Dotfiles Alternatives

dotfiles reviews and mentions

• Benedict Evans: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 May 2026

  > Automation takes a lot of manual labour

  That's a great quote.

  https://xkcd.com/1205/

• So where are all the AI apps?
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2026

  I posted it recently, but now this works differently https://xkcd.com/1205/

  You can get a throw away app in 5 mins, before I wouldn't even bother.

• Jemalloc Un-Abandoned by Meta
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Mar 2026

  exactly. I can think of at least 5 different projects I have been on where a better allocator would made a world of difference. I can also think of another 5 where it probably would have been a waste of time to even fiddle with.

  but as usual there is an xkcd for that. https://xkcd.com/1205/

  One project I spent a bunch of time optimizing the write path of I/O. It was just using standard fwrite. But by staging items correctly it was an easy 10x speed win. Those optimizations sometimes stack up and count big. But it also had a few edges on it, so use with care.

• 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2026

  https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth the time matrix)

  LLM's change the calculus of the above chart dramatically.

• The Xkcd thing, now interactive
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Mar 2026

  On an unrelated note, AI completely changed economics of https://xkcd.com/1205/

  Previously I'd postpone some tooling since I'd lost more time on it (unless it's something I wanted to learn anyway), but now I'm all in.

• Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Feb 2026

  > The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

  There are plenty of products now that only exist because of what it did deliver on. Any one who spends time in the niche communities where it is thriving can see that... On the low end look at Apollo automation, the story of Grismo Knives, at the high end look a Hadrian Manufacturing.

  Vibe coding is a terrible name, but what a skilled dev can do with a deeply integrated AI coding assistant is amazing. It changes the calculus of "Is it worth your time" (see: https://xkcd.com/1205/ ).

  Is it helpful in my day to day: it sure is. Is it far more helpful in doing all the things that have been on the back burner for YEARS? My gods yes! But none of that is matching the hype thats out there around "vibe coding".

• LLM=True
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2026

  In my experience, it's the old time-invested vs time-saved trade off. If you're not looking at these reams of output often enough, the incentive to figure out all the flags and configs for verbosity to write these script is lower: https://xkcd.com/1205/

  And because these issues are often sporadic, doing all this would be an unwanted sidequest, so humans grit their teeth and wade through the garbage manually each time.

  With LLMs, the cost is effectively 0 compared to a human, so it doesn't matter. Have them write the script. In fact, because it benefits the LLM by reducing context pollution, which increases their accuracy, such measures should be actively identified and put in place.

• AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Feb 2026

  Absolutely, as per the xkcd automation chart, you'll break even if you save yourself those 5 minutes of work even just once a month over 5 years.

  https://xkcd.com/1205/

• Software Engineering Is Back
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Feb 2026

  Dead wrong.

  Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ )

  There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review.

  Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Having an internal debate on how to solve a problem, try both, write a test, prove out what is going to be better. Pair program, function by function with your LLM, treat it like a jr dev who can type faster than you if you give it clear instructions. I think you will be shocked at how quickly you can massively scale up your productivity.

• After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2026

  Just to be more pedantic, there is more nuance to all of that.

  Nobody smart is going to disagree that LLMs are a huge net positive. The finer argument is whether or not at this point you can just hand off coding to an LLM. People who say yes simply just haven't had enough experience with using LLMs to a large extent. The amount of time you have to spend prompt engineering the correct response is often the same amount of time it takes for you to write the correct code yourself.

  And yes, you can put together AGENT.md files, mcp servers, and so on, but then it becomes a game of this. https://xkcd.com/1205/

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  www.saashub.com | 7 Jun 2026

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