Hey HN, we are still in beta and resolving the rough edges. But please try it out. Leave any feedback here or email me - yusuf at sleekcms. Thanks.

At my work I interview a lot of fresh grads and interns. I have been doing that consistently for last 4 years. During the interviews I always ask the candidates to show and tell, share their screen and talk about their projects and work at school and other internships.

Since last few months, I have seen a notable difference in the quality and extent of projects these students have been able to accomplish. Every project and website they show looks polished, most of those could be a full startup MVP pre AI days.

The bar has clearly been raised way high, very fast with AI.

I’ve had the same experience with the recent batch of candidates for a Junior Software Engineer position we just filled. Their projects looked impressive on the surface and seemed very promising.

Once we got them into a technical screening, most fell apart writing code. Our problem was simple: using your preferred programming language, model a shopping cart object that has the ability to add and remove items from the cart and track the cart total.

We were shocked by how incapable most candidates were in writing simple code without their IDEs tab completion capability. We even told them to use whatever resources they normally used.

The whole experience left us a little surprised.

In my opinion, it has always been the “easy” part of development to make a thing work once. The hard thing is to make a thousand things work together over time with constantly changing requirements, budgets, teams, and org structures.

For the former, greenfield projects, LLMs are easily a 10x productivity improvement. For the latter, it gets a lot more nuanced. Still amazingly useful in my opinion, just not the hands off experience that building from scratch can be now.

I have always liked Astro. It also works great with AI tools since its combination of markdown and code. Was able to vibe code a quick blog template and deploy to cloudflare in minutes with an existing headless backend - https://sleekcms-astro-blog.pages.dev/

This is making me even less interested in trying Astro.

Websites should not be vibe coded.

The code is vibe-coded. Not the content. Which I think is more important for a blog site.

So.. just because a tool can be potentially mishandled (e.g. put in the hands of a toddler, which is basically what vibe code ends up being) because it's easy to use, you never want to take a look at said tool?

That sounds like shooting yourself in the foot out of pure spite, but you do you.

Astro is enabling vibe coders with a section of the documentation that gives advice on using AI, an Astro docs MCP server, and a copy of the documentation that is specifically formatted for LLM use.

Just use TypeScript frontend and backend. For backend, use Node+Express+TypeScript. If doing anything in ML, create a service in Python, but keep application code in TypeScript.

If you are doing full stack development, this works much better. The npm ecosystem is amazing. You can create common libs, share types, don't have to context switch and all future developers can do some full stack.

This is the boring stuff, but works and scales.

Sucks. More than the system it's the silly woman who called the cops. Instead of helping the child she did a great disservice to him and his entire family.

I had a similar hiccup when I first came to US when our apt neighbor called cops because my 1 year old was screaming. Crazy, I know.

This country thrives on fear - health, insurance, legal, weapons - the biggest money making industries in US all feed on fear economy.

That seems too much even for this. What did the cops said? Children are screaming all the time with tantrums

There is a great poem call "If" by Rudyard Kipling. I feel it defines pretty well the traits of a happy person.

Ive always hated "If" as it captures that British Imperialist viewpoint at that point in history

Its background is that it was written as a tribute to Jameson after the failed Jameson raid - which was an attempted South African coup

I didn't know the background but I'd agree though not necessarily as strongly as hating it.

To me, the poem paints an unreachable ideal of being that just doesn't resonate with me at all. It may just be me but in my mind it feels naive.

There is a beautiful (to me) recitation of "If" performed by Dennis Hopper that I have saved along with several other similar recordings, all of which have helped me immensely over the years. Thank you for reminding me that it's about that time of year to watch/listen to it again!

YouTube link of the recitation for anyone interested: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4EZhc_YZ2fs

Best to do it as exempt or retainer. Hard to build or do anything creative while counting hours.

DM me yusuf.nb @ gmail, I might be able to help.

Google did encroach. Google office/docs is much better than Microsoft. Chrome OS is a better OS for most non-tech jobs. The browser is the operating system for most people, and Chrome is leading in that. They won on mobile as well with Android. Google Workspace, in my opinion, is much better than Microsoft.

It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.

Google Docs is not anywhere close to as powerful or as performant as Microsoft Office. I don’t really see how someone familiar with both forward suites could think that is the case.

Pretty much the only notable advantage MSO for my use is excel, which is better for "advanced" spreadsheet workloads. For collaborative work and 99% of documents and spreadsheets, Google docs is the superior option.

I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.

Email - it brought the world closer in a way it was never before.

That's capitalism. The optimization function works towards maximizing profit over value.

For a $2 sandwich, I would need to sell 100 at $3 to make a $100 profit and just 10 at $12 to make the same.

That only works if there isn't any competition.