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Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews
In the last two years, code review has gotten much more important. Code is now easy to generate using LLMs, but it’s still just as hard to review. Many software…
Sean Goedecke
Sean Goedecke's personal blog
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Visit seangoedecke.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2020 – Nov 2026
Career & Management 22AI & Machine Learning 17Software Engineering 16Tech Industry & Business 9Society, Policy & Culture 7Life, Learning & Writing 5
32
Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"
People have been making fun of OpenAI models for being overly sycophantic for months now. I even wrote a post advising users to pretend that their work was…
33
Should LLMs just treat text content as an image?
Several days ago, DeepSeek released a new OCR paper. OCR, or “optical character recognition”, is the process of converting an image of text — say, a scanned…
34
The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of…
35
LLMs are not superhuman at reading and writing neural network weights
A recent paper argues that frontier LLMs can work with neural network weights directly. This seems superhuman, but it isn’t. The paper shows that GPT-6 Astra…
36
Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
The European Union AI Act will begin to be enforceable in August 2026, one month from now. One of the biggest new requirements is Article 50, which requires all…
37
Dangerous advice for software engineers
I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct…
38
What it's like working for American companies as an Australian
My experience working across timezones for Americans
39
Three kinds of AI products work
The very first LLM-based product, ChatGPT, was just the ability to talk with the model itself: in other words, a pure chatbot. This is still the most popular…
40
I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to…
41
Ratchet effects determine engineer reputation at large companies
Why you can't skip to the top (but you can skip to the bottom)
42
The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
The first public passenger locomotive, Locomotion No. 1, began service in September 1825. The first mass-casualty railway disaster happened seventeen years…
43
In defense of shallow technical knowledge
Whenever a new piece of technology comes out (these days, mostly AI) I go to some effort to understand it. Usually I end up writing a post about it, so I can be…
44
Avoiding Worry Driven Development
Sofware dysfunction is more often motivated by worry than it is by a lack of technical skill
45
Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers
Two recently-hyped developments in AI engineering have been Geoff Huntley’s “Ralph Wiggum loop” and Steve Yegge’s “Gas Town”. Huntley and Yegge are both…
46
Great software design looks underwhelming
Years ago I spent a lot of time reviewing coding challenges. The challenge itself was very straightforward — building a CLI tool that hit an API and allowed the…