Top all-time · #6985
Phil Booth
Personal blog · philbooth.me/blog · on HN as philboprogramming
Phil Booth's personal blog at philbooth.me covers programming. Since 2017, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Personal website of Phil Booth
Most-linked posts?
- Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-04-25
- How to Debug3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-23
- The art of good code review3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-29
- How to Evaluate Dependencies2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-25
- Concurrency diagrams2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-30
- Back-off and retry using JavaScript arrays and promises2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-02
What Hacker News says?
I think one way to approach this is by deliberately choosing less capable tools (but still AI-assisted). You don't have to delegate huge tasks to agents wholesale, but it requires fighting against mainstream harnesses to do so because they exist to sell you more tokens. Model providers are not incentivised to offer less autonomous flows. I wrote about this frustration a few months ago [1], then realised that if the…
Comment linking /blog/agentic-coding-and-mental-models
on “AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust”Submitted Things my dog taught me about software development as a story · 78 points
HN discussionhttps://philbooth.me/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted The art of good code review as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://philbooth.me/blog
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted The art of good code review as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFor decades, engineers understood that large code reviews are harder than small ones. Out of both politeness and a desire to receive better code reviews, we learned to break our large changes into smaller chunks. Some engineers took things even further and replaced code reviews with pair programming. But then LLMs showed up and everyone seems to have forgotten those lessons. They can be still be applied now using co…
Comment linking /blog/agentic-coding-and-mental-models
on “Automating Myself Out of Development”Submitted Lessons learned from integrating with GPT in production as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI like to have a step zero, that comes even before you try to reproduce the issue: get your head right, essentially. If something's broken in production and the bug is hard to figure out, that often means stress. And stress is not good for helping you to solve problems. So take a few breaths, slow down, relax. Slowing down to get into the right frame of mind helps get to the _right_ fix faster, because your panicked…
Comment linking /blog/how-to-debug
on “A Systematic Approach to Debugging”Submitted Some useful, non-obvious Postgres patterns as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> How do you evaluate 3rd party dependencies? I actually blogged my answer to that exact question recently (shameless plug): https://philbooth.me/blog/how-to-evaluate-dependencies
Comment linking /blog/how-to-evaluate-dependencies
on “Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market”Submitted Concurrency Diagrams as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Concurrency diagrams as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Status Games as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The art of good code review as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Debug as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Interactive bulk editing with vim macros as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Back-off and retry using JavaScript arrays and promises as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Refactoring with Rust macros as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Very niche software, part 2 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Agentic Coding and Mental Models as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pawno: Terminal Pleasure as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Vector Search for Dummies as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Redis as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Evaluate Dependencies as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
