I&#x27;m researching pain points around manual workflows that haven&#x27;t been automated yet.Specifically looking for tasks where:
- You do the same thing 5+ times a week
- You&#x27;ve looked for a tool but nothing good exists
- You&#x27;d pay $10-20&#x2F;month if something just workedWhat&#x27;s yours? Curious to hear both technical and non-technical answers.

Ask HN: What do you still do manually in 2026 that should be automated?

SpaceX has submitted plans to build Terafab.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;spacex-plans-55-billion-chip-plant-texas-2026-05-06It is smart strategically and financially risky - very on-brand for Musk. Given how hard it is to build, let alone scale a fab without considering existing competition(TSMC) which is light years ahead I’m curious to know what HN thinks of this move?SpaceX is already targeting a trillion dollar IPO and as an investor if you believe in this long term vision a trillion dollars might not seem too unreasonable.

Ask HN: Terafab – Smart move or insane financial risk?

I see a lot of activity every months in the &quot;Who wants to be hired&quot; threads but I wonder how many end up actually hired from these posts during 2026?

Ask HN: Who got hired with Who wants to be hired? (On 2026)

I have been trying to become an individual developer for a period, and have developed several tools or little projects (mainly open source). Some of them actually are very helpful at least to me, but unfortunately I am the only one to use them.No pull requests, no issues, even no stars except the only one from myself. I found it hard for them to be seen. I feel down because if there are no users, I can&#x27;t get any feedbacks and it&#x27;s hard for me to improve my projects. I feel trapped into a hole and can do nothing but to stay at the origin and get drowned.How can I promote my open-source projects (and maybe products in the future) ? I&#x27;ll really appreciate it if someone with related experiences can offer me some advice.

Ask HN: How to start up as an individual developer?

There may still be engineering jobs today, but I honestly wonder how long that can last and how long they&#x27;ll still pay well. I&#x27;m in the middle of looking for my next engineering role but also wondering if I should be going back to school in my 40s instead.

Ask HN: Is anyone seriously considering a career change?

How are you guys ensuring that the code that goes into production is high quality now that the time to review code is significantly greater than the time to generate it.There is a huge asymmetry between who is generating the code and who is reviewing it, making the review process even more painful than it used to be.Wondering whether if instead of reviewing PRs, we should instead move towards reviewing plans so that no code is generated before at least another person approves the plan.Once the code is generated, the users who contributed to the plan can still review it but the fact that both participated in the plan should help reduce the asymmetry.Feels like we need a way to collaborate and iterate on plans. Would love your thoughts on this.

Reviewing in the Age of AI

AI hallucinations are getting ambitious.A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death.“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024.Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.source: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&amp;id=100076638743004Cheers, -Cliff

Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

Some things I don&#x27;t understand with MCP vs. CLIPermissions: you can already scope CLI command permissionsDiscoverability: you can already discover commands&#x2F;arguments with a help flagWhy add a whole other process to the computer?Do MCP proponents imagine in the future every program on your PC has another MCP process also running?It seems like adding extra complexity&#x2F;moving parts for not much benefit.

Ask HN: Is the future everyone having 100 MCP processes running on their PC?

A lot of programmers I read here and elsewhere say LLM isn&#x27;t going to change much, some say LLM is just going to make them more productive, and some even say not using LLM makes you some sort of relic. What is not debated is that LLM has changed our industry. Programming is a lot more accessible to a lot more people than five years ago. Someone who has never coded anything could sit in front of Claude and produce an entire app ready to be used today.Assuming software development becomes a commodity and the job becomes something like a fast food job where practically any adult who wants it can do it, what is your next move?Anthropic and OpenAI are working hard to redirect the salary you earn to themselves in the form of API costs, so let&#x27;s assume that in the year 2030, the average yearly wage for a programmer is around the same as a McDonald&#x27;s worker, because companies have the option of paying Anthropic or OpenAI for API access as an alternative. What is your move?

Ask HN: The death of software development as a job?

I’m not trying to brag, I am just genuinely confused. I got laid off recently and I had a new job within a week because I constantly get contacted by recruiters both through LinkedIn and directly by email. I’ve never sent an application to anyone and I’ve had dozens of interviews in the past year while I was looking for a new job before getting laid off.I would have had a new one earlier except I was aiming for fully remote and a big raise, and I failed their correspondingly difficult evaluations. Never got ghosted, never had to deal with AI, never had to fill out an application. I took a local, in office offer that I would have ignored if I were still employed.Currently I’m waiting for a final decision from another fully remote company and I’m in midstage with 2 more.I’m not a super genius engineer, and I don’t have any fancy companies on my resume. How unusual is this experience?

Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?

Hey HN, which embedding models are people using? There has been so much development around foundational LLMs, but haven&#x27;t seen much news about embedding models.

Ask HN: Best Embedding Models?

I feel like I don&#x27;t have a choice to accept it. If I want to keep my job I need to use it. I felt pride in making things with code but now that you can just type in words into a prompt and code comes out, it just feels empty now. There&#x27;s no joy in writing code anymore doing this.I know for my personal hobbies I can do that... I need money is the thing, I can&#x27;t walk away yet but I think I will if this is how every job will be.I&#x27;m not denying its capability it&#x27;s like today I need to make a bluetooth android app that can do HFP today, NOW. I can&#x27;t do that with my current knowledge but AI can... and anybody who can type can use it so why am I needed kind of thing.So yeah right now my plan is to coast using these tools, do the things I enjoy to do then make enough money to get out. I&#x27;ll write my own code for my own fun.I&#x27;ve been a developer&#x2F;writing code since 2013.I&#x27;m not saying I&#x27;m against the technology enabling other people to code, I&#x27;m saying if I have to use it and I don&#x27;t have to write code anymore I feel sad about that. No feeling of accomplishment.The other thing is if you push back on it, you&#x27;re seen as like a negative person&#x2F;luddite, just do it everyone else is kind of thing.

Ask HN: Is there a term for feeling sad about forced AI adoption?

Is it more impressive to take longer to answer 2 + 2? It’s not. The longer one takes, the less intelligent we would rate that person.Somehow for AI agents taking longer is getting praise with the framing “maintaining attention for long-time horizons?”Have we collectively gone down to room temperature IQs with COVID?Why would the time dimension matter for a tool that is limited in context window? Doesn’t matter if you fill up the window in 1 second or 60 minutes. Also, it’s super easy to game. Insert random lags, reduce tokens&#x2F;sec, there you have a model that maintains attention over “long-time horizons”Maybe more importantly how do people in this field buy into these easily game-able non-indicators so easily? How did they not develop the instinct to instantly call out metrics like lines of code, number of tokens burned or time taken to process a task as BS the instant they hear it?How do they benchmark their code? The longer running the better? Number of CPU cycles spent?

Ask HN: Why would we care about "extended time horizons" and LLMs?

Ask HN: How do I get freelance developer jobs?

Besides Hacker News, I&#x27;m wondering where people are finding good sources of AI progression and news. Of course I can read arxiv and such, but wondering what folks have going for them!

Ask HN: Where are you getting your AI news from?

It&#x27;s one thing having to download this monstrosity, and a whole other, having to use it daily to write code.

Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

I finally got a kick in the pants. I now need a new AC2200 access point for my Google Wifi 5 mesh. Which is no longer sold. And Google decided to make Wifi 6 non-backwards-compatible. So I can either:1) Find one on eBay and try to keep an unsupported system limping along.2) Finally put in the time to set up something under my control.Several things have been bugging me:* The complexity &amp; expense - but mostly complexity - of streaming video in 2026.* The looming worry that one random whim from Google could wipe out my most valuable data (the photos &amp; videos of my kids growing up).* The overall awfulness of the Google Home app &amp; the unreliability of Google Home devices, like speakers.* The amount of personal &amp; family data I implicitly share with Google by just living our regular, daily lives.Someone, somewhere has built exactly the sort of setup I want, and there&#x27;s a good chance they&#x27;re on HN. There&#x27;re probably several &quot;unknown unknowns&quot; that I&#x27;m blind to, so I&#x27;d appreciate any tips from HN users with homelabs (is that even the right term these days?).Design goals:1. A shared, collective archive of family photos taken on Androids &amp; iPhones, stored privately, with some backup system.2. A streaming server that can host the couple of shows my wife &amp; I care about, plus shows we&#x27;ve selected for our kids. Our TV and laptops should be able to stream from the server.3. Speakers placed in various rooms in the house (we have ~8 of them now) that are wirelessly controllable. When they happen to work, our Google Home speakers have been awesome with kids and with hosting.4. Everything must be usable by non-tech friends &amp; family. They&#x27;re used to shared Google Photos albums, the Google TV interface, playing music in various rooms in the house via Apple Music &#x2F; Spotify -&gt; Google Home speakers.5. Stretch: I&#x27;d love to be able to host small &#x2F; simple &#x2F; fun services from my house. Just toys that today I&#x27;d stick on Netcup or Hetzner.6. Stretch: I&#x27;d love to be able to locally host models and even do light training. Maybe a framework desktop in a closet?I&#x27;m researching options now but I&#x27;d love guidance from humans who have already taken this journey. I&#x27;m moderately comfortable with linux (Fedora is my daily driver) and I have a 1 GB symmetrical fiber connection. Thanks!

Ask HN: Is a hands-off, family-friendly, de-Googled "home lab" feasible?

There are no extensions besides uBlock Origin and Saka Key running
Only a single message with some short text and code is open
This is on a &quot;cold start&quot; after installing updates
16GB is definitely nowhere near enough anymore, it&#x27;s almost like how 2GB was in 2016

Why Does a Single Firefox Tab Take Almost 1.5GB RAM?

Industry is increasingly moving towards complex, autonomous agentic loops and feedback chains. They obviously comes with significant latency, non-determinism, low-accuracy and cost.I&#x27;m interested in hearing from engineers who have moved in the opposite direction.At what point in your product lifecycle did you decide that agentic approach was wrong tool for the job?What was the specific failure mode (reliability, cost, latency, maintainability) pushed you to replace agentic loop with more deterministic system&#x2F;pipeline?

Ask HN: When did you move from AI agentic loops to simpler deterministic system?

So I wouldn&#x27;t mind to lose my job for almost any other reason. Bad market, company pivot, even my own stupid mistakes... fine, thats life. But losing it because of the love I put in my open source projects? C&#x27;mon man, that one really pisses me off.
I had side projects on weekends just for fun like everyone else, stack overflow answers at 2am for strangers I never gonna meet, and repos nobody paid me for..Honestly that kinda of culture was the best thing about being a dev and now it became the training set. I hate how openai&#x2F;google&#x2F;anthropic&#x2F;etc scraped it all, learned from it, and now they sell our love back to us as a product. Sure, I get it, it&#x27;s capitalism, whatever, but I feel like the biggest fool out there. I guess I just have to accept it, put my head down and keep going. There&#x27;s one thing I dislike most though: the people around here that glorify AI&#x2F;LLMs. It&#x27;s just a matter of time until the higher ups normalize reducing even more headcount because of AI, 90% of us will be affected. Not everything is about the technical details people!

Tell HN: The saddest irony of my/our craft

edit: project link is https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;upwindchange&#x2F;AutaiI had an open source project launching but I found out that I cannot make ShowHN post, the explanation given to me is very vague, I am not sure what should I do to get myself qualified? Is there some quantized instruction like &quot;how many days the account should be registered&quot; or &quot;how many posts&#x2F;comments&#x2F;upvotes&quot; the account should get qualified? Thank you for your guidance.