Top all-time · #188
Sean Goedecke
Personal blog · seangoedecke.comprogrammingaicareer
Sean Goedecke's personal blog at seangoedecke.com covers programming, ai and career. Since 2020, 230 different Hacker News readers have linked it 518 times, most often “Seeing like a software company”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sean Goedecke's blog for its essays on software engineering careers, big-tech shipping, and AI and LLM engineering, such as inference economics and expertise.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called 'super interesting', 'an absolute classic', 'a good article' and 'well worth the read'; one commenter says its How to ship post is better.
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.
Sean Goedecke's personal blog
Most-linked posts?
- Seeing like a software company8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-09-03
- How to Keep Thinking8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2026-08-07
- Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-07-02
- The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-05-18
- Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-04-24
- How I ship projects at big tech companies5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-11-11
- Dangerous advice for software engineers5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-04-05
- Advice to a Beginning Software Engineer5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-09-26
- The whole point of OpenAI's Responses API is to help them hide reasoning traces5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-09-09
- They do think AI might kill everyone5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-09-10
What Hacker News says?
Text watermarking has no effect on output quality, it just works by changing the explicit source of randomness that is in practice always present in LLM output sampling. See for example https://www.seangoedecke.com/ai-text-watermarking-is-not-a-b... .
Comment linking /ai-text-watermarking-is-not-a-big-deal/
on “Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1”Submitted How I ship projects at big tech companies as a story · 1425 points
HN discussionAnd the reason they're all in on streaming to begin with is because they're sending massive amounts of data back and forth all the time. Like Sean Goedecke said in his API design writeup [0], a technically poor product can make it nearly impossible to build an elegant API. I believe we're seeing the same thing with Next.js, all of these wonky interfaces derive from the underlying architectural issues. [0] https://ww…
Comment linking /good-api-design/
on “Next.js is infuriating”Submitted Do the simplest thing that could possibly work as a story · 1111 points
HN discussionhttps://www.seangoedecke.com/ai-inference-is-obviously-profi... https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/anthropic-inference-margins-7... its even higher depending on the model, how optimized it is, and the chips! I wouldnt die on this hill
Comment linking /ai-inference-is-obviously-profitable/
on “Mistral raises €3B”Submitted Good system design as a story · 957 points
HN discussionA lot of people in this comments section seem to be against this, i genuinely don't get it? Why? Do you think the current state of affairs is GOOD? That if we let companies create a mind that is, AS OF TODAY, able to solve problems no human in history has solved, with no regulation, things will end up good for us? We need some sort of regulations, some sort of method to help ensure the thing we are creating ends up…
Comment linking /they-really-do-think-ai-might-kill-everyone/
on “Everyone should slow down AI development except for me”Submitted Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases as a story · 811 points
HN discussionI don't disagree with your point, but I did read a post by Sean Goedecke[1] (whose opinions on the world of LLM-stuff I've generally come to respect) that I found relevant. It's not that the second-order effects don't matter to them, it's more that both the cat's probably out of the bag on those negative externalities regardless of the progress of frontier models, and that they are truly, sincerely, in-their-bones w…
Comment linking /they-really-do-think-ai-might-kill-everyone/
on “Everyone should slow down AI development except for me”Submitted What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes? as a story · 571 points
HN discussionAnother post from the same author puts this in an interesting context: https://www.seangoedecke.com/glue-work-considered-harmful/ (follow up: https://www.seangoedecke.com/cynicism/ ) Keeping the code base tidy is glue work, so you should only do enough of it to ship features. So maybe these are not "mistakes" but rather tactical choices made by politically smart engineers focused on shipping features.
Comment linking /cynicism/
on “Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases”Submitted Everything I know about good API design as a story · 429 points
HN discussion- nl · 2026-08-27
There's a difference between the Deepseek.com provider lunch pricing and the pricing every other provider is doing now. Right now DS4-Pro-0813 is available from multiple providers for $1.32/million input tokens[1]. It's pretty easy to work backwards from B200 and electricity prices and see this is profitable even without the heavy serving optimization these providers are doing[1.5]. The OpenCode CEO said: "inference…
Comment linking /ai-inference-is-obviously-profitable/
on “Qwen3.8-Flash-Next” Submitted How good engineers write bad code at big companies as a story · 407 points
HN discussionI'm not convinced spymark is better than just "invisible watermarks", spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example. Tech like SynthID I see a net positive especially since it doesn't degrade text quality. I dream about a browser extension running at all times that makes text more translucent based on the confide…
Comment linking /deckard/
on “Spymarks, not Watermarks”Submitted OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5 as a story · 403 points
HN discussionI went down that “water use” rabbit hole a month ago and basically… it’s just a bunch of circular reporting that was based on some paper published in 2023[1]. For ChatGPT 3.5 they claimed “500ml for 10-50 responses”. In 2024, Washington Post published an article that took their claim and said “519 milliliters per email”[2] but didn’t source that from the original paper… that “shocking headline” took off and got wide…
Comment linking /water-impact-of-ai
on “AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering”Submitted Seeing like a software company as a story · 388 points
HN discussionI think this article can be interesting: https://www.seangoedecke.com/inference-batching-and-deepseek... Here is an example of what happens > The only way to do fast inference here is to pipeline those layers by having one GPU handle the first ten layers, another handle the next ten, and so on. Otherwise you just won’t be able to fit all the weights in a single GPU’s memory, so you’ll spend a ton of time swapping we…
Comment linking /inference-batching-and-deepseek/
on “Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?”Submitted How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer as a story · 353 points
HN discussionThere was actually a good article about this the other day which makes sense to me, it comes down to function vs form kinda: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/
Comment linking /pure-and-impure-engineering/
on “It’s been a very hard year”Submitted What is “good taste” in software engineering? as a story · 342 points
HN discussionSean Goedecke has some good insights into where this "build faster to stop other models killing everyone" attitude comes from: https://www.seangoedecke.com/they-really-do-think-ai-might-k... It's well worth the read.
Comment linking /they-really-do-think-ai-might-kill-everyone/
on “AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity”Submitted Knowing where your engineer salary comes from as a story · 335 points
HN discussionSee also: Do the simplest thing that could possibly work https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-simplest-thing-that-could-p...
Comment linking /the-simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work/
on “I only use Google Sheets”Submitted Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally as a story · 328 points
HN discussionI think Blow and Muratori are pure engineers (as defined here: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/ ). Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there. Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.
Comment linking /pure-and-impure-engineering/
on “Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles”Submitted Getting things “done” in large tech companies as a story · 315 points
HN discussionThis is a great explainer from an LLM perspective, and it would be interesting to see a computational scheduling explanation in depth. I presume that hyperscale LLM companies extensively examine the computation trace to identify bottlenecks and idle bubbles, and develop load balancers, pipeline architectures and schedulers in order to optimise their workload. The batching requirement for efficiency makes high securi…
Comment linking /book/
on “Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally”Submitted How I use LLMs as a staff engineer as a story · 248 points
HN discussion
