Top all-time · #7721
Eric Bower
Personal blog · bower.shprogrammingwriting
Eric Bower writes prose.sh, a personal blog at bower.sh about programming and writing. Since 2022, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 80 times, most often “Replacing tmux in my dev workflow”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Eric Bower's post arguing you might not need tmux, with terminal emulators handling window management. Commenters cite it as a reason to skip tmux or to reconsider its role.
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.
A journal by Eric Bower
Most-linked posts?
- Replacing tmux in my dev workflow5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-07-31
- Front-end complexity is all in your head2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-10-30
- Who Will Understand Consciousness?2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-08-30
- Why Structured Concurrency?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-28
- POSIX shell is all you need: and a better line editor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-29
What Hacker News says?
The reason why it’s so hard to define intelligence or consciousness is because we are hopelessly biased with a datapoint of 1. We also apply this unjustified amount of mysticism around it. https://bower.sh/who-will-understand-consciousness
Comment linking /who-will-understand-consciousness
on “Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents”Submitted Replacing tmux in my dev workflow as a story · 312 points
HN discussionLove it, I called it entity factories https://bower.sh/entity-factories
Comment linking /entity-factories
on “How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years”Submitted You might not need tmux as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThis comment is steeped in bias. The front end is not complex for its own sake, it’s complex because APIs are needlessly rigid: https://bower.sh/front-end-complexity
Comment linking /front-end-complexity
on “The Frontend Treadmill”Submitted Why Structured Concurrency? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionEvery tool marketed as minimal is usually just an excuse to ship something with limited features. Unless there is a strict design ethos at its core [0], it’ll eventually grow its features to no longer be minimal. Further, pi is now owned by a company which as we all know, tend to explode code with features while chasing product market fit. [0]: https://bower.sh/smol-contract
Comment linking /smol-contract
on “You said no MCP”Submitted Front-end complexity is all in your head as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHmm, JS is "different" because it has completely unique challenges that no other programming language has to deal with: https://bower.sh/my-love-letter-to-front-end-web-development
Comment linking /my-love-letter-to-front-end-web-development
on “We fell out of love with Next.js and back in love with Ruby on Rails”Submitted Front-end complexity is all in your head as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI had the same thought recently: https://bower.sh/on-writing
Comment linking /on-writing
on “Svelte 5 Released”Submitted Death by a thousand existential checks (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI was inspired by this email and wrote a blog post about creativity: https://bower.sh/what-is-creativity
Comment linking /what-is-creativity
on “Steve Jobs emails himself (2010)”Submitted The Dogma of Restful APIs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI have some takes on this topic. The reason why I think we find consciousness so mysterious is because we are so intimately biased that we are blinded by what’s plainly understandable. Consciousness is an emergent property of nervous systems. https://bower.sh/what-is-consciousness
Comment linking /what-is-consciousness
on “Our conscious experience of the world is a memory, says new theory”Submitted Conventional Wisdom as an Anti-Pattern as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> The choice isn’t between JavaScript frameworks, it’s whether SPA-oriented tools should be entertained at all. For most sites, the answer is a clearly “no”. “Most sites” sit in the world of marketing, ecommerce, blogs. True, they don’t need an SPA. Then there are businesses that “require” highly dynamic websites with tons of data funneling through them. I use require here in the sense of business requirements set b…
Comment linking /react-is-bad-because-its-great
on “If not React, then what?”Submitted We Are All Savages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAh! A real criticism of FE development, I agree with your problem statement. When you jump into the world of single-page applications, things get complex pretty quickly, because the use case for needing an SPA pushes the web app into a full desktop application. Ultimately, for a highly interactive and dynamic "desktop-class" user experience, there is added complexity. I think that's why so much movement within the F…
Comment linking /dogma-of-restful-api
on “FastUI: Build Better UIs Faster”Submitted POSIX shell is all you need: and a better line editor as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt seems the big selling point is building websites without JS. To each their own but typescript is one of the best programming languages I’ve used. I do enjoy python a lot but whenever I use it I feel like I’m going a decade into the past, especially with their tooling (lint, types, formatters, package manager, venv, etc). I wrote a post recently about how I feel like this loathing of all things FE/JS is overblown:…
Comment linking /front-end-complexity
on “FastUI: Build Better UIs Faster”Submitted Show HN: Zmx – run local code agents on remote machines as a story · 1 points
HN discussionResource management, especially when lexical scoping is a feature, is why some of us have been working on bringing structured concurrency to JS: https://bower.sh/why-structured-concurrency Library that leverages structured concurrency: https://frontside.com/effection
Comment linking /why-structured-concurrency
on “JavaScript's New Superpower: Explicit Resource Management”Submitted Who Will Understand Consciousness? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> LLMs are a more complex and expensive trick The more I think about this, the more I think the same is true for our own intelligence. Consciousness is a trick and AI development is lifting the veil of our vanity. I'm not claiming that LLMs are conscious or intelligent or whatever. I'm suggesting that next token prediction has scaled so well and cover so many use cases that the next couple breakthroughs will show us…
Comment linking /who-will-understand-consciousness
on “A definition of AGI”Submitted Bower's Law as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think the social networking aspect of GitHub is one of its worst features. It carries with it all the negatives while also being required to use at work. https://bower.sh/github-as-social-network
Comment linking /github-as-social-network
on “Trending tabs are being deprecated due to low usage”Submitted In Love with a Ghost as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt’s not a JS problem, it’s a fundamental constraint of working within the browser runtime: https://bower.sh/my-love-letter-to-front-end-web-development
Comment linking /my-love-letter-to-front-end-web-development
on “Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ”Submitted We don't need human linters as a story · 1 points
HN discussion