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- Hacker News
- I’ve been thinking of the term ‘gearhead’ lately. Everyone saying bro put this skill in your agent harness to change everything is significantly motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc
The hobbyist tinkering with the programming setup has its benefits (enjoyment) but it’s a mistake to think it matters at all to the end user or indeed — as this post argues — to actual quality and quantity of work when compared to the benefits of actually thinking about the product and the code
by firasd - Eh, I think the urge is similar but maybe the rationality a bit less. i.e. there is some measurable increase in… whatever you’re trying to maximize with a car mod, volume or performance or whatnot. It’s more opaque with these harness optimizations and tools.
To be fair I mess with “how” I use or orchestrate the harness myself, I still can’t say anything I do that benefits me is more than placebo. At least from my projects. I think it matters easily for the things that can be patched like Context7 helping with API knowledge, and less for those that can’t like whatever “prompting style” attempts to address.
Maybe for those, you can say it matters in making agent use more subjectively ergonomic? So less of a correctness thing and more of reducing fatigue.
by mpdpsycho - We have GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) and Productivity Procrastination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_addiction#Gear_Acquis....)
https://stanforddaily.com/2025/05/27/productive-procrastinat...
Buying ever more elaborate keyboards and endlessly tweaking syntax highlighting and Kanban boards will always loose to just getting on with it.
by gherkinnn - I’m not an engineer (by trade) so I am not as deep as many of you in the tooling.
But this article mirrors my thinking on every new notes app, or new “second brain,” or somehow new or better version of Jira, etc. There are real productivity gains and losses and a lot of theatrics.
by grvdrm - > motivated by the same urge as the person in the car mod culture tweaking their exhaust system etc
to be fair, the car mod people's end goal is just modding their cars mostly. there's no end goal like there is with software (a product).
I think people just get preoccupied with things that make them feel good and are simple and have immediate feedback. Not to be pedantic, but I would argue the more accurate analogy to this is the photography community. I had a period where I was really obsessed with photography and realized the majority of people love just...buying shit. All they did was just collect cameras and lenses and took extremely mediocre pictures. Turns out actual creativity is a lot harder and less immediately satisfying than the dopamine hit of buying some new lens, or changing your vim colorscheme and updating some alias for the 100th time. I'm sure there's some psychology behind people being too afraid to actually produce something because then they actually put themselves out there whether that's through some website or a photograph.
by volkk - me looking at my brand new mechanical keyboard ssshhh... it's OK, it's not about us.by utopiah
- For the most curious the kbd https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/117008257708036677by utopiah
- You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.by fallous
- More of that:
You can spend thousands on a carbon fibre hi tech bicycle, or do what the Dutch do and go everywhere in a 50 euros battered thing that may or may not have been metal at some point.
Bonus:
Do you know those people that spend tons on "high end" mountaineering gear and never make it to the peaks?
by nottorp - by LunicLynx
- Very good, pairs well with the linked article.
I am an old man (mid-70s) and retired now except for personal research and writing, but fifty years in the business taught me to simply pay attention to what people actually get done.
- I think this is something almost straight out of Fred Brooks mythical Man month set of essays, from observations in the 1960s.
Iirc, one of the essays had the moral " many software developers would rather work on the infrastructure to solve the problem than actually solve the problem"
- More people want to write game engines than actual games.by Sharlin
- The best artist I talked to in-person still uses Photoshop CS6. (And a Wacom without a display).by raincole
- CS6 was peak, everything we needed, nothing we didn't. That's pretty much what photopea is, with improvements, which supports this view.
- If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is also why e.g. Java or Python isn't going anywhere anytime soon; they're fine, but there's armies of software developers who are well-versed in them. Newer languages may be "better" (by whatever measure), but experience trumps novelty.by Cthulhu_
- I think most professionals are conservative when it comes to their tools. Mastering them took a long time and it's hard to change.by gniv
- It's not about productivity, it's about having fun with your toys.by 4m1rk
- The OP implicitly raises the question of why does "productivity" exist. I've been giving that some thought lately, and the hypothesis I arrived at was that of diminishing suffering.
Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering.
Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more.
I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.
by YouWhy - There's a bubble where VC backed companies are not producing anything that people are really using or paying for. So to justify their valuation they instead try to show just how productive they are. Surely if they are this busy and productive they must be worth something? (This could also explain the hype around AI which is all about "productivity/how" and nothing about "what")
This article compares these kinds of companies ("nihilists") with game developers who are producing things that people pay for and use. The game developers don't pay much attention to productivity tools because they are too busy producing things.
https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/
> the perennially unprofitable venture-backed startup, for which faux productivity is connected to the generally immaterial nature of its high valuations, versus the game studio that lives and dies by the profitability of its products.
> In a sector of the economy where "it's not about how much you earn, but about how much you're worth," the labors of the companies whose workflows are built on the kinds of productivity apps that today comprise nearly 40 percent of Product Hunt's output are not actually directed at the creation of a thing, but at the appearance of the creation of a thing.
- I wonder where the people who spend hours and hours making the perfect gaming setup isntead of gaming, or the audiophiles who spend their lives in an eternal quest to get the perfect equipemnt instead of listening to music, end up in this analogy.by haritha-j
- Not sure it’s a bubble so much as a story as old as time… signal hacking. Always has happened and always willby jaccola
- Game developers put tons of effort into tooling, just not especially into text editors.by jeremyjh
- I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. My productivity also went up dramatically when I reduced from three monitors to one.
I solve most of my problems when I'm doing things like chopping vegetables or mowing the lawn. Sitting in the presence of shiny technology does not magically confer one with the ability to achieve higher quality decisions more quickly. I find the opposite to be mostly true. I can massively outperform the development team that my clients have simply because I am not a full time employee and can idle out long enough to think about their problems the slow way. The urgency to keep the status circle green in Teams (and related productivity theater) creates a lot of stupid decisions in many shops.
by bob1029 - Given your username, are you the Bob from the article?by croemer
- > I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer.
Right on! For 15 years I worked for two companies that had their offices on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in La Jolla CA. I would spend a lot of time walking along the cliffs or in the park thinking about work, and for serious work discussions I would urge my colleagues to walk with me if we didn’t need a white board.
Listen to Rich Hickey’s ‘hammock talk’ again…
- This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building.
The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.
- I think for me customizing my setup isn't time away from "real tasks" - I do the customization when I don't feel like doing the work or I'm doing some background thinking on how to proceed in the real task. It's an interesting way to keep my mind warmed up for programming through times when I'm not in the mood, and I'd guess 80-90% of the customization is waste of time, but the ones that I end up sticking with can be really useful and save time/effort dozens of times per dayby bayesianbot
- > 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.
Not sure about you, but I do a lot of thinking by typing code...In fact, I think it would be very hard to think without actually typing code..
I don't think this is exclusive to coding. Even general ideas are refined if one tries to put them in writing.
by qsera - > 90% of my time as a coder is spent typing
> 90% of our time should be spent thinking
Thinking and typing often happen at the same time. Its much easier for many people to reason about a problem by writing and changing the code, and it's also why LLMs can significantly reduce code understanding even if you read everything they wrote.
by flexagoon