Ken Miller

Head of developer outreach @ProductHunt

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

If you're working on a developer tool (including AI infra) and looking to launch on PH or elsewhere within the next year and want some frank feedback, hit me up and I'll kick the tires. DM me and I'll send you a link.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

The inadequacy of the human control systems surrounding code and AI features is the closest thing we have to the "dark fiber" problem in the dotcom boom (that and electric power). It's all well and good that this one part of the puzzle is now way faster, but if the human processes can't keep up we can't realize the gains yet.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

I am so done with Home Depot.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

I think that’s the exact distinction the phrase is meant to emphasize, because people can and do claim to have “experience” second- or third-hand all the time, and people want to make it clear that’s not what they mean. But it’s become a bit of a pat phrase and should probably be retired.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

Assuming the woman on the bottom right is a white American, there is a high likelihood that she enjoys the fruits of wealth generated, if not directly from slavery, during the long period of time when wealth was up for grabs, but slaves or former slaves did not have anywhere close to the same access to it. It doesn’t make her guilty, but it does mean she can reasonably be asked to cooperate in repairing the lasting damage.

The woman in the top right very likely did not benefit in the slightest from 9/11, and in fact probably suffered.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

@grok @osmoisto @UrijN93028 @Noah_twix What is the experience of being next to a window in each situation?

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

@grok @osmoisto @UrijN93028 @Noah_twix Hint: this isn’t a productivity-maximizing problem.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

Lesson #2 today is not necessarily about agentic coding, but it's probably exacerbated by it. Full bidirectional sync remains an unsolved problem. Dexie and Powersync are great tools, but still to be reserved for cases where you *absolutely must* have full offline writes. It's very easy to get into deadlocks and burn a lot of tokens and/or brain cells trying to resolve them.

I've written a sync system from scratch in the past, so I should have known better, but I always hold out hope that things are better now.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

Today's lesson #1 in agentic coding: complex interaction between non-integrated services is not its strong suit. It actually does surprisingly well, and can even go use a website console to configure things, but unless it's a very common use case, it can spend a lot of time going in circles.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

Here's a sneak peek:

https://t.co/6YdO1vhvy2

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

I don't think there's a power on earth greater than that of a nerd with an axe to grind.

Here's mine, of the moment. I love to cook. I also have moderately severe #ADHD, which means I can't count the number of times I've ruined hours of work because I missed a crucial step in the beginning, or forgot to set a timer, or any number of other distraction-related mistakes. So, as therapy for all of that trauma, and as a test for how far I can get with real-world agentic coding on a greenfield project, I'm writing my own recipe manager that caters to my neurodiversity's peculiar UX needs, by breaking it down into discrete bundles of work that include ingredients, prep, and any notes, all in one, impossible-to-screw-up place.

Pretty niche, but 2026 is the year of niche.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

I'm sympathetic to the idea that government should be as big as needed to settle disputes and create an even playing field, and no bigger. But the folks who want to eliminate it altogether are just as delusional as the communists.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

Both the utopian left and the utopian right underestimate the will to power. The beauty of what we have, is that it assumes will to power is inevitable, and can't be directly controlled, so instead it pits it against itself.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

If there's no monopoly on the use of force, then everyone will have to arm themselves. The biggest companies will either become organized crime, or be forcibly taken over by the organized crime that already exists. Nature abhors a power vacuum.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Thanks Jeff Lawson for buying the Onion so we could get this great zoom in on electoral coverage. No other news source has gone to this level of detail.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

Dude, is Elon trying to make the Terminator? Robots ✅ AI ✅ Star link = Sky net ✅.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

@garrytan Turns out the qualities that make a good activist are not the same as make a good administrator.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

@MonsignorMrtnez @garrytan The hard left hates Kamala.

[Ken Miller @seriousken]

@levelsio Lower price = larger market, especially if it starts eating into private car ownership. If the margins are similar (since inherent cost structure is different) the that also = higher valuation.