It's been fantastic. The mouse puts my hand in a natural "handshake" position, which has cut down on the wrist strain I used to get after long hours of work or browsing.
This suggests HN is functioning as designed. Votes signal agreement while comments surface disagreement.
Negative posts outperform because they create unfinished cognitive work. A clean, agreeable story closes the loop, a contested claim or engagement opens and follows the open loop.
I’ve been vibe-coding replacements for the tools I actually use every day. So far: a Notepad, a REST client, a snipping tool, a local gallery and lightweight notes for iPhone.
The motivation isn't novelty. It's control. I don't need ads, onboarding flows and popups, AI sidebars, bloated menus, unnecessary network calls , etc. A notepad should never touch the network. A REST client shouldn’t ship analytics or auto update itself mid-request.
No plugin system. No extensibility story. Just plain/simple software.
As I build these, I have been realizing how much cognitive overhead we’ve normalized in exchange for very little utility.
big fan of this and have been doing similar. i just got to a good state with my Linear clone app. im planning to do a REST client soon, how'd that go for you?
Nice, Linear is a perfect target for this mindset.
The REST client went surprisingly smoothly once I committed to keeping it boring.
I'm building Mac apps in Xcode, and I keep multiple small apps in a single Xcode project with a few shared libraries (basic UI components, buttons, layout helpers, etc. to keep all my apps similar).
The REST client is literally just another target + essentially one extra file on top of that. No workspaces, no collections, no sync, no plugins. Just method, URL, headers, body, hit send, show response. Requests are saved and loaded as plain local JSON.
What surprised me is how little code is actually required once you strip away "product features".
I feel like being in a time loop. Every time a big company releases a model, we debate the definition of open source instead of asking what actually matters. Apple clearly wants the upside of academic credibility without giving away commercial optionality, which isn't unsurprising.
Additionally, we might need better categories. With software, flow is clear (source, build and binary) but with AI/ML, the actual source is an unshippable mix of data, infra and time, and weights can be both product and artifacts.
I'm glad you said it. Incredible tech and the top comment is debating licensing. The demos I've seen of this are incredible and it'll be great taking old photos (that weren't shot with a 'spatial' camera) and experiencing them in VR. I think it sums up the Apple approach to this stuff (actually impacting peoples lives in a positive way) vs the typically techie attitude.
AI stays the top story but in a boring way as novelty wears off and models get cheaper and faster (maybe even more embedded). No AGI moment. LLMs start feeling like databases or cloud compute.
No SpaceX or OpenAI IPO moment. Capital markets quietly reward the boring winners instead. S&P 500 grinds out another double digit year, mostly because earnings keep up and alternatives still look worse. Tech discourse stays apocalyptic, but balance sheets don't.
If you mute politics and social media noise, 2026 probably looks like one of those years that we later remember as "stable" in retrospect.
> If you mute politics and social media noise, 2026 probably looks like one of those years that we later remember as "stable" in retrospect.
I love this, we focus way too much on the apparent chaos of daily life. Any news seems like a big wave that announces something bigger and we spend our time (especially here!) imagining the tsunami to come. Then later, we realize that most events are just unimportant to the point we forgot about them.
To me, this is wishful thinking. The more I see these "our jobs are safe" claims, the more I fear our jobs are not safe, and people are just trying to convince themselves which is an indicator of turmoil ahead.
What does "safe" mean? Unemployment in the US right now is under 5% which is historically very good (even though it's been slightly trending upwards over the past few months).
Keep in mind this is supporting the gif economy too. Lots of people are underemployed not necessarily unemployed because they start driving Uber for example instead of just wanting to sit at home after a job loss.
Employed. My contention is the AI is getting so good at doing tech related things that you'll need far fewer employees. I think Claude Code 4.5 is already there. Honestly, it just needs to permeate the market.
I agree that Claude Code is a lot more effective than I was expecting, but I don't think it can fully replace human software engineers, nor do I think it's on any trajectory to do so. It does make senior engineers a lot more productive so I could see it reducing some demand for new grad software engineers.
The dream never dies, possibly because people remember when class time was supplanted by a movie. Anyone remember "I Am Joe's Heart"? Those movies showed that you could just sit and watch passively like TV, and you'd learn quite a bit, with professional diagrams and animations to help.
Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
Charging by minute might push people toward shorter, noisier and more fragmented pipelines. It feels more like a lever to discourage selfhosting over time.
It's not outrageous money today, but it's a clear signal about where they want CI to live.
Us software engineers assume value comes from serving more people, faster, with less friction. But many of the things that actually make life feel coherent such as learning a craft, maintaining friendships and building tools for one person, only work because they’re slow and specific.
Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.
I have an Apple TV and I’ve been running iSponsorBlockTV [1] on my Synology box for a while. It auto-skips the sponsored segments and with Youtube premium, it gives me a clean, ad-free setup.
I can’t stand those in-video intros or sponsored promos, where I’m suddenly pitched a random VPN or productivity app.
For home: Bidet
For personal: Kindle
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