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Mythical Man Month
a bliki entry for Mythical Man Month
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
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Claude Code VS Code extension with backdoor released on Cursor marketplace
Yesterday, Anthropic were compromised and used to stage a global supply chain attack.
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A new Go API for JSON
Go 1.27 introduces new encoding/json/v2 and encoding/json/jsontext packages.
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Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
AI agents are getting very good at finding vulnerabilities in large-scale software systems.
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Decisions API is in public beta
Use the Decisions API to check conditions, select from fixed options, and score text, images, and JSON against a rubric.
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Mini Shai-Hulud Strikes Again: 314 npm Packages Compromised
A compromised npm maintainer account published 637 malicious versions across 317 packages including size-sensor, echarts-for-react, timeago.js, and hundreds…
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LLVM: The bad parts
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on design issues in LLVM IR . Since then, one of these issues has been fixed fully (opaque pointers migration), one has been mostly fixed (constant expression removal), and one is well on the way towards being fixed (ptradd migration).
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The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
If we think writing code is dead, and AI is generating all codebases, I still think the bigger problem is people or full teams not knowing anything anymore about the system...
279
I am happier writing code by hand
I felt the familiar feeling of depression and lethargy creep in while my eyes darted from watching claude-code work and my phone. “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll? This was the third time I gave claude-code…
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I love software rendering
Sharp pixels, gritty colour banding, and DOS games running at resolutions their own era couldn’t manage. Why I still prefer the software renderer, and why it needs a fast PC.
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Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day—the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant …
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Seven books I keep close because I love them
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Writing code is cheap now
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
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Missile defense is NP-complete
Exploring the Weapon-Target Assignment problem: how missile defense connects to NP-completeness, SSPK probability calculations, and how saturation attacks exploit computational limits.
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Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
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A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
A how-to manual for engineer-led discovery in software platforms
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A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding
SSH port forwarding explained in a clean and visual way. How to use local and remote port forwarding. What sshd settings may need to be adjusted. How to memorize the right flags.
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An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re…
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Formal methods and the future of programming
I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.
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LLM Structured Outputs Handbook
A practical handbook for developers using LLMs to get structured outputs.
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Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish
I tried to use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 to implement a connector between Youtube Music and opensubsonic. The end result was a fairly short amount of time to get a working project.
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Agent Skills
AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skill...
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Leanstral 1.5: Proof abundance for all
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.
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Returning to Rails in 2026
I love a good side-project. Like most geeks, I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes when faced with problems - give me a minor inconvenience and I’ll happily spend weeks building something far more elaborate than the situation warrants. There’s joy in having a playground to explore ideas and “what ifs”; Building…
298
Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things
You’ve almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you’ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear at it. Even though it is used by a…
299
Git at any scale
Hosting Git repositories at scale is a nightmare. When Linus Torvalds designed the first version of the information manager from hell (that's actually the tagline for Git, look it up ), he had a very specific use case in mind: his own. He wanted to replace BitKeeper, the distributed version control system that was…
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Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
After careful consideration, we’ve decided on a meaningful way to use the generous donations from our community: funding longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce.