Hacker News with Generative AI: Software Engineering

AI: Accelerated Incompetence (slater.dev)
In software engineering, over-reliance on LLMs accelerates incompetence. LLMs can't replace human critical thinking.
Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering
303 points by stevekrouse 9 days ago | 270 comments
Ask HN: Decided I no longer want to be a SWE – what next? (ycombinator.com)
I recently spent the past six months working on a startup. We had a fair bit of momentum coming out of a well known accelerator and an idea with traction, but unfortunately the money just didn't quite show up for the seed. At 30, doing this without pay (and expenses covered) seemed like an ok idea, at least for a few months. But at this point I'm kind of done.
Careers, Startups, Software Engineering
48 points by leeroihe 10 days ago | 63 comments
Why Cline doesn't index your codebase (cline.bot)
Here's a common question we get from prospective Cline users: "How does Cline handle large codebases? Do you use RAG to index everything?"
Code Search, Software Engineering
178 points by intrepidsoldier 10 days ago | 124 comments
Gradient-Based Program Repair: Fixing Bugs in Continuous Program Spaces (arxiv.org)
Automatic program repair seeks to generate correct code from buggy programs, with most approaches searching the correct program in a discrete, symbolic space of source code tokens.
Software Engineering, Programming, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
16 points by andre15silva 10 days ago | 0 comments
Ask HN: What's the best decision you made early in your career (ycombinator.com)
Ask HN: What's the best decision you made early in your career
Career Advice, Decision Making, Software Engineering, Personal Development
18 points by Rohitcss 11 days ago | 8 comments
Beware the Complexity Merchants (chrlschn.dev)
Something I’ve come to appreciate over my engineering career is simplicity and how it is an enabler of speed and creation.
Software Engineering, Simplicity, Speed, Creation
42 points by kiyanwang 12 days ago | 38 comments
Ask HN: Career Change Confusion (ycombinator.com)
I feel stuck and not sure what to do with my career anymore. I’m currently a software engineer but I have never really enjoyed working professionally as a SWE, I’ve switched companies about every two years thinking that maybe if I can work on something different it would solve this problem but it never has and I am always ready to leave after about a year and a half.
Career Advice, Software Engineering, Personal Growth, Job Satisfaction
17 points by tdnka 12 days ago | 18 comments
In defense of shallow technical knowledge (seangoedecke.com)
Building a shallow understanding about how technologies you use work is very helpful, because it lets you have useful insights (about performance, quality, when the technology is a good fit, and so on).
Software Development, Technology, Learning, Knowledge, Software Engineering
108 points by swah 12 days ago | 78 comments
We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash (freedium.cfd)
In the quest for reliable systems that can handle extreme workloads, choosing the right programming language is critical. We designed a comprehensive stress test to push seven popular languages to their absolute limits, measuring performance under conditions that would make most systems buckle. The results challenged our preconceptions and revealed surprising strengths in an unexpected contender.
Programming Languages, Performance, Stress Testing, Software Engineering
11 points by manusachi 13 days ago | 2 comments
Music, teeth, and AI but not all at once (erikheintare.substack.com)
Hi! It’s Erik. My Slack bio says, "I'm probably taller than you.", but other than that, I’m a husband, father, and owner of two dogs. For the last 10+ years, I have swum in data waters. Currently leading engineering teams at Bolt, focusing on making Bolt's data usable to everyone. These letters will contain bits and pieces I’ve noticed over the last few weeks.
Artificial Intelligence, Data, Software Engineering
3 points by erikhhhh 14 days ago | 0 comments
Prime Path Coverage in the GNU Compiler Collection (arxiv.org)
We describe the implementation of the prime path coverage support introduced the GNU Compiler Collection 15, a structural coverage metric that focuses on paths of execution through the program.
Compiler Optimization, Software Development, Software Engineering, Code Coverage
12 points by matt_d 14 days ago | 1 comments
Engineers and AI: ramblings of a small startup founder (labadal.com)
AI feels like a nightmare for a lot of us software engineers. Everyone wants it to replace us. I have always been a naysayer when it comes to AI in software engineering. Not that it can’t eventually be something that replaces me, just that it slows me down right now. I understand the thing I’m building and why I’m building it. I can call out bad requirements (unlike our favorite yes-man, ChatGPT).
Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Startups
15 points by labadal 15 days ago | 3 comments
New #1 open-source AI Agent on SWE-bench Verified (refact.ai)
Refact.ai Agent achieved 69.8% on SWE-bench Verified — autonomously solving 349 out of 500 tasks. This makes Refact.ai a leading open-source AI programming Agent on SWE-bench and places it among the top ranks on the leaderboard.
AI, Open Source, Software Engineering, Benchmarking
28 points by laxyz 15 days ago | 15 comments
Tales from Mainframe Modernization (oppi.li)
At my last workplace, I wrote transpilers (or just compilers if you prefer) from mainframe languages (COBOL, JCL, BASIC etc.) to Java (in Rust!).
Programming, Software Engineering, Mainframes, Legacy Systems, Rust
65 points by todsacerdoti 16 days ago | 31 comments
Python Tooling at Scale: LlamaIndex’s Monorepo Overhaul (llamaindex.ai)
When we talk about LlamaIndex, we’re actually referring to an ecosystem consisting of more than 650 Python packages, mostly Integrations and Packs. All these packages share a single GitHub repository, what engineers fondly call a “monorepo”. In this article, we’re going to introduce LlamaDev, our new tool for managing monorepos at scale, and explain the challenges we ran into with existing tooling to get us to this point.
Python, Software Engineering, Open Source, AI
38 points by cheesyFish 16 days ago | 11 comments
LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective (bearblog.dev)
TL;DR: Giving LLMs the full output of tool calls is costly and slow. Output schemas will enable us to get structured data, so we can let the LLM orchestrate processing with generated code. Tool calling in code is simplifying and effective.
Programming, Software Engineering, AI Tools
282 points by jngiam1 16 days ago | 101 comments
Devstral (mistral.ai)
Today we introduce Devstral, our agentic LLM for software engineering tasks. Devstral is built under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI 🙌, and outperforms all open-source models on SWE-Bench Verified by a large margin. We release Devstral under the Apache 2.0 license.
Software Engineering, Open Source, Artificial Intelligence
701 points by mfiguiere 16 days ago | 148 comments
AI Slop PRs are burning me and my team out hard (reddit.com)
AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard, anyone else experiencing this?
Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Work Culture, Burnout
7 points by xemane 16 days ago | 1 comments
The Future of Junior Software Engineering Roles (adventuresincoding.substack.com)
Over the last few months, I have had conversations with people from all over the tech world about various and sundry subjects related to our fields — Professors, Undergrads, Ph.D. students, CEOs and CTOs, Senior Software Engineers, Junior Engineers, Data Scientists, and everything in between. From all of these points of view, we have observed one particular issue: the role of the junior engineer is disappearing.
Software Engineering, Technology Trends
40 points by pootietangus 16 days ago | 84 comments
Show HN: Engine – A multi-LLM alternative to Codex (enginelabs.ai)
Engine is a cloud-based AI software engineering agent that works without supervision to turn issues into pull requests
Software Engineering, Generative AI, Open Source
16 points by sdspurrier 17 days ago | 14 comments
Programming Models for Correct and Modular Distributed Systems (eecs.berkeley.edu)
Distributed systems are a fundamental part of modern computing, but they are notoriously difficult to program.
Distributed Systems, Programming, Software Engineering
7 points by matt_d 18 days ago | 0 comments
Designing type inference for high quality type errors (polybdenum.com)
Type inference has a reputation for confusing and impossible-to-debug type errors. However, there is no reason why it has to be this way. If you design your language in the right way, you can still have high quality type errors even with powerful global type inference. This does mean avoiding certain features which are often convenient, but I think in the long run, having high quality error messages in your language is the superior tradeoff.
Programming Languages, Type Systems, Compiler Design, Software Engineering, Error Handling
83 points by PaulHoule 18 days ago | 17 comments
What makes a good engineer also makes a good engineering organization (2024) (moxie.org)
The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers, and yet if they graduate from university, it is typically with a degree in computer science. That has always felt a little strange to me, because science and engineering are two pretty different disciplines – yet we for the most part seem to take such an obvious contradiction for granted.
Software Engineering, Computer Science, Education, Organizational Culture
337 points by kiyanwang 18 days ago | 139 comments
Show HN: Job board aggregator for best paying remote SWE jobs in the U.S. (remoteswe.fyi)
Save hours searching and scrolling, Get all daily updates in one place.
Software Engineering, Remote Work, Jobs, Job Search
195 points by xitang 19 days ago | 143 comments
Benchmarking Crimes Meet Formal Verification (microkerneldude.org)
No, this isn’t about formally verifying benchmarking (BM) crimes. It’s about the use of misleading statistics in papers that apply formal methods (FM) to verify (prove correct) operating systems (OS) code – something that has been bugging me for a while.
Formal Verification, Operating Systems, Research, Software Engineering
37 points by snvzz 19 days ago | 6 comments
Can You Trust Code Copilots? Evaluating LLMs from a Code Security Perspec (arxiv.org)
Code security and usability are both essential for various coding assistant applications driven by large language models (LLMs). Current code security benchmarks focus solely on single evaluation task and paradigm, such as code completion and generation, lacking comprehensive assessment across dimensions like secure code generation, vulnerability repair and discrimination.
Code Security, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering
11 points by badmonster 19 days ago | 2 comments
Reflecting on Software Engineering Handbook (yusufaytas.com)
One year. May 2024. Back then, we were riding high, celebrating the launch of this Software Engineering Handbook with an amazing trip to Iceland. Five days of glaciers and waterfalls, finally enjoying the fact that we finished up a two year project. We thought we’d cracked it, pouring our hard won experience into a guide for anyone navigating the software engineering business.
Software Engineering, Books, Retrospective, Project Management
19 points by yusufaytas 19 days ago | 1 comments
Microsoft winnows: Layoffs hit software engineers hard (theregister.com)
Microsoft's recent round of layoffs appears to have fallen largely on software developers, including several prominent Python developers and a veteran TypeScript developer.
Microsoft, Layoffs, Software Engineering, Python, TypeScript
28 points by gitremote 19 days ago | 6 comments
Every programming language has its 'killer' domain (huijzer.xyz)
I recently read the article Every programming language needs its killer app to succeed and think the article makes a great point.
Programming Languages, Software Development, Software Engineering
34 points by todsacerdoti 19 days ago | 69 comments
ChatGPT Codex: The Missing Manual (latent.space)
ChatGPT Codex is here - the first cloud hosted Autonomous Software Engineer (A-SWE) from OpenAI. Josh Ma and Alexander Embiricos tell us how to WHAM every codebase like a power user.
Programming, Software Engineering, OpenAI
3 points by Brajeshwar 20 days ago | 0 comments