Have you perceived a market shift for freelancers given the rise of AI coding?

It seems to me that sadly, paying for getting a few isolated tasks done is becoming a thing of the past.

No slowdown that I've seen - my style of freelancing is pretty long-term though, clients I've known and worked with for many years.

Every "how I use Claude Code" post will get into the HN frontpage.

Which maybe has to do with people wanting to show how they use Claude Code in the comments!

Suggestion, don't use your pinky. I haven't used it for over a decade. Instead, move your whole arm as a unit, and primarily use your index finger. It takes some adaptation, but movement is better than stillness the vast majority of times.

As for the tendinitis, have you tried physical therapy for your fingers? Whenever I've had a stupid day of overusing the thumb with my phone, I wrap the smallest possible elastic band around my thumb, and do some curls. Slow and controlled. The mixture of force, movement and stretching feels great, and the issue is gone.

Here is an example band https://www.decathlon.es/es/p/banda-elastica-5-kg-cross-trai... the important part is that it's really thin and light. It should look like a string, not a flat band.

Kinesis Freestyle2. 100 bucks, it's been around for a long time.

I have a pair of Freestyle2 keyboards, both are over a decade old. I strongly recommend the V3 tenting kit. You can get a refurb USB Freestyle2 with the V3 kit for $70 direct from Kinesis.

Good coincidence, yesterday I switched to a split keyboard. I had been programming since 2011.

Main reason for my switch is that I felt that my shoulders have a wider stance than before. I don't know if it's because of an improvement in fitness (I do a lot of shoulder and back work), or maybe with age I lost a bit of shoulder internal rotation mobility.

Either way, the learning curve was like a few minutes for me. Guess it's a perk of experience and the habit of touch typing.

Yes. I'd swear that people that unfortunately fall into RSI also fall into a negative cycle of moving less and favoring a static position at all levels - fingers, wrists, shoulders.

Our bodies love movement and it's often a recipe for solving all sorts of issues.

Hopefully with the advent of AI coding, OSS frontends for all sorts of commercial backends will be more frequent, have higher quality, and consumers would be able to vote with their wallets for high-quality APIs enabling said frontends.

The week that investors freaked out because of a set of prompts on a github repo.

It's not and I really doubt it will, for true SaaS platforms. A desktop .gif recorder (frequent example I've read about) is not a SaaS, even if you charge monthly for it.

Let's put an example an exception-tracking SaaS (Sentry, Rollbar). How do the economics of paying a few hundred bucks per month compare vs. allocating engineering resources to an in-house tracker? Think development time, infra investment, tokens, iteration, uptime, etc. And the opportunity cost of focusing on your original business instead.

One would quickly find out that the domain being replaced is far more complex and data-intensive than estimated.

There are many cases where the company might only use a fraction of the features (and therefore complexity) of the SaaS and so only need to develop and maintain those features they actually need. That's when ditching the SaaS can make sense if you can easily develop/maintain what you specifically need on your own with AI assistance.

Even if they use it less, if you combine all of the Saas products used by a company, thats a tiny fraction of the overall CapEx. And this cost is tax deductible, so there is no reason to optimise it unless Execs are really penny pinching, but at that point that company isn't worth selling to anyway.

Why is this at the top?

I've flagged it, that's what we should be doing with AI content.