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I have no idea, but this type of scenario is just one of many, many reasons giving an LLM free access to a browser on the open internet sounds like a terrible idea.

Which "LangChain situation" are you talking about? Anything specific, or just everything that's happened in the past year or so?

What I meant was how LangChain dominated the llm frameworks scene because it loaded VC money. It was just at the beginning - now it has normalised - but I believe it did a lot of damage at that early stage by sucking all oxygen.

Can you add in the missing words that make this comment make sense, please?

What would that look like? In my experience, real production codebases tend to have lots of bugs. Most of them never get prioritized, because features matter more than fixing obscure bugs.

Indeed - one of my biggest pet peeves is when organizations chronically avoid budgeting the time and resources to deal with their technical debt. Or when they lack leadership that is confident and bold enough to make the hard decisions to do so (which requires experience and reputation), or suffer a culture that doesn't tolerate some degree of risk-taking, with contingencies (particularly in schedule and blast radius containment) to safely deal with occasional failure on the road to improvement.

I'd love to reinvent computing from the ground up, stripping away the many patchwork layers of complexity we've accreted over time and applying an obsession for making each individual component uncommonly robust and engineered for clarity. I feel that kind of project would be a great candidate for human-written code. I think AI tools would make a great sounding board / linter / reviewer in such a scenario, but since they were trained on existing examples and legacy patterns I'm not convinced they'd be as good as a human at the actual constructing, in terms of what I'm optimizing for.

I personally tend to favor longer lead times and slower public ship pace (but not slower betas or delay in customer feedback) in order to maintain a higher bar of quality. Even if saying so out loud risks branding me heretical by some corners of Silicon Valley!


Are you willing to wake up at 3 AM when that "valuable" AI-written code pages on-call?

I agree there is some value in AI tools, but implementation details do matter. People shouldn't be pushing unread code to prod. That's how you end up with security holes and other bugs. That's how you end up dropping millions of orders on Amazon.com.


I think the last ten+ years has taught us that massive security breaches are more of an insurance claim problem and some $4/mo credit monitoring payouts.

And major corporations certainly don’t seem to care that much about leaving massive amounts of money on the table from jr level tech issues. I see it all the time. I mentioned a few from Walmart, Meta, and Amazon recently.

Everyone talks like these things matter, but the results say everyone is just playing pretend.


Excuse me? Amazon lost more money in one day than most companies have in revenue, from dropped orders. I would say that matters. Believe it or not, the systems we work on do things that matter in the real world.

Seems to be an instance of the prevention paradox: Security (in general) is taken seriously enough that major incidences are low enough that people think that security does not matter that much.

I would too. I’m saying businesses don’t seem to. At least not like we assume.

People pushed unread and buggy code to production long before AI.

I actually considered that, myself. The thing is, California is where the jobs are for me. If I move out of California, I may never be able to come back. That could cost me a lot.

Who cares about California? If you dont have family there, just head to Europe as fast as you can, one way ticket, don't ever pay the IRS to come back.

I don't think anyone mentioned comparing AI error rates to a base rate of zero. What has been mentioned is significant numbers of clinically significant omissions, and outright hallucinations. Blatant fabrications should never happen with a human scribe, and one would expect clinically significant omissions to be rarer, because a human has clinical judgement that an AI can't have.

I'm asking myself the same question for a different reason: nobody will even interview me. I've been out of work for a while. Savings are running out. I apparently don't even know how to look for a job anymore.

Yeah. Got word I was being laid off in November. Officially because of restructuring, but after having had some conversations it's clear I've been replaced by a junior with a Claude subscription.

20 years coding experience. Gone through the sweaty junior years, senior, founding engineer, CTO (and back to software Engineering again because it's my preference) -- and now I can't even get an interview with a human.

Due to unfortunate life events my savings are now all but gone and I don't even know how if I will be able to keep a roof over our heads. It's messed up.

If anyone is hiring send me a message. I'm a .eu citizen but work have residency in and work out of Mexico.


Use AI to mass-apply to all available job postings. It's a numbers game.

The best way to find out: just start. You’ll improve along the way. Questions like this (and anxiety) are best fixed by action.

When someone says “no one will interview me” this is a pretty unhelpful response.

My response is probably controversial. But I genuinely think it’s generally helpful advice. Ofc I don’t have any other information than the comment about this person.

You literally said they should do something.

Yes exactly. I stand by that advice. What’s the alternative? Do nothing?

So you advise that they do not need to change their approach at all, since they’re already doing something: posting on hacker news.

Ok, so comments like this are helpful then?

I decline to believe you actually do not understand how "as opposed to what, do nothing?" is freaking obtuse. I credit you with more basic functional intelligense than that. That unfortunately removes an excuse. When an idiot says something idiotic, well you don't really hold it against them.

I mean, I am. How else would I know nobody wants to interview me? :)

Fair enough :) wasn’t clear to me from your first comment. It’s definitely pretty tough out there right now.

It was completely clear from the first comment, which is why yours was so clearly unhelpful.

Yes absolutely. It’s even scientifically proven to be helpful advice.

Look up the work by Seligman et al. on resilience.


I have no advice to offer, I only wish you good luck. I am still lucky enough to be employed, but when this whole parade ends, I have no idea what comes next - my only skill is programming and related knowledge work. I think the only path forward is to try to jump ship to another white or blue collar industry…

I thought along those lines as well. The only thing I could come up with that would be semi-viable was medical school, and I"m not sure I'd survive residency. I definitely would never be able to pay back the debt, if I had to take any.

The era of anyone interested in programming for fun being able to make upper 10% incomes is drawing to a close. You'll unfortunately have to join the rest of us who work for money and program for fun. I suggest engineering (the real kind, not software 'engineering')

Unfortunately, I have a visual-spatial processing disability. You don't want me near anything mechanical, and I can't do visualization-based tasks because I literally can't visualize. That eliminates most engineering jobs.

There's also the matter of going back to school, and the associated debt I'd have to take. I'd never be able to pay the loans off if I did that.


Electrical engineering doesn't need much in the way of mechanical aptitude, has a substantial overlap with what you already know depending on specialization, and might not have as much new schooling required as you would think.

Something like industrial controls engineering might be right up your alley.


Where do you live, what are your skills, and what is your citizenship status?

If you are gunning for a remote job, that's not happening anymore expect for the top 5% of candidates.

If you are gunning for a job outside of a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay, NYC, London, TLV, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Singapore, BLR, HYD, etc you will have a hard time.

If you are not up-to-date with modern stacks and the capacities as well as limitations of AI/ML enhanced workflows, you will have a hard time.

Edit: can't reply

> Paul-Craft

Based on your profile below, I am surprised you aren't finding anything in the Bay. It's a hot market right now. Maybe get your resume reviewed?

> Most of the job openings for humans are remote and not in big tech

Absolutely agree about the "not in big tech" part, but remote being the majority of tech hiring is absolutely false in 2026.

> My "default" resume is by ChatGPT; it's essentially my human-written resume, jazzed up a bit for ATS-friendliness

Go back to using a human written resume. An LLM generated resume is obvious and a negative signal (you could be a bot)

Also, make sure your resume is 1 page.


Huh, weird that you can't reply.

I'm tailoring my resume to individual postings a good portion of the time. My "default" resume is by ChatGPT; it's essentially my human-written resume, jazzed up a bit for ATS-friendliness. There are no hallucinations in it, and I feel it accurately represents my experience.


> Huh, weird that you can't reply.

It happens to many, it's happened to me three times so far - the mods rate limit (only X comments per Y time period) people who have been flagged, judged, and found to be a bit prone to get in rapid back n forth exchanges that have crossed guidelines.

It can generally be reversed on request via hn email, sometimes it's a blessing, sometimes it's not even something that impacts a user very often unless they find themselves in an interesting exchange.


By hand written, I think he means something like a letter written by hand, or anyway sent via post. Not "chatgpt that is basically handwritten"

Nope. I mean text created by a human not an LLM.

Bay Area, 9 YoE primarily backend, US citizen. I'm familiar with AI coding tools. I've done real work on real systems.

What is your experience in? The company I work for is constantly hiring

At this conversation depth thete is no reply button here but you can open the comment by clicking the time "8 hours ago" then reply.

Most of the job openings for humans are remote and not in big tech, but the pay in absolute terms is significantly lower (same wage percentile for the area you live though).

It's important to understand the world beyond your bubble. If those jobs seem unrealistic as an option, you may need to consider if your cost of living is unrealistic.


I'm fine with "not big tech," along with a "not big tech" salary. In fact, I prefer "not big tech." My cost of living is not absurd for the Bay Area. I'd even be willing to take a little less than what I made before. After all, less than before is still better than 0. I'm using AI to tailor my resume to every posting, and still not getting calls.

You’ve got nine years of experience, so work your network and get referrals. It’s very hard to get mid-career jobs through the front door; most people want someone they trust to vouch for you.

I've tried that. They don't have anything for me.

> not absurd for the Bay Area

Yeah I was implying you might need to move to optimize for cost of living, but I don't know your situation and am not really asking. It's actually surprising sometimes to hear how long this took to affect some tech workers. You're lucky it's now that housing prices have stabilized (everyone else has stopped moving), and not a few years ago.

Remote work doesn't necessarily mean you aren't still tethered to some radius. Otherwise I'd be living in Monaco or something haha.


> Most of the job openings for humans are remote and not in big tech

where do you find these?


I can certainly imagine such a world. I don't use Brave because I don't want to support Brendan Eich.

If he showed up in the Epstein files I'd stop using Brave. Until then, I'll keep on rolling my eyes whenever someone brings up this stuff from... 2008.

Indeed. I wonder if the folks rejecting Brave have also vetted the political beliefs of everyone that delivers their packages, manufactured their phone, and grown their food.

The injection of politics into absolutely everything is so arbitrary and harmful.


Why should they have to vet everyone? If I learn that the people who deliver my packages, manufacture my phones, or grow my food support practices that I deem fundamentally harmful to society, I change my behavior accordingly. Where does this weird idea come from that I have to vet literally everyone for my rejection of Brave to be valid?

> The injection of politics into absolutely everything is so arbitrary and harmful.

Are you referring to Eich, or the people who react to his political choices?


You're probably going to want to take a look at how your smartphone battery is made. You're taking a principled stand on the basis of not using a browser from a company cofounded by a guy that voted differently than you, but it sounds like you're willfully ignoring the child slave labor used to create the device you're using to type that opinion.

Do as you please, but it makes no sense to me, and doesn't strike me a principled at all: it's basically virtue signaling. But then again, I don't view people that hold different political views as my enemy. They're just people I disagree with, and they can still make a great browser, even though we disagree on some things.


Sorry, but if you think that the issue is that Brendan Eich "voted differently than" me, you're either not understanding or willfully misrepresenting what this discussion is about.

What technical difference do the social opinions of the people who write your software make? Genuinely curious.

What exactly is a "technical difference", and why is only that relevant? I am more than my interactions with software and companies, just like every other human. Why should I focus on an arbitrary subset of factors when making decisions?

Because the technical factors are what you experience when you interact with software written by a company/person?

And the non-technical factors are what my friends and loved ones have to experience due to Brendan Eich's choices. So again, why should I ignore them? I'm more than a user of software.

Because when we decide on a goal for our technical work and decide on an acceptable code of conduct inside the project, our differences outside the project don't matter to our collaboration within the project. This is a core foundation of the Free Software and Open Source movements. (And it's worrisome to me that it's being eroded.)

My point is that this same setting aside of irrelevant (to the technical aspects) differences should apply to use of software in addition to development of software.


I'm not working on a project together with Brendan Eich, I'm choosing not to use a product from which he directly profits. I sincerely hope that we both agree that this is a completely normal and rational choice.

I think I failed to explain my point: Just like OSS contributors don't have to agree on anything but the goal of the project and how to treat each other while working on it, people shouldn't decide what software to use based on anything but the technical merits of the program.

Also, you don't have to benefit Brendan Eich by using Brave. Turn off the crypto and AFAICT Brave gets no money from you.

Not that I actually recommend Brave: I have no opinions on it. I'm just tired and worried by the attitude of judging software by the non-technical opinions of who wrote it.


So instead you use, what, Chrome because you want to support Sundar Pichai??

You are literally on a thread about Firefox, and you think someone saying they don't use Brave must be using Chrome?

You are literally in a thread where 90% of the discussion is surrounding chromium and you think this isn’t a connected idea?

Edit: also crazy that someone who doesn’t want to support the Brave guy would support the browser using the Brave guy’s stuff, but I guess I see lots of chick-fil-a haters shopping in Amazon these days, so who am I to question what’s in vogue?


If only there was another browser option that was the first word of this thread's title!

Well the guy running Brave must’ve had absolutely nothing to do with Brave’s Adblock engine going into Firefox, so I can see why you’re acting so smug. After all, why would the guy involved with Brave be involved with Brave’s thing going somewhere other than Brave? Maybe it’s just random evolution! Excellent point, friend. I can tell you thought it out.

The ghost of Milton Friedman speaks!

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