‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

317 points · 408 comments · julian_digital

  1. torben-friis · · focus · HN ↗
    Here's my constant question:

    Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.

    Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

    While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.

    Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?

    1. apf6 · · focus · HN ↗
      Last year people were asking "if AI is so great then where are the new apps?". Then data for 2026 came out and now the IOS app store has a 84% percent year-over-year increase in new app submissions.

      For the question where are the alternative OSes? Here is one that I&#x27;ve seen. There&#x27;s probably more - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ClaudeAI&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1wfpydl&#x2F;i_asked_claude_to_build_an_operating_system_from&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ClaudeAI&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1wfpydl&#x2F;i_asked_c...

      For that other stuff you mentioned like the right click menu. Those huge corporate projects suffer more from layers of institutional dysfunction and will be very very slow to show any improvement. Their dysfunction can&#x27;t be solved with just faster coding.

      Using AI to build more features is easier than using AI to improve existing projects. People will gradually figure out how to do latter too, it&#x27;ll just take longer.

      1. torben-friis · · focus · HN ↗
        That&#x27;s just volume though. I also know, and have no trouble believing, that github is going down partly due to the weight of all the vibecoded pushes. But that does not necessarily translate to people&#x27;s needs and wants being covered, for all we know iOS just has a plague of unused POCs.

        Do you have actual productive examples? As in, products with a real userbase that couldn&#x27;t exist or be scaled pre-AI? Genuinely asking, I might have missed some large hits. The closest I can remember was bun rewrite kerfuffle, which seemed more a marketing action than anything.

        1. ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
          In the gaming space, retro console PC ports have absolutely exploded in the last year. People are modding old games with 4k textures, ray tracing, DLSS 5, widescreen support, uncapped framerates, dual-screen (e.g. Ayn Thor), etc. PS5 emulation has gone from almost nothing to AAA titles in-game in like 2 months, and apparently now runs on xbox (lol).

          The other day someone posted a reverse engineered GPU driver for their Mac[0].

          Anyway, what makes you think those pushes aren&#x27;t individuals meeting their own needs? I expect it will take a while for this to really sink in, but the future is people asking the computer to build exactly the app they want.

          [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49717638">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49717638

          1. Kurtz79 · · focus · HN ↗
            Also, English localizations of even super-obscure foreign retro games.

            Most of those might be not as good as fan translations from dedicated people with good knowledge of English and the original language (especially for very context-dependent languages like Japanese) but they are definitely good enough to follow the story and play through the game.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.