Top all-time · #8472
Cat Hicks
Personal blog · fightforthehuman.comcareerculture
Cat Hicks's personal blog at fightforthehuman.com covers career and culture. Since 2025, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Are developers slowed down by AI?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Rehumanizing tech with a psychologist for the humans of tech
Most-linked posts?
- Are developers slowed down by AI?3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-07-14
- More than a metaphor: here are testable diagnostics for comprehension debt2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-28
- Can we make Security Empirical, and why might we want to?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-20
What Hacker News says?
Here's an in depth analysis and critique of that study by someone whose job is literally to study programmers psychologically and has experience in sociology studies: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down- ... Basically, the study has a fuckton of methodological problems that seriously undercut the quality of its findings, and even assuming its findings are correct, if you look closer at the da…
Comment linking /are-developers-slowed-down-
on “Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context”Submitted I Cannot Be Technical as a story · 72 points
HN discussionHere's an in depth analysis and critique of that study by someone whose job is literally to study programmers psychologically and has experience in sociology studies: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down- ... Basically, the study has a fuckton of methodological problems that seriously undercut the quality of its findings, and even assuming its findings are correct, if you look closer at the da…
Comment linking /are-developers-slowed-down-
on “Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context”Submitted More than a metaphor: here are testable diagnostics for comprehension debt as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe design of that study is pretty bad, and as a result it doesn't end up actually showing what it claims to show / what people claim it does. https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...
Comment linking /are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/
on “ChatGPT Pulse”Submitted We need more than a metaphor as a story · 2 points
HN discussiondissected https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...
Comment linking /are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/
on “AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why”Submitted Can we make Security Empirical, and why might we want to? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI suggest reading the author's About page for some additional context: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “I Cannot Be Technical”Submitted Are developers slowed down by AI? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt didn't really show that if you break down the data, and its methodology was pretty bad https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...
Comment linking /are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/
on “I Don't Want to Code with LLM's”Submitted Software research must become more reusable as a story · 1 points
HN discussionRe productivity: the METR study is seriously flawed overall, and: 1. if you disaggregate the highly aggregated data, it shows that the slowdown was highly dependent on task type, and tasks that required using documentation or novel tasks were possibly sped up, whereas ones the developers were very experienced with were slowed down, which actually matched the developers' own reports 2. developers were asked to estima…
Comment linking /are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/
on “Write-Only Code”Submitted How Not to Measure the ROI from AI in Your Software Organization as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Science at the Edge of the World as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Can we make Security Empirical, and why might we want to? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
