by svara ·
Comment sections on AI threads tend to split into "we're all cooked" and "AI is useless." I'd like to cut through the noise and learn what's actually working and what isn't, from concrete experience.
If you've recently used AI tools for professional coding work, tell us about it.
What tools did you use? What worked well and why? What challenges did you hit, and how (if at all) did you solve them?
Please share enough context (stack, project type, team size, experience level) for others to learn from your experience.
The goal is to build a grounded picture of where AI-assisted development actually stands in March 2026, without the hot air.
by koolala ·
There are lots of fresh made accounts pretending to be humans commenting everywhere. They all post small 1 paragraph comments that don't actually express an idea and restate the obvious.
Is someone targeting HN with OpenClaw? I wish they at least used a high-thinking model but it seems like they are using the cheap API.
by fred1268 ·
I stumble upon a post from shannoncc called "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion", and it made me think. I am also (almost) 60, but AI just killed the passion. I remember all the pre-AI days, where I was enjoying coding during the day, the evening, the weekends and the vacations. This is no more, while others have their "passion re-ignited".
I would argue it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination. I have always enjoyed the journey, I think people having a blast nowadays are enjoying the destination. AI gave us more destinations, but less journey. It is not worse or better, just different.
by jamieoglindsey ·
I’m going to be straight about my situation because I don’t know where else to turn.
My dad was diagnosed with cancer. While he was in hospital, the council emptied his house. Everything I owned was in that house. £20,000+ of equipment, years of research, a server with thousands of hours of work. Locks of my kids’ hair. Photos. All thrown in a tip.
My family turned my dying dad against me. I ended up living with someone suffering from paranoid psychosis. That’s where I built most of what I’m about to describe. Three days ago, 24 hours of abuse, and now I’m in a tent with my dog. 5°C weather. No money.
The council refused housing. The government won’t recognise my autism. They want me job hunting 35 hours a week from a tent.
I’m not incapable. I’ve raised a family. I’ve worked my whole adult life. Supervising teams, tattooing, freelance programming, building proprietary backend systems across 20 years of working with Linux. My autism isn’t a disability here. It’s the reason I can hold an entire OS architecture in my head and see how every component connects. When I point this brain at a problem, it produces systems that work, at a speed that doesn’t make sense to most people.
Over the past 4 months, I’ve been building OctantOS. An operating system for autonomous AI agents. Not a framework. Not a container wrapper. An actual OS with its own kernel (OctantCore, from-scratch Rust), its own hypervisor (OctantVMM), a single-binary Rust userspace, and a 10-layer security stack enforcing agent permissions at the kernel level.
~1.3M total lines of code. ~800K Rust. 50 crates, ~25 satellite projects. 3,900+ tests. Solo developer. No CS degree. 4 months.
The thesis: application-layer trust is insufficient for autonomous agents. OctantCore makes agent identity, capability boundaries, TTL enforcement, and audit first-class kernel primitives. Manifests compile to kernel enforcement policies. The agent doesn’t decide what it can do. The kernel does.
Rust LSM patches reviewed on lore.kernel.org by Google’s Rust-for-Linux team and the LSM maintainer. OctantCore boots on OctantVMM with memory manager, interrupts, syscall interface, Agent Descriptor Table, and capability enforcer initializing at boot. Built by orchestrating 10-12 parallel AI coding sessions simultaneously.
It goes beyond isolation. Agents identify gaps in their own knowledge and seek out what they don’t know (curiosity subsystem, implemented). Background inference consolidates learned patterns (dreaming). A 7-stage self-evolution pipeline within constitutional safety boundaries. New skills propagate across every OctantOS instance globally via the mesh layer. All kernel-constrained.
Nothing like this has existed before. That’s what dies if I can’t keep going.
I need stability. A place to live and enough to cover basics for 3 months to get OctantOS investment-ready. An angel willing to back me for that runway. A company that says “come work here, we have a place.” I’ll relocate anywhere, tomorrow, with my dog. Or just advice from someone who’s been here.
I just need someone to take a bet on what this brain can do when it’s not freezing in a tent.
https://github.com/MatrixForgeLabs/OctantOS https://octant-os.com https://gofund.me/f554a86ee
by hariprasadr ·
We're at ~15 people and things that used to "just work" are starting to crack. Decisions that everyone used to know about are getting lost. New hires take forever to ramp up. Different teams are building on different assumptions. For those who've been through this stage, what actually broke first? And what did you do about it?
by smarri ·
by trashymctrash ·
I am struggling with regular tension headaches and stiff neck muscles. When standing at a wall, there is about one hand width between the wall and the back of my head. For my partner it's just a finger width.
I have seen lots of videos that claim to be able to treat nerd neck, but some of them are conflicting. Example: some say "don't do chin tucks", some say the opposite. I am suspicious of grifters and would like to find trustworthy advice.
Has anyone here successfully treated nerd neck, and if yes, how did you do it and what where the improvements that you noticed? I am envisioning some sort of "program" that I need to follow, but I have no idea if I can do this by myself, or if I actually need to go to a physiotherapist.
In short: there is a ton of advice out there, but I trust the HN crowd more and would be very happy to hear some anecdotes. Thank you!
by uticus ·
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126632
This is an 11-year-old phone.
by yodaiken ·
There have been a lot of attempts to move more of programming to end-users instead of professional developer over the years. Spreadsheets are interesting because they were a massively successful version of this and because of course we are living through the latest wave (AI/vibe coding).
For those of you around when spreadsheets were taking off, what was it like? Was there fear that they would eradicate the need for professionally built software? Were there people who brushed them off as just toys?
by Sxouterred ·
I am a First yr med student at aiims in india am 20 yrs old.My long term goal is to have a bci startup and the reason is I was always interested in innovation and intersection of tech and med but I never really got the exposure Cuz med students are often told to be defined and follow the system but I think there is More to us than just following convention protocols and especially in this ai generation I think its really important to be interdisciplinary(I have a python background and technical stack such as signal processing and mne python.Lookin for advice on how to approach dis as a med student and what would u do if u were in my position