Top all-time · #2972
Hazel Weakly
Personal blog · hazelweakly.me/blogprogrammingsystemscareer
Hazel Weakly's personal blog at hazelweakly.me covers programming, systems and career. Since 2022, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Hazel Weakly's posts on AI tools and engineering practice, including delegation, skill growth and SRE-style debugging. Her posts are cited as supporting references in AI debates.
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.
I have thoughts, lots of thoughts. They never stop thinking. Never stop thunking.
Most-linked posts?
- Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-11-29
- Building better AI tools4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-05-17
- So You Want to Hire for Developer Tooling4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-07-16
- Home Baked Abstractions, Store Bought Implementations3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-04
- To Be a Leader of Systems2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-18
- Observability 3.02 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-23
- Scaling Innovation: Building Ecosystems2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-23
- Why Is Browser Observability Hard – Hazel Weakly2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-06
What Hacker News says?
Exactly. See also https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards... for a detailed look at this aspect of AI coding.
Comment linking /blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards/
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted Building better AI tools as a story · 346 points
HN discussionThere is a form of delegation that develops the people involved, so that people can continue to contribute and grow. Each individual can contribute what is unique to them, and grow more capable as they do so. Both people, and the community of those people remain alive, lively, and continue to grow. Some people call this paradigm “regenerative”; only living systems regenerate. There is another form of delegation wher…
Comment linking /blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards/
on “MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline”Submitted Pick Your Distributed Poison as a story · 104 points
HN discussionI disagree. AI works as a better tool for teaching humans than to do the work themselves. While someone experienced in fighting fires can take intuitive leaps, the basic idea is still to synthesize a hypothesis from signals, validating the hypothesis, and coming up with mitigations and longer term fixes. This is a learned skill, and a team of people/AI will work better than someone solo. https://hazelweakly.me/blog/…
Comment linking /blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards/
on “OTelBench: AI struggles with simple SRE tasks (Opus 4.5 scores only 29%)”Submitted Cache Me Not, Cache Me, Cache Me Not as a story · 57 points
HN discussionSubmitted Redefining Observability as a story · 39 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Is Browser Observability Hard – Hazel Weakly as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stop Building AI Tools Backwards as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scale Down to Scale Up as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Observability 3.0 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Home Baked Abstractions, Store Bought Implementations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Home Baked Abstractions, Store Bought Implementations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted So You Want to Hire for Developer Tooling as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted To Be a Leader of Systems as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Is Browser Observability Hard as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Innovation: Building Ecosystems as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted You Have One Voice as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Home Baked Abstractions, Store Bought Implementations as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted So You Want to Hire for Developer Tooling as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted To Be a Leader of Systems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Innovation: Building Ecosystems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Future of Observability: Observability 3.0 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Engineering Language as a Vehicle of Innovation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Observations of Leadership (Part One) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
