This answer makes two big assumptions that haven't been proven out yet.
- Understanding code without writing it is as viable as understanding code that you've worked with directly or indirectly
- Businesses care that you understand code
I really doubt the first one. Traditionally, understanding a code base in large part came from working with it intimately and building that muscle memory. The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic.
Whether businesses care that their engineers (which they are increasingly viewing as monkeys at LLM typewriters) to understand the code remains to be seen. I don't think they particularly care whether their code runs slow and is buggy so long as it works just enough to churn out features and continue to pull income.
> The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic.
As one of those developers who has written almost no significant code by hand since November 2025, but has produced a great deal of working software, I still understand the majority of the code I've produced just as well as if I'd typed it myself.
I may not be typing it myself, but I'm manipulating it constantly. It's not as simple as "reading" it - I'm reading it, executing it, figuring out refactorings for it, having tests built for it, having documentation built for it, sometimes writing that documentation myself, spinning up example scripts that use it, then building new code that depends on that previous code.
It's that act of exercising the code that gives me confidence that I understand it.
On the surface it sounds weird - why would this be?
Possibly because building a system is not a one-shot step, but a process of many iterations, each of which involves experiments in production, and gaining more learnings. So at the end of the process, you don't just have N lines of working code, but also N lessons learned along the way. So presumably with the AI process we miss out on half the value.
Now the going thesis is that this extra value is unnecessary if we take the plunge and don't look back. My gut says the answer is somewhere halfway, I guess we'll see.
> One of the problems with the Web is that as soon as a monopolistic entity can build a mechanism to extract revenue from it, there will be an incentive to capture the standard and change it to for their own benefit. In the particular case of the Web, this has resulted in a standard that grows out of control in complexity so it increases the barrier of entry for new browsers and reduces the competition.
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I don't really know what the author is talking about here. What parts of the standard? HTTP? HTML? DOM APIs? What?
The only sort of problem this might solve is the insanely low barrier of entry that the Web has in 2026. The Web was arguably a better (albeit imperfect) place when it was dominated by geeks and kids who could learn to use it faster than their elders. It was a club in a sense. Today it's a club where everyone on the planet is invited, meaning it's no longer a club. I know that sounds great to a lot of people, but I don't agree that systems become better with more participation and fewer criteria for that participation.
Even so, those who want to share and access information can already do that via the Web. Nobody has to use scripting. Nobody has to use The Google as their search. Nobody has to rely on an LLM. If there is demand for simple webpages that are free of scripting, they can be built and shared today. Because of this, the proposal comes off as very out of touch and deep within the HN bubble. Strict grammar for declaring documents is merely a fetish. If there's no scripting, then there's no reason for a document to break for some silly reason.
What does an 80 year old (or anyone really) need with more than one or two cards on a daily basis where this would be an issue? Not being flippant; I legit want to know what leads to this. I have multiple cards but there's only one I use 99% of the time, and it's pink so it stands out.
> What does an 80 year old (or anyone really) need with more than one or two cards on a daily basis where this would be an issue?
In my physical wallet I can take the card I use daily (which is on a limited account and no big deal if I lose it) and leave the others at home. On my phone, there are all the cards I ever used or plan to use at some point in the future.
To that end, I do wish there was a way to hide some cards in wallet inside a "folder" or something. As is, they're there front and center, or not added at all.
I'm not 80 but do have a backup credit card and debit card and I do travel. So it's not so much "daily basis" but I do have a handful of cards that I keep with me.
In my house we have two businesses [1][2] so that adds two cards. You may also have a card for medical expenses that can be reimbursed with a FSA/HSA or a prepaid debit card that you got as a gift, etc.
My bank does a slightly different cutout notch at the top of the card for credit card versus debit card. It is useful for orienting card when inserting into card readers (or cash machines).
That was a bit blunt; but absolutely true. I'm 64, and never really gave much thought to being here.
Seems like a lot of folks in tech are doing the same.
I won't suddenly become black (I can't even get a decent suntan), and I'm unlikely to suddenly become a woman (but I guess, technically, it's possible), but we all get older (the alternative kinda sucks). Every single one of us will, one day, enjoy the special warm feeling that you get, when someone dismisses you with a flippant "OK Boomer," or whatever the millennial and GenX versions will be.
That's what makes the infamous Silicon Valley (but Brooklyn is actually much worse) ageism so bad. A lot of folks are finding themselves being hoist by their own petards, as they are suddenly unable to get a job.
One of the interesting things about AI, is that younger folks are now getting screwed. Not sure if that's good for older folks, though. The ones that are already there, and are doing a decent job of adopting AI, are probably going to be OK, but that's unlikely to be a majority.
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?
We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.
Many upper level managers seem to be blind to the fact that the kind of person who can actually excel as a "do it all" is most likely not the kind of person that wants to work in that kind of environment. Those people will do a year or two pulling down a salary while they are also spinning up a side project, and then they'll bolt as soon as they can. It sounds like a recipe for constant employee churn, leaving behind a wake of fragile code.
I'm only writing this because Devil's advocate and all, but what if you're actually capable of all those things?
Plenty of us here can conceive, design, architect, build, ship and own things from soup to nuts, and feel a lot more invested in the result as a consequence.
If the compensation is good, and it feels less shackled and less bureaucratic, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Starting a company needs a lot more than those three skills. Plenty of people choose a pay packet with less stress.
Many founders recycle into tech jobs after they discover exactly why failure rates of startups are so brutal. Apparently 15-25% of employees aged 30–39 at major SV companies have a failed or acquihired startup in their history. Golden handcuffs can appear very pretty after you've missed out on striking gold by yourself.
I'm not arguing what defines inefficient in these situations, just that "if we group together we'll be okay" for tech workers will go about as well as 1960's longshoreman unionization
Well, yeah. As an employee in general one isn't that bothered about profit. As long as one's own job is safe and the jobs of the people one's close to.
It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am. Moreover, leadership will not recognize my ingenuity as an asset, hence no added job security. No way am I going to help my company out of the goodness of my heart to be potentially let go anyway in the near future.
If developers are worried about their jobs with the way the market currently is, they should treat their personal workflows as trade secrets. My example was not specific to AI, but it applies just as much to AI workflows. In a worker's market, it was sometimes fun to share that kind of knowledge with an organization. In an employer's market, they can pay me if they want access to my personal choices.
> I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am.
That sounds like a toxic environment. Sharing those types of things is how I got the recognition to get ahead in my career and I have never once regretted it.
Ownership of the IP, as it were, is certainly true, but usually with these tools, most of the battle is documenting it, training people, answering questions, etc., and if you aren't motivated to do that it's very hard to make it happen.
Boss-man actually has a very difficult time turning legal theoretic right into actual deliverables.
Exactly. I get why multiple people are replying that my company owns what I make on their time, but it's honestly funny as hell to me that people think most management at any company cares about or understands some CLI tool enough that they would know about it in the first place or actually go through the effort to force one to hand it over. That's gotta be really rare. Being concerned about that is like being afraid drive through a red light at an empty intersection when you're the only car on the road at 3am.
Over the years, I too have developed ad hoc tools to make my job easier or faster. I don't hide them, but I do not share any since the tools are not really ready for that. I don't have them properly documented, other people would not understand how to use them, why and all the quirks. I suppose a lot of developers do the same.
Yeah, if there is no gain then employees shouldn't be giving any more than exactly what they were hired for. Most big companies are and should be treated as adversarial, because they won't think twice about dropping your ass, you are just a name in the HR departments computers to anyone you don't directly work with every single day. I think a lot of tech employees bought into all the bullshit because they made such good money and were for awhile uncommonly skilled. But their uncommon skill sets have become more and more common while the actual knowledge needed by individual employees has dropped. All the garbage conditions many game programmers and artists have to deal with? Yeah that is coming for the entire tech industry, and that isn't the low point, that is the shit pile just picking up speed. It should be obvious looking at almost every other industry after a few decades.
I sadly have to agree with this. In a collaborative "give and take" world sharing is good. In an environment that takes only, all you have left is your own intellectual property. It is your own most vital asset worth protecting. Shouldn't be like this, but it is.
I'm talking about your personal knowledge base and your processes for getting stuff done, you take that with you when you leave and it belongs to you. Of course what you create belongs to your employer.
I go completely the opposite direction. I stick my name right in the script and write a wiki page documenting it as clearly as I can manage. It becomes part of my value proposition to the company.
I don't think this way because I like to collaborate. If a colleague can benefit from a tool I made I'm proud to save them time. I also think your attitude doesn't pass the golden rule: would you like to work on a team full of people like you?
I tend to agree with you - a rising tide lifts all boats and I want my team to be a rising tide. If I'm at a startup and I'm confident my tool is a good fit for what the rest of the team is doing and there's a genuine teamwork dynamic, oh absolutely I share things like this.
But when I've been stuck for a while in a dysfunctional team, I've definitely seen the flip side where other people will find ways to take a lot of credit for minor iterations on my work, where management will reward my productivity with high expectations and high pressure to continue the trajectory they perceive in a single idea, and when the tool becomes a support burden because too many people think it should solve all of their other problems too and I'm now perceived as being the owner of this thing they depend on.
It does seem like a highly antagonistic way of working or perhaps I'm just naive.
If your only goal is to maintain a performance lead on your peers, you either need to gain and keep an advantage or find ways to actively make your coworkers disadvantaged (or both). And if you're already doing 1) then 2) isn't a far stretch.
> would you like to work on a team full of people like you?
If their team is already like this, what choice do they have? It's a prisoners dilemma where everyone else is defecting and I'm the sole cooperator.
IMO the onus for solving this is on the business owner, either through establishing a knowledge sharing culture or more comprehensive performance evaluation that rewards these innovations.
It sucks to work with people like you, honestly. Prima-Donna types that overindex on their own personal paranoias instead of trying to succeed, grow, and excel along with the people around them. Quite literally not a team player.
> I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier
I mean, according to your employment agreement, that code is owned by your employer, since you wrote it as an employee for use at work. They could easily demand that you share it, if they knew it existed.
This just illustrates that smart people figure out their own productivity/time-saving shortcuts at work, and little scripts and tools like this are part of it. Happens all the time. Other employees don't, and just plod through whatever manual process they were trained to do.
Contracts vary, but here if your employer tells you to do work ("document and deliver a tool that does X") and you refuse, here that's grounds for warning process and dismissal as a breach of contract.
You have to get used to acting within the grey area and playing politics. Your counterparty (your employer) certainly does. Every businessperson is good at it, or they wouldn't be successful.
In any transactional relationship - which employment is - when you want to do something, don't think: I can't do this because they wouldn't like it. Instead think: what are the likely consequences of doing this? Are they positive or negative for me, on net?
I love open source, but you are correct in identifying it as a very similar problem, though it's more a problem with software licensing than source code being publically available. Usually the argument is made that FOSS ends up as free labor, which is true in a lot of ways, but I see FOSS devaluing software as a whole. When software is open and libre, that sends a psychological signal that the software isn't that valuable. There would still be FOSS in a world where even projects like React charged a licensing fee to big organizations, but in that case there would be more choice between YOLO with free software or paying for quality software; as token expenses have proven, many companies could absolutely pay for the latter many times over. In terms of specifically open source, however, companies get a bit of a loophole in that their own employees (or LLM of choice) can be "inspired* by the source code and clone aspects of commercial software. This has the effect of devaluing the skill of individual software engineers to being glorified script kiddies.
Yeah, that's it exactly. Films aren't reality, although they can be a reflection of what we might think how reality should go. Af the end of the day, films are made to capture an audience, not to paint a perfect portrait of the real world.
Also, there are counterexamples to that person's claim, such as the film Before Sunrise, which is an excellent romance film that doesn't involve an arc where the characters are indifferent or dislike each other at first. The films Sideways and even Office Space defy that trope as well.
When I grew up in LA 20+ years ago, seating was way more casual. Now everywhere seems to want assigned seating. I think this is in part because so many theater chains now offer a "premium" dining experience. It's yet another reason I rarely go to theaters anymore, on top of most of the film offerings being crap.
My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do.
- Understanding code without writing it is as viable as understanding code that you've worked with directly or indirectly
- Businesses care that you understand code
I really doubt the first one. Traditionally, understanding a code base in large part came from working with it intimately and building that muscle memory. The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic.
Whether businesses care that their engineers (which they are increasingly viewing as monkeys at LLM typewriters) to understand the code remains to be seen. I don't think they particularly care whether their code runs slow and is buggy so long as it works just enough to churn out features and continue to pull income.
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