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I&#x27;ve been trying to get agentic coding to work, but the dissonance between what I&#x27;m seeing online and what I&#x27;m able to achieve is doing my head in.Is there real evidence, beyond hype, that agentic coding produces net-positive results? If any of you have actually got it to work, could you share (in detail) how you did it?By &quot;getting it to work&quot; I mean:
 * creating more value than technical debt, and
 * producing code that’s structurally sound enough for someone responsible for the architecture to sign off on.Lately I’ve seen a push toward minimal or nonexistent code review, with the claim that we should move from “validating architecture” to “validating behavior.” In practice, this seems to mean: don’t look at the code; if tests and CI pass, ship it. I can’t see how this holds up long-term. My expectation is that you end up with &quot;spaghetti&quot; code that works on the happy path but accumulates subtle, hard-to-debug failures over time.When I tried using Codex on my existing codebases, with or without guardrails, half of my time went into fixing the subtle mistakes it made or the duplication it introduced.Last weekend I tried building an iOS app for pet feeding reminders from scratch. I instructed Codex to research and propose an architectural blueprint for SwiftUI first. Then, I worked with it to write a spec describing what should be implemented and how.The first implementation pass was surprisingly good, although it had a number of bugs. Things went downhill fast, however. I spent the rest of my weekend getting Codex to make things work, fix bugs without introducing new ones, and research best practices instead of making stuff up. Although I made it record new guidelines and guardrails as I found them, things didn&#x27;t improve. In the end I just gave up.I personally can&#x27;t accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality.

Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

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Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

Hi HN,I built this because I often work in coworking spaces or do screen sharing, and I&#x27;ve always had this fear of accidentally flashing my .env file with production secrets to the whole room (or recording).It’s a simple VS Code extension that opens .env files in a custom grid editor. It automatically masks any value longer than 6 characters so I can safely open the file to check keys without exposing the actual secrets.It runs 100% locally with zero dependencies (I know how sensitive these files are). It just reads the file, renders the grid, and saves it back as standard text.It&#x27;s open source (MIT) and I&#x27;d love any feedback on the masking logic or other features that would make it safer to use.Marketplace: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketplace.visualstudio.com&#x2F;items?itemName=xinbenlv.dotenv-mask-editor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketplace.visualstudio.com&#x2F;items?itemName=xinbenlv...</a> Github <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;xinbenlv&#x2F;dotenv-mask-editor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;xinbenlv&#x2F;dotenv-mask-editor</a>

Show HN: Dotenv Mask Editor: No more embarrassing screen leaks of your .env

Hey folks, I’m Hassan, one of the co-founders of Infracost (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infracost.io">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infracost.io</a>). Infracost helps engineers see and reduce the cloud cost of each infrastructure change before they merge their code.
The way Infracost works is we gather pricing data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. What we call a ‘Pricing Service’, which now holds around 9 million live price points (!!). Then we map these prices to infrastructure code. Once the mapping is done, it enables us to show the cost impact of a code change before it is merged, directly in GitHub, GitLab etc. Kind of like a checkout-screen for cloud infrastructure.We’ve been building since 2020 (we were part of YC W21 batch), and iterating on the product, building out a team etc. However, back in 2020 one of our users asked if we can also show the carbon impact alongside costs.It has been itching my brain since then. The biggest challenge has always been the carbon data. The mapping of carbon data to infrastructure is time consuming, but it is possible since we’ve done it with cloud costs. But we need the raw carbon data first. The discussions that have happened in the last few years finally led me to a company called Greenpixie in the UK. A few of our existing customers were using them already, so I immediately connected with the founder, John.Greenpixie said they have the data (AHA!!) And their data is verified (ISO-14064 &amp; aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol). As soon as I talked to a few of their customers, I asked my team to see if we can actually finally do this, and build it.My thinking is this: some engineers will care, and some will not (or maybe some will love it and some will hate it!). For those who care, cost and carbon are actually linked; meaning if you reduce the carbon, you usually reduce the cost of the cloud too. It can act as another motivation factor.And now, it is here, and I’d love your feedback. Try it out by going to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.infracost.io&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.infracost.io&#x2F;</a>, create an account, set up with the GitHub app or GitLab app, and send a pull request with Terraform changes (you can use our example terraform file). It will then show you the cost impact alongside the carbon impact, and how you can optimize it.I’d especially love to hear your feedback on if you think carbon is a big driver for engineers within your teams, or if carbon is a big driver for your company (i.e. is there anything top-down about carbon).AMA - I’ll be monitoring the thread :)Thanks

Show HN: See the carbon impact of your cloud as you code

SETI@home is in hiberation

Seeing a lot of people running coding agents (Claude Code, etc.) in custom sandboxes Docker&#x2F;VMs, firejail&#x2F;bubblewrap, scripts that gate file or network access.Curious to know what&#x27;s missing that makes people DIY this? And what would a &quot;good enough&quot; standard look like?

Ask HN: Why are so many rolling out their own AI/LLM agent sandboxing solution?

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I built a simple tool to compare hard drive and SSD prices by price-per-terabyte.I kept having to calculate $&#x2F;TB manually when shopping for NAS drives, so I made this to save myself the trouble.It pulls prices from Amazon (US, CA, AU, and EU stores), calculates $&#x2F;TB, and lets you filter by drive type, interface, form factor, and capacity.Nothing fancy — just a sortable table updated daily.Any feedback is more than welcome, I hope someone will find it useful!

TerabyteDeals – Compare storage prices by $/TB

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I been building a view into companies based on their job postings. I am hoping it is useful to get a quick snapshot on the company say for interview prep etc. Please be advised that it is still a WIP in terms of data quality. Example urls: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobswithgpt.com&#x2F;company-profiles&#x2F;openai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobswithgpt.com&#x2F;company-profiles&#x2F;openai&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobswithgpt.com&#x2F;company-profiles&#x2F;advanced-micro-devices-inc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobswithgpt.com&#x2F;company-profiles&#x2F;advanced-micro-devi...</a>

Show HN: Company hiring trends and insights from job postings

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We figured out how to turn protein function on and off, with magnetic fields from small handheld magnets.More context here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;magnetically-sensitive-proteins-could-lead-new-imaging-tools-and-remote-controlled" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;magnetically-sensiti...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-026-00204-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-026-00204-9</a>

Magnetic remote control of biology

Hi HN! I built Ghibli Search, a semantic search engine for Studio Ghibli movie scenes (e.g. Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl&#x27;s Moving Castle, etc.).Describe a dreamscape like &quot;flying through clouds at sunset&quot; or upload an image, and it finds visually similar scenes from the films.Live demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghibli-search.anini.workers.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghibli-search.anini.workers.dev&#x2F;</a>Full Cloudflare stack: Workers, AI Search, R2, Workers AIOpen source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aninibread&#x2F;ghibli-search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aninibread&#x2F;ghibli-search</a>Would love feedback on the search quality and any ideas for improvements!

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