bug, even with the support of Opus.
Expecting even a 2x productivity improvement on some those systems is wildly unrealistic. I'm seeing a lot of people get stressed out because the productivity gains from simple application building trickle into the expectations for these complex systems.
That said, if things keep improving at this rate it might just be a matter of time.
Claude Code is notably better than Pi, although I wish them the best of luck in their efforts. As https://c-daniele.github.io/en/posts/2026-05-18-coding-harne... notes, "Pi's lightness comes from a default setup that does not survive contact with reality."
The same post on Claude Code: "Even though the System Prompt and tool descriptions are clearly more verbose, most of the extra tokens encode product features and rational design choices: a memory system, scheduled tasks, sub-agents, plan mode, worktree support. Whether those features are worth paying for depends on your needs. Calling the prompt 'bloated' without looking at the whole picture feels wrong to me."
The "guardrails" are bloat if you're using a proper sandbox. This seems like a matter of using the right harness for the environment it's running in, rather than one always being better than the other.
How is text editing in it? This is what I hate about terminal coding UIs the most: all the text editing experience - the basic stuff like moving the cursor around, copying, pasting - is just broken.
I ask Claude to implement non-regression tests. It works like magic. With a couple of modules checking for code quality, more magic. Add some online performance tests if relevant, and it is close to paradise. From time to time, send it to some blog pages and articles with implementation ideas and recommendations. Look for best practices and let it do the analysis and implementation job if it makes sense... T
Our org has been attempting to trial Fast Mode on and off but enabling it in Claude Code just says something like "not available with your cloud provider"
It turns out that for all of the matrices on the documentation site, there is a secret "other" set of infrastructure for those who bill Enterprise via AWS Marketplace where certain features like Fast Mode are incompatible when using "aws routing"
Anthropic Support straight up mentioned that Claude Code just doesn't handle this case correctly and erroneously gives you the impression that it's supported against your billing method, and that it's all effectively undocumented.
I suppose this means there are like 5 different AWS methods of use:
- Bedrock (Legacy)
- Bedrock
- Claude for AWS
- Claude via Marketplace
- Anthropic's own "primary infrastructure"
and then roll in other cloud provider variations
On that note, I recall Datadog having coupled billing and infrastructure per cloud (ie; billing via GCP requires using the GCP infra) and was wondering if commenters had any insights into if there is some special requirement/complexity around marketplace billing for cloud providers or if it's just some weird design choice?
On the other hand, my last experience with gemini was like "don't give your sandwich to the dog again" whereas with opus it was more "let's debug why this uncrustables factory is having breakdowns".
Claude harnesses have plenty of bugs but I prefer capability over interface shininess any day. (though if I were running the show I'd have a sizable team set aside to do exclusively boring stability and polish work)
FWIW Codex TUI is written (in large part) in Rust and is way less buggy, and a lot faster. When I was a regular Claude Code user I'd routinely get bizarre "scroll everything since the beginning of time in one massive flash on every update" bugs ... for months. Like, just there from the time I started using it in June '25 or so until I quit in March.
I prefer it over opencode, which is my other option I use with my Codex sub
That particular bug seems to be gone. I'm using my own Ruby terminal, and it's more than fast enough for normal stuff, but it made that bug 10x more painful so I am particularly sensitive to it... Not seen it at all recently.
This isn't even Code but I noticed last night that my fans spin up in my machine every time I open the settings in the claude web interface. I was trying to check my usage and couldn't figure out why my computer would be spinning fans up, closed it again it stopped, opened again spinning up fans. So even the website is buggy crap.
100%,I have used it for two of my projects. One prompt for fixing one issue triggers other 10 npm, lint errors which you have already solved in the previous sprint.
It takes hours to manhunt these errors and also you cannot risk again to tell the local llm to fix it.
That's interesting - I just fixed my terminals rendering by having Claude build a test harness that used tmux as an oracle, and one of the programs it fixed the rendering of by reading out the tmux pane was Claude Code itself...
Turn off vim mode if you use it. There is some kind of bug with it I found it basically unusable. With vim mode off it sort of works ok. Only breaks occasionally.
Is this a new regression for others? I feel like I used it in a tmux setup without issues for 6+ months and only recently am I forced to Ctrl+L or resize the window constantly.
I've never seen any developers really use a windows terminal before, if you're on windows wouldn't you be using the WSL or whatever if you're doing development?
It's not just Windows where the rendering goes to shit immediate: any time I've got it open in tmux on Linux, it becomes a basket case in probably a few hours or less.
I've seen this too. I had a couple of instances inside a tmux session, and after some time, everything in there slowed down to a crawl. What I found interesting is that terminals outside tmux were fine.
Would it not be hysterically funny, if they starting expanding their job openings for Software Developers ? Or they will be too ashamed of calling them that?
I suspect being a "better programmer" cannot be said unequivocally at their level. At that percentile of achievement, it depends on the specific dimension you are talking about. It's true of the highest skill in any field.
I think that undersells Bellard. The engineers that made NVidia’s chips made a trade: they give their achievements and potential public recognition to their employer in return for generous compensation. Bellard’s work is overwhelmingly free and open source.
I think Fabrice is actually quite noticeable. His name kept on coming up again and again in the past. He is definitely not incognito as such, even if he may not be that interest in hyping up his own name either.
I work on the open-sourced Jedi Academy game engine, which is based on id tech 3. It has special logic to specifically adjust the gamma of the physical monitor during launch, then restore it upon exit.
This is why when these older games crashed on your PC, the monitor would look all washed out due to the manual gamma adjustments the game made that didn't get restored.
Nice! I remember being an early Nvidia adopter (RIVA 128, TNT) when all of my fellow LAN party buddies were Voodoo users, and I had to download a custom opengl32.dll which actually adjusted the gamma into tolerable levels so you could see what was going on in Quake.
Ok, stupid question, but what applications is something like tailscale/iroh used for? I've never worked with this type of tech so curious where it is valuable.
Say you want to build a Peer to Peer application; chat, file sharing, music sync or whatever, then something needs to be built to communicate between this application running in two different places. While you still need to build the actual protocol yourself ("Users can send messages" etc), how the two instances are connected is handled by Iroh mostly.
Not a stupid question - I was wondering about the same thing, and this gave me easy access to the answer because someone replied to your comment. Thank you for asking :)
Masters of Doom is a great book on the history of id software, which includes the origins of the development of smooth scrolling by Carmack and Romero, which was groundbreaking at the time on PC.
The underlying mechanics of Carmack's technique is very similar to the full screen smooth scrolling effect on C64 at any speed and distance. It is nowadays referred to as DMA delay.
ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data at a different starting point than as designed by the hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle exact.
Here is the explanation in detail together with all major top notch effects. The article is a legend and kind of the bible of doing the most sophisticated effects on C64. Some effects have since then even more and better explained and exploited due to cross platform development possibilities and better tooling, but understanding all mechanics here is a necessity to play a role in the Champions League of C64 demos, besides and also being able to implement the techniques mentioned here:
https://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/c64/vic-ii.txt
> ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data at a different starting point than as designed by the hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle exact.
heh, is there a new meaning for ELIF? im not sure that there are many 5 year olds who would understand that ;-)
I was going to say, smooth scrolling is one place where VGA was fairly simple to work with, since it didn’t have to deal with chunky graphics/bitplanes or specific timing tricks.
In fact, Carmack specifically states that packed pixels were the impetus for id’s side scrolling experiments that led to Commander Keen and its ilk.
It should be noted that John Romero released his own book, Doom Guy, a few years ago which contradicts some of the accounts in Masters of Doom. MoD is probably the more thrilling read and I enjoyed both books, but some of the stories need to be taken with a grain of salt.
I also think Doom Guy is worth a read because it gives a lot more insight into what happened at Ion Storm and how the Daikatana project fell apart. And some important context about the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad (mainly that he really didn't want to publish it at all). But I digress.
I would recommend the audiobook - John Romero actually reads it so it seems a lot more personal.
I did feel that Romero skipped a load of stuff, at least int he audio version. There was no real mention of Stevie Case, just one passing name check. That was really odd. I was expecting him to at least mention her.
I've also both read and listened to Masters of Doom (read by Wil Wheaton no less) and it is a great book too. The audio version is really good.
Yeah that's confirmed in Masters of Doom as well - sounds like Romero was a bit hesitant about it but Mike Wilson, the marketing guy, pushed him into it.
One thing I was sus from the book and which this post didn't clarify for me was whether Carmack truly invented side scrolling for the PC. He claimed to have done so, and even pitched it to Nintendo for a Mario port that never took off.
Also, the idea that it hadn't been done yet by 1990, when consoles were well in the game, suggests the PC market was behind popular gaming in a big way.
The consoles at the time had dedicated sprite video RAM and hardware and dedicated hardware instructions for background scrolling. The NES for instance had up to 64 sprites (independently moving 16x16 or 32x32 pixel images) supporting up to 8 of those sprites per scanline. The NES background layer was a relatively simple tile map that supported smooth scrolling. All of which was managed by a dedicated hardware Picture Processing Unit [1].
PCs were designed to be general hardware and it didn't seem to make sense to create a generic "PPU" for the PC, so instead game engines at the time (and many game engines to this day) had to emulate one entirely in software. The video RAM of EGA and VGA is just one big blob of pixels, or perhaps two if your system supported double-buffering. At the hardware level it doesn't have concepts like sprites or scrolling backgrounds.
Carmack was one of the first (if not the first; Commander Keen was also among the first commercially successful attempts) to get a software "PPU" renderer on the PC working reliably in real time. Another notable achievement for side scrollers on the PC in that era was Cliff Bleszinski managing to software render the parallax effects similar to Sega's "Blast processor" PPU (notable for "gotta go fast" Sonic games) for Jazz Jackrabbit (in 1994).
It has sort of long been the arc of PC development of eventually doing entirely in software what consoles and arcades were doing with dedicated and/or one-off hardware. (Right up until about the invention of the modern GPU when suddenly the PC was leading graphics hardware in a different way.)
I've been following the Japanese early gaming scene, which had a lot of parallels to the west. They had NEC PCs running DOS, and there were a lot of games for the systems. Some of them had smooth scrolling. Did they come later? Did they copy ID Software's approach?
I feel like the very thing that EU is great at: more consumer friendly and anti-corporate legistation, also hamstrings it for innovation. Why would VCs invest in AI there instead of in the US where they don't have to worry about any of that.
A.) The actual steps of the proof, which I assume the AI would provide. B.) People, while working toward a solution, finding novel properties/methods along the way that open new avenues of research + new open problems.
Does B.) actually happen? Would knowing the solution to a problem stymie the process of finding new open questions? I would assume finding a solution may unlock other problems too. So maybe on balance it's not really bad?
I guess in the end, I'm just making the obvious case "the future is uncertain in the face of AI".