Top all-time · #7645
A Place Where Even Mammoths Fly
Personal blog · dmitriid.com/blog · on HN as troupoprogrammingwebai
A Place Where Even Mammoths Fly is a personal blog at dmitriid.com about programming, web and ai. Since 2016, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 50 times, most often “The broken promise of Web Components”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's posts on web components, tagged template literals, AMP page weight and hypermedia as references in front-end debates, often while disagreeing with them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The broken promise of Web Components4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-03-15
- Prompting LLMs is not engineering2 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2025-02-11
- Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2025-07-04
- Tagged Template Literals Are the Worst Addition to JavaScript2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-03-05
- /hypermedia-is-a-property-of-the-client2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-10-05
What Hacker News says?
The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality: - https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... - https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ But more importantly, it makes you stupid: - https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human... - https://archive.is/M3lCG And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, mu…
Comment linking /everything-around-llms-is-still-magical-and-wishful-thinking
on “LLM Inevitabilism”Submitted Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking as a story · 298 points
HN discussionI myself post positive comments about AI from time to time. I never pretend that AI is the be all end all of programming, don't claim that it can do all the magical things, or that it's capable of running hours on end just creating software with not proof like most positive posts do. See the difference? I'm all for positive posts. I'm against childish belief in magic: https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-s…
Comment linking /everything-around-llms-is-still-magical-and-wishful-thinking
on “NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy”Submitted The broken promise of Web Components as a story · 149 points
HN discussion> How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. We don't. Because there's no hard data: https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical... And when hard data of any kind does start appearing, it may actually point in a different direction: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... > We need to shift the conversation to techniques,…
Comment linking /everything-around-llms-is-still-magical-and-wishful-thinking
on “Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context”Submitted Prompting LLMs is not engineering as a story · 104 points
HN discussion> or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples. There's no such thing as a "right prompt". It's all snake oil. https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
Comment linking /prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
on “Void: Open-source Cursor alternative”Submitted The broken promise of Web Components (2017) as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> These LLM discussions really need everyone to mention what LLM they're actually using. They need to mention significantly more than that: https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical... --- start quote --- Do we know which projects people work on? No Do we know which codebases (greenfield, mature, proprietary etc.) people work on? No Do we know the level of expertise the people have? No. Is the exp…
Comment linking /everything-around-llms-is-still-magical-and-wishful-thinking
on “Why LLMs can't really build software”Submitted Hypermedia Is a Property of the Client as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Wrap all SQL responses with prompting that discourages the LLM from following instructions/commands injected within user data I think this article of mine will be evergreen and relevant: https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering > Write E2E tests to confirm that even less capable LLMs don't fall for the attack [2] > We noticed that this significantly lowered the chances of LLMs falling for attacks - e…
Comment linking /prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
on “Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database”Submitted Prompting LLMs is not engineering as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> LLMs follow instructions. They don't > Garbage in = garbage out generally. Generally, this statement is false > When attention is managed and a problem is well defined and necessary materials are available to it, they can perform rather well. Keyword: can . They can also not perform really well despite all the management and materials. They can also work really well with loosey-goosey approach. The reason is that…
Comment linking /prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
on “Human coders are still better than LLMs”Submitted Things you may have missed during Apple's event as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> I've written 100s of thousands of lines of difficult code. How do you know it's difficult if you say you don't understand it? > Anyway all of this reads like someone who is not actually using LLMs to build software or hasn't tried them in a while. I run all the "latest and greatest" models the moment they become available to me. The amount of insanely bad code they produce remains largely the same, and largely in…
Comment linking /adding-to-i-dont-read-ai-code-discourse
on “Coding is not solved”Submitted The curious case of Alan Dye as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis blog post of mine will be evergreen: https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical...
Comment linking /everything-around-llms-is-still-magical-and-wishful-thinking
on “Getting AI to work in complex codebases”Submitted JavaScript Tools: A Story in Disgrace as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor those who don't know, there's a whole system alongside the eastern post-Soviet border: you arrive on a train, all the carriages are lifted and fitted with proper wheels. In the poorer countries like my home country these look like this: https://dmitriid.com/media/1/3/7/1/f50f-720b-4f59-873a-75c51... (article: https://dmitriid.com/romania-2023-chisinau-bucharest )
Comment linking /romania-2023-chisinau-bucharest
on “Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge”Submitted I do read AI code as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> So what? You always pop up to complain about this, like it should be some obvious fatal flaw, but you never explain why it bothers you personally so much. I pop up to complain about this because I refuse to give in to mass delusion about what tagged template literals are. Others have said it much better than I have [1]: "...we’ve learned not to write code in strings. You’d think this would be a fundamental law of…
Comment linking /blog/2019/03/tagged-template-literals/
on “Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?”Submitted Daring Fireball, John Gruber, and Threads as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou don't need monospace for formatting. And there are a few options for system fonts: https://iainbean.com/posts/2021/system-fonts-dont-have-to-be... Boom, you got yourself a text-mostly website with no monospace: https://dmitriid.com/hypermedia-is-a-property-of-the-client (with an option for images of course https://dmitriid.com/romania-2023 )
Comment linking /romania-2023
on “The beauty of a text only webpage”Submitted Tagged Template Literals Are the Worst Addition to JavaScript as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBoth Datastar and HTMX try to lay claim to being "the one true hypermedia" just because they both are vaguely HTML-like. And they gladly misappropriate Ted Nelson, too: https://dmitriid.com/hypermedia-is-a-property-of-the-client
Comment linking /hypermedia-is-a-property-of-the-client
on “I switched from Htmx to Datastar”Ah, I see your point now (and I'm the author :) ) I agree with you after this explanation. I think (especially in the current offerings) non-determinism and incorrectness are so tightly intertwined that it's hard to say where one starts and the other one ends. Which makes the problem worse/more intricate. And yeah, prompting is useless: https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
Comment linking /prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
on “Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking”Here's another way for you to understand the problem. Here's my page: https://dmitriid.com/blog/2016/10/javascript-tools/ It's prerendered (via a static site generator). In total, it loads 692 KB (I din't do anything to optimize it, the images are quite large etc.). It loads from a small server, and images are loaded from Twitter, meme.com etc. Here's an AMP page: https://www.google.se/amp/s/www.usmagazine.com/celeb…
Comment linking /blog/2016/10/javascript-tools/
on “AMP: the missing controversy”preview.js 752 KB vendor.js 614 KB https://dmitriid.com/i/gm2tmobrgeydcnbt.png
Comment linking /i/gm2tmobrgeydcnbt.png
on “Betting on the Web – Why I Build PWAs”> knowing how the models behave, simply providing more/better context and instructions can fill this gap No. --- start quote --- prompt engineering is nothing but an attempt to reverse-engineer a non-deterministic black box for which any of the parameters below are unknown: - training set - weights - constraints on the model - layers between you and the model that transform both your input and the model's output tha…
Comment linking /prompting-llms-is-not-engineering
on “What to build instead of AI agents”> try hover.com > it is a responsive website, they do not have native apps, you can still use it on a phone I see a largely static site with very little functionality. During search the site jumps when the progress bar disappears, so you can easily misclick on items in the list (I did at least once). During checkout it takes a second or so to add additional items to the order (could be long network connectivity, but…
Comment linking /media/6/b/1/f/912c-e91b-4530-af54-092479b35220.png
on “It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU”
