Top all-time · #655
Geoffrey Huntley
Personal blog · ghuntley.com · on HN as ghuntleyaiprogramming
Geoffrey Huntley's personal blog at ghuntley.com covers ai and programming. Since 2015, 95 different Hacker News readers have linked it 319 times, most often “Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mostly for the VS Code 'fracture' essay and posts on AI coding agents, such as the Ralph loop and Cursor rules. A few comments call posts insightful or spot on.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Kodak post 'spot on'; fracture post 'thoughtful speculation'; stdlib post 'great insights'; internet post 'of interest'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I'm a software engineer who writes about AI-assisted software development. I created the Ralph loop, which runs a coding agent in a loop until the work is done. It's the technique loop engineering grew out of.
Most-linked posts?
- Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)24 people · 42 mentions · first linked 2022-08-31
- Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer"12 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2025-07-14
- You are using Cursor AI incorrectly8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-02-08
- I ran Claude in a loop for 3 months, and it created a genz programming language8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-09-09
- Everything Is a Ralph Loop7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2026-01-17
- Teams too busy doing their job to experiment with AI are going to be replaced5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-10-09
- Software development now costs less than than the wage of a minimum wage worker4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-02-27
- There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven when Starlink arrives4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-09-20
- Why I left Gitpod4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-09-20
- Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you're screwed unless you take action4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-02-27
What Hacker News says?
ditto - https://ghuntley.com/disclosures
Comment linking /disclosures
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted How to build a coding agent as a story · 472 points
HN discussionSee also https://isdotnetopen.com and https://ghuntley.com/fracture
Comment linking /fracture
on “Getting forked by Microsoft”Submitted Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022) as a story · 405 points
HN discussionVS code is designed to fracture. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
Comment linking /fracture/
on “The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source”Submitted There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven when Starlink arrives as a story · 397 points
HN discussionJust wrote up a quickie about how Nix + LLMs make patching everything super simple via overlays. Simplest security response I've ever done in my life. http://ghuntley.com/patch
Comment linking /patch
on “eMudhra intermediate CA compromise”Submitted A new chapter – full-time working from a van in a forest as a story · 328 points
HN discussionit isn’t http://ghuntley.com/fracture forking vscode? simple. extensions not so simple. they are controlled by microsoft. without them you’ll run into continual papercuts as a vendor who has forked vscode.
Comment linking /fracture
on “Google Antigravity”Submitted Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture as a story · 264 points
HN discussionSource code analysis [and dump] of Kiro at https://ghuntley.com/amazon-kiro-source-code/ - Uses ripgrep under the hood - VSCode fork (thus suffers from the https://ghuntley.com/fracture problem) - There are 14 different ways defined to edit a file due to its multi-modal design. Tuning this is going to be a constant source of headaches for the team. - Kiro utilises a https://ghuntley.com/specs based workflow.
Comment linking /specs
on “Kiro: A new agentic IDE”Submitted Why are McDonald’s Self Service Kiosks so hackable? as a story · 250 points
HN discussionhttps://ghuntley.com/fracture/
Comment linking /fracture/
on “Zed on Linux Is Here”Submitted Unikernels were hard. key word: were as a story · 199 points
HN discussionpbcopy && pbpaste are also available for windows - https://ghuntley.com/archive/2016/01/20/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-w...
Comment linking /archive/2016/01/20/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-windows-released/
on “Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year”Submitted Yes, Claude Code can decompile itself. Here's the source code as a story · 187 points
HN discussionYup. See https://gitpod.io/blog/workshops-as-code and https://ghuntley.com/anywhere
Comment linking /anywhere
on “Vscode.dev”Submitted $ sudo rm -rf / === NPM install as a story · 171 points
HN discussionGeoff here from Gitpod. My primary development machine is an iPad after I bricked my M1 laptop. I’m currently out in the middle of no-where of Australia with my van so I’m all in. Even when I get my M1 fixed I’m likely to keep my thin client device for hipsters as my primary development machine. See https://ghuntley.com/anywhere for tips and tricks.
Comment linking /anywhere
on “Vscode.dev”Submitted Reflections on software development from anywhere on an iPad as a story · 137 points
HN discussionI use a mixture of Gitpod, GitHub Codespaces and Proxmox. https://ghuntley.com/anywhere
Comment linking /anywhere
on “Vscode.dev”Submitted No other profession trivialises their profession to the degree of software as a story · 97 points
HN discussionGeoff here from Gitpod. I have a bare metal machine that I remote into and use for supportive tasks such as (in a couple moments) exploring the TruNAS marketplace ecosystem. My primary computer these days is an iPad - see https://ghuntley.com/anywhere There are big changes happening in development ecosystem which will happen faster then people realize. Soon more than 80% of the IDE market will have built-in function…
Comment linking /anywhere
on “Vscode.dev”Submitted An "oh fuck" moment in time as a story · 88 points
HN discussionVSCode futures doesn't look good, OSS wise. "Microsoft loves open source" is the joke of the century. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
Comment linking /fracture/
on “Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge”Submitted /new convention: think of it as “dotfiles” but “for computers” as a story · 87 points
HN discussionThe beauty of Emacs though is that it puts the user in full control. There is nothing in the world stopping anyone from modifying anything in Emacs (at least on the Elisp layer), hence packages like this. VS Code on the other hand is designed to fracture [1]. MS can and has given proprietary API access to their blessed tools, forcing others to go through their much less capable extension API, hence the plethora of v…
Comment linking /fracture/
on “Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs”Submitted Latest Soundboks firmware cuts the performance of their speakers by half as a story · 81 points
HN discussionASI is just Claude in a while loop: https://ghuntley.com/ralph/
Comment linking /ralph/
on “I resigned from Anthropic today”Submitted Converting C to ASM to specs and then to a working Z/80 Speccy tape as a story · 80 points
HN discussion
