C
Christian Ekrem
cekrem.github.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2022
Christian Ekrem, a developer who likes Elm and functional programming, writes about software design, theory building, and programming craft.
What HN saysCommenters link his posts on Naur's theory building and the lack of a silver bullet when discussing AI-generated code and mental models.
23HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
37stories submitted
308story points
2 months agolast shared
2022people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Programming as Theory Building: Why Senior Developers Are More Valuable4 people · 71 points · first shared 2025 · 15 comments on HN
- 2There Is Still No Silver Bullet3 people · 5 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Resists It3 people · 5 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Liskov Substitution: The real meaning of inheritance2 people · 75 points · first shared 2025 · 89 comments on HN
- 5Functors, Applicatives, and Monads: The Scary Words You Understand2 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 6Why I Hope I Get to Write a Lot of Elm Code in 20252 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7A Use Case for Port Boundaries in Front End Development2 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym1 people · 98 points · first shared 2025 · 93 comments on HN
- 9The Draft Is Done. Now I Need Reviewers and Feedback (Elm Language)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 10I'm taking a three-week LLM fast1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 11Kotlin's Rich Errors: Native, Typed Errors Without Exceptions1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 12Making Impossible States Impossible: Type-Safe Domain Modeling with Functional1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 13Introducing `content-visibility: auto` – A Hidden Performance Gem1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 14Replacing Hugo with a Custom Kotlin Blog Engine1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15Programming as Theory Building, Part II: When Institutions Crumble1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
copemaxxxing · 2026-08-21
This is a good intro https://cekrem.github.io/posts/there-is-still-no-silver-bullet/
anishjain123 · 2025-10-01
Interesting, reminds me of Peter Naur’s (https://cekrem.github.io/posts/programming-as-theory-building-naur/) beliefs where building mental models is more important than the mere code output itself
So easy to fall into a slop tsunami without actually knowing what the code does or how it works
mpyne · 2026-05-17
> The process didn’t work before because the person writing the requirements either put out vague requirements or bad requirements because they didn’t understand the business intent (or were careless).
You make it sound like writing good requirements is easy.
If it were easy we wouldn't need all these concepts around PMF, product pivots and the like. And even before that was Peter Naur's paper "Programming as Theory Building" [1].
If you truly understand the problem you're solving with software then requirements can be easy. But usually we don't, not right away, and so we have to build up our understanding of the problem first in order to solve it.
Even then, the problem we solve may not have been the problem paying users will have, so you can have "good requirements" and still have a bad business, or even the opposite where you somehow build a working business despite bad requirements, because you hit upon a customer's need quite by mistake.
Nothing about any of this precludes LLMs being helpful, though nothing guarantees LLMs will be helpful either.
[1]: https://cekrem.github.io/posts/programming-as-theory-building-naur/