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Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer
- cevn 4mo ago> I didn’t build Twilio. I didn’t build the Realtime API. I didn’t build Claude Code or MCP. I didn't write a blog post.
- RealityVoid 4mo agoThank you, this quip really cracked me up. :))
- boomlinde 4mo agoThat time in the car could have been spent thinking of something worthwhile enough to write about.
- cloche 4mo agoMost innovation is just connecting the works of others together with a touch of individual creativity.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- derwiki 4mo agoMea culpa. But I _did_ record a video!
- infogulch 4mo agoI guess you can try again when you post the video.
- derwiki 4mo agoVideo is in the post
- satvikpendem 4mo agoSo, you knowingly submitted AI generated content to HN? No wonder it's flagged.
- zahlman 4mo agoThe best time to solve personal problems with those techniques, perhaps. That is not the same as (and might be opposed to) the best time to seek employment or go into business using those techniques; there isn't going to be much of a market for things that your (employer's) potential customers could trivially do themselves.
- Daishiman 4mo agoIt is never sufficiently trivial if you don't have the technical know-how or the ability to do it in a time-efficient manner.
- Otek 4mo ago> What I wanted was to say “hey Siri, call Claw Phone” and have the audio system in my Toyota become an IDE. So I build it. Or just focus on driving? Why we are doing it to ourselves? It seems so toxic to fill every possible little moment with… productivity? Is it even productive? This comment is too emotional but i just felt so sad while reading this
- knollimar 4mo agoDriving is a good time to decompress or hammock based engineer imo
- Avicebron 4mo agoBeing a hammock-deployed engineer is really the career goal.
- singpolyma3 4mo agoI assumed they meant the 15 minutes waiting in between kind of slots. Not... Actually while driving I hope
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- godelski 4mo agoI wonder if these people just need to talk. I wonder if these people are just avoiding thinking about the tough things in their lives. I wonder if these people are just scared of being human, so reaching for any distraction they can get. I've tried to stop taking my phone with me when I go to the bathroom. When I shower. When I go to bed. Because I think we all have these same addictions. There's things that suck in life. But maybe if we put our phones down we can work together to solve these things. - Written on godelski's iPhone while pooping
- pavel_lishin 4mo agoI do know a lot of people who love to talk. I don't think it's a character flaw. It's certainly not what I want, and I would die if I had to talk all day, but it's just the way they prefer to communicate. Same way that some people are introverts and some are extroverts, some people like reading paper books and some people like audiobooks.
- Schiendelman 4mo agoThis is just an advertisement, it's not about being a "duct tape engineer", and the various coding agents are already great duct tape engineers, so I can't imagine someone writing a compelling blog post about it anyway.
- hylaride 4mo agoAgreed. I was expecting something more along the lines of "now is the best time to be somebody capable of glueing together and fixing all the messes that AI agents have created, on top of being aware enough of security issues. This was the exact opposite.
- npodbielski 4mo agoExactly what I thought! And then I read that some guy is working while driving. Jesus Christ... Next time it will be post: I am talking to my phone about my code while I shower and I never felt more productive!
- Hugsbox 4mo agoAnd when you get home to check out the results, you won't understand any of the code :)
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoI tend to call this sort of "I glued a bunch of external services together to make a useful tool" Software Plumbing, not Engineering. Anyways I think what you've demonstrated that it's actually a really bad time to be a "Duct Tape Engineer" because anyone with a bit of knowhow can coax the AI to build them some pile of loose data pipes and leaky abstractions that appears useful. The market for this sort of software builder is about to get very crowded
- jupr 4mo agoThis is a completely insane way to check how many emails I have in my inbox I love it.
- f311a 4mo agoI hope he does not use it and just wanted to advertise his project to get some Github stars...
- derwiki 4mo agoWhy do you hope that?
- MeetingsBrowser 4mo agoI see this sentiment constantly. AI tooling is better than ever and its making building things easier than ever. I have respected coworkers who say that are maxing out multiple $200/month subscriptions. But I have yet to see any results? Where is the useful stuff?
- bityard 4mo agoI don't know what those people are doing, but I built a personal day-to-day notes manager at work, for work, for under $20 in credits. Yes, I could have just used text files but this is less friction which means I'll actually stick to it. Nothing exactly like this already existed. It was built in under a week in small portions of spare time, and it probably would have been more like a month if I had to choose all the libraries and write the whole thing myself.
- skydhash 4mo agoYou have build "a stuff". But no one knows what the "stuff" is, and your comment is not exactly describing it. That's why it's so hard to converse with the AI proponents. They don't want to talk about what they've built and why it's awesome (at least for them). They just want you to take it at face value. If you're sharing something, just give enough details so that others can contrast to their own experience and learn something from it.
- bityard 4mo agoI thought I described it pretty well, but if you really need more detail to prove I'm not making it all up, here is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/cu/doneski https://github.com/cu/doneski I didn't include it with my comment because I didn't want to be seen as shilling it. And because it's not likely to be useful to anyone but me.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoSearch Ask HN threads, there are lots asking the same question and it looks like people do make useful stuff, it's just personal software not distributed to the public. I find that nice actually, because it's nice to make something just for yourself and is essentially what software is good for, solving your own problem.
- tired_and_awake 4mo agoI feel as if a lot of this what Google home (or other "home like" products) could have been and they have failed miserably. As a Google home user I find it can't answer the simplest questions that would require even the hint of an integration within Google's own ecosystem.
- heohk 4mo agoAll modern SaaS is just other SaaS glued together
- j45 4mo agoIt's the spaghetti code years all over again but with ai. :)
- axegon_ 4mo agoThe good times are yet to come though: when all the slop held together by spaghetti, duct tape, chewing gum and hairballs starts falling apart and someone needs to fix it. If the slop bubble doesn't start popping soon, in 10 years a handful of people will end up being better paid than COBOL developers are now cause they'd be the only one that know what a compiler is. Personally I'm not too enthusiastic about the prospect so if I'm lucky, I'll be enjoying early retirement and watching all hell break loose from a camper van near the sea somewhere.
- cloche 4mo agoHave you used AI lately? Yes, this was the case a year ago but I've been using Claude daily for the past month and the quality is on par with what a senior engineer would be producing - often times better as it's more thorough and can think through all logical edge cases much more reliably. I do review all the code it writes. There are some suggestions I have but I'd say overall, 99% of it is solid.
- axegon_ 4mo agoIf that were the case I'd be getting a lot less "Hey, can you check this, something isn't working, here's what the AI did: ..." in complex systems but, alas, I hear those exact words 10+ times a day if I'm lucky (up from 3-4 a year ago).
- cloche 4mo agoI get that many people are tired of too many AI posts and there's an influx of negative comments but I think this is genuinely amazing. Think about watching Star Trek in the 60s and seeing people talk to computers and them understanding and being able to communicate back. We're literally living in the future!
- locallost 4mo ago"Understanding"
- andybak 4mo ago"quotation marks"
- analogpixel 4mo agoI'm sick of "AI posts" that just talk about AI the tool. I like posts about, because of AI, I built this cool idea I was thinking about. (or not even saying AI, just show us the cool things you made, that are hopefully not just "a tool written by ai to do ai")
- mrbonner 4mo agoThis has been the the case all the time: most of our work are connecting pipes using glue code/duct tape so to speak. But now, we are delegating this to AI. Nothing new for me.
- infogulch 4mo agoThis week I built https://github.com/infogulch/caddy-zone-manager https://github.com/infogulch/caddy-zone-manager, "A Caddy app that performs desired-state synchronization of DNS records to a target zone using Caddy’s existing libdns DNS-provider ecosystem." I thought that since caddy is already managing dns records anyway to pass DNS-01 ACME validations and update HTTPS records, wouldn't it be nice if I could just have it manage all of them and keep my desired DNS state checked into git? This is exactly the duct tape scenario. There are a bunch of systems that bound the problem: Caddy's app lifecycle, the Caddyfile configuration system, libdns interfaces, DNS semantics, the Go language. Sure, there are a lot of little decisions that need to be made that fall into the "taste" category (no promises), and the sync engine itself is a new brand component, but by and large once the idea was formulated the problem domain is narrow enough for an LLM to stitch the systems together. It was done in about two days of personal time. I read through all the code and rewrote a good portion of it manually. I probably could have written it from scratch myself with two weeks of full time effort (honestly I would have stumbled a bit on DNS recordset semantics which I was not very familiar). Instead it cost me $100. (I will reconsider my LLM usage patterns for the next project...)
- zygology 4mo agohave you considered the ethical implications of vibe coding while controlling a 2 ton projectile around living humans?