Top all-time · #11600
Ken Kantzer
Personal blog · kenkantzer.comprogrammingstartupscareer
Ken Kantzer's personal blog at kenkantzer.com covers programming, startups and career. Since 2022, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “GPT Is the Heroku of AI”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ken Kantzer's writing on startup engineering, including a learnings post on team sizes and building products. One commenter calls that post very good.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thoughts and essays on security, technology, and management.
Most-linked posts?
- GPT Is the Heroku of AI4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-04-13
- Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-05-25
What Hacker News says?
(op here) I actually completely agree - you're right: "simple outperformed smart" doesn't point to a useful, nuanced solution. I wrote more in-depth here about slightly-more-specifically where there are problems, curious your thoughts, feel free to DM me or comment on the blog (this thread is kinda dead)! https://kenkantzer.com/5-software-engineering-foot-guns/ .
Comment linking /5-software-engineering-foot-guns/
on “Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits”Submitted Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits as a story · 798 points
HN discussionOP here - I had never thought of the analogy to DevOps before, that made something click for me, and I wrote a post just now riffing off this notion: https://kenkantzer.com/gpt-is-the-heroku-of-ai Basically, I think we’re using GPT as the PaaS/heroku/render equivalent of AI ops. Thank you for the insight!!
Comment linking /gpt-is-the-heroku-of-ai
on “Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens”Submitted Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens as a story · 512 points
HN discussionHey, OP here! The answer is a bit boring: the expenditure definitely has helped customers - in that, they're using AI generated responses in all their work flows all the time in the app, and barely notice it. See what I did there? :) I'm mostly serious though - one weird thing about our app is that you might not even know we're using AI, unless we literally tell you in the app. And I think that's where we're at with…
Comment linking /gpt-is-the-heroku-of-ai/
on “Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens”Submitted You Don’t Need Hundreds of Engineers to Build a Great Product as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThe cited article from Ken Kantzer is also very good: https://kenkantzer.com/learnings-from-5-years-of-tech-startu... "You don’t need hundreds of engineers to build a great product. I wrote a longer piece about this, but essentially, despite the general stage of startup we audited being pretty similar, the engineering team sizes varied a lot. Surprisingly, sometimes the most impressive products with the broadest sco…
Comment linking /learnings-from-5-years-of-tech-startup-code-audits/
on “Death by a Thousand Microservices”Submitted Software Engineering Foot-Guns as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI resisted learning a lot of it knowing that there will be a snap-back to simpler designs long-term, and it's happening now. And when I tried, it went nowhere. After months of work on my side project with Electron, Typescript, and Vue, I was in the same place because every time I opened IntelliJ, it seemed all of my effort went into just having it build again . Now I chose ArrowJS for my project, and it's been a del…
Comment linking /learnings-from-5-years-of-tech-startup-code-audits/
on “Thoughts on Svelte(Kit), one year and 3B requests later”Submitted Technology ROI discussions are broken as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT Is the Heroku of AI as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT Is the Heroku of AI as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Backlog Peter Principle as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Let's be Honest about AI Coding as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Let's be Honest about AI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Parable of the Wise Hiring Manager as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Gauge Engineering Experience as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Let's be honest about AI Coding as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT Is the Heroku of AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Learnings from 5 years of startup code audits as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to find great senior engineers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Googler’s Dilemma: Why Experience Will Always Have a Premium as a story · 1 points
HN discussion