Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

I appreciate the reply, and you trying to be helpful, but this is not what is happening.

I mean I'm definitely still in the stage of disillusionment, but I'm not treating LLMs as senior or expecting much from them.

The example I gave played out much as you described above.

I used an iterative process, with multiple self-contained smaller steps, each with a planning and discussion stage where I got the AI to identify ways to achieve what I was looking to do and weigh up tradeoffs that I then decided on, followed by a design clarification and finalisation stage, before finally getting it to write code (very hard sometimes to get the AI not to write code until the design has been finalised), followed by adjustments to that code as necessary.

The steps involved were something like:

- build the app skeleton

- open a camera feed

- display the feed full screen

- flip the feed so it responded as a mirror would if you were looking at it

- use the ios apis to get facial landmarks

- display the landmarks as dots

- detect looking in different directions and print a log message.

- detect the user opening their mouth

- play a sound when the mouth transitions from closed to open

- etc

Each step was relatively small and self-contained, with a planning stage first and me asking the AI probing/clarifying questions.

The threading issue didn't come up at all in any of this.

Once it came, the AI tied itself in knots trying to sort it out, coming up with very complex dispatching logic that still got things incorrect.

It was a fun little project, but if I compare the output it just wasn't equivalent to what I could get if I'd just started with the Apple documentation (thought maybe it's different now, as per another commenter's reply).

It's also easily completeable in a day if you want to give it a try :-) Apple Developer reference implementation [here](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Vision/tracking-th...).

> By project manager role, I mean that I am explicitly taking the CC through the various SWE stages and making sure they have been done properly, and also that I iterate on the solution. On each one of the stages, I take the role of the respective senior professional. If I cannot do it yet, I try to learn how to do it. At the same time, I work as a product manager/owner as well, to make decisions about the product, based on my personal "taste" and requirements.

Right, this is what I do. I guess my point is that the amount of effort involved to use English to direct and correct the AI often outweighs the effort involved to just do it myself.

The gap is shrinking (I get much better results now that I did a year ago) but still there.

For complex analysis, I recommend using Stein's book (the whole series is good).

Coffee roasting - I've started to roast a coffee for my girlfriend coffee shop as a side job 2.5 years ago and now I start to feel, my learning curve is finally growing up. I want to learn how to make consistently great roasted coffee, how to manage entire process and how to keep pushing quality up.

That's kinda wild to hear about the corn because I've found corn to be one of the easiest crops to grow.

If you want to try again, these are the seeds I last used which had 100% germination and produced plenty of ears of corn.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005MI33BS

I've also had a ton of luck growing corn in 5 gallon buckets with holes drilled in the side to allow air into the soil which keeps the roots from balling up (wasting energy that should go into growing ears). Used potting mix with a handful of lime and a handful of epsom salt, and topped the buckets with mulch to retain moisture.

If you're willing to try that approach, this was very similar to my system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgJn15TmRM

What I meant by "not treating LLM as senior" is that the disillusionment phase culminates in an a-ha moment which could be described a "LLM is not a senior developer". This a-ha moment is not intellectual, but emotional. It is possible to same time think that LLM is not a senior developer, but not realize it emotionally. This emotional realization in turn has consequences.

>The threading issue didn't come up at all in any of this. > >Once it came, the AI tied itself in knots trying to sort it out, coming up with very complex dispatching logic that still got things incorrect.""

Yes. These kind of loops have happened to me as well. It sometimes requires clearing of context + some inventive step to help the LLM out of the loop. For example my ad pacing feature required that I recognized that it was trying to optimize the wrong variable. I consider this to be partly what I mean by "LLM is a junior" and that "I act as the project manager".

> I guess my point is that the amount of effort involved to use English to direct and correct the AI often outweighs the effort involved to just do it myself.

Could you really have done a complex mobile app alone in one day without knowing the stack well beforehand? I believe this of stuff used to take months from a competent team not long time ago. I certainly could not have done one year ago what I can do today, with these tools.