Top all-time · #6416
Clayton Ramsey
Personal blog · claytonwramsey.com/blog · on HN as claytonwramseyprogrammingsystems
Clayton Ramsey writes - Blog, a personal blog at claytonwramsey.com about programming and systems. Since 2024, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “I'd rather read the prompt”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN links Clayton Ramsey's essays on AI-generated output, including "I'd rather read the prompt", which argues that model output beyond the prompt carries little useful information.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Clayton Ramsey's personal website
Most-linked posts?
- I'd rather read the prompt3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-04
- Making robots plan faster with SIMD and Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-11-14
- Garbage collection in Rust got a little better2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-29
- We're not done with point clouds2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-10
What Hacker News says?
Nit pick: He's not a professor, just a grad student at the same place he got his undergrad, and he's mostly gone to university during covid. At least per his page here: https://claytonwramsey.com/about/ Its not like professors get real training either, but the guy doesn't seem to have gotten any real pedagogy. I guess that I'm driving at that this guy is awfully young and the essay was a hot take. We should judge it…
Comment linking /about/
on “I'd rather read the prompt”Submitted I'd rather read the prompt as a story · 1444 points
HN discussion> I did not feel that I knew the codebase enough to be able to actually assess the correctness of the change. > I want to do good engineering, not produce slop, but for 1 min of prompting, 5 mins of tidying, and 30 mins of review, we might save 2 days of eng time. I don't really understand where do "2 days of engineering time" come from. What exactly would prevent someone who does know the codebase do "1 min of prom…
Comment linking /blog/prompt/
on “A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests”Submitted I'm a seeing-eye dog for a computer as a story · 117 points
HN discussion"I would rather read the prompt" https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/ discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803 All of the output beyond the prompt contains, definitionally, essentially no useful information. Unless it's being used to translate from one human language to another, you're wasting your reader's time and energy in exchange for you own. If you have useful ideas, share them, and if you…
Comment linking /blog/prompt/
on “Unverified: What Practitioners Post About OCR, Agents, and Tables”Submitted Things I learned from teaching (2023) as a story · 117 points
HN discussionSubmitted No longer writing my own damn HTML as a story · 86 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making robots plan faster with SIMD and Rust as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Solving 20B Wordle problems per second as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reflections on a year of grad school as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making robots plan faster with SIMD and Rust as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making robots plan faster with SIMD and Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making robots plan faster with SIMD and Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Effect polymorphism fixes dependency inversion as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted I built a garbage collector for a language that doesn't need one as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted We're not done with point clouds as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted We're not done with point clouds as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Garbage collection in Rust got a little better as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Garbage collection in Rust got a little better as a story · 1 points
HN discussion