frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Is SWE mostly just calling APIs?

1•humbleharbinger•1h ago
Been thinking about this question more and more in the context of AI automation. A lot of SWE (apart from design and org politics) is just chaining calls to APIs.

Analysis is just calling APIs to get data. We use that to drive a decision and then we write code and use APIs to deploy it. We close the loops with the same data/metric APIs to verify our code achieved an outcome.

I wonder if this is why SWE seems so susceptible to automation - LLMs are great at chaining together calls to APIs.

Just a thought - I know there's a lot of diversity in SWE and this may not apply everywhere. I can think of holes in this line of reasoning (ex. we make decisions about the product during this process) but want to hear others' opinions.

Comments

blinkbat•1h ago
My thought is no.
humbleharbinger•1h ago
Care to expound?
blinkbat•1h ago
real engineering work is about delivering solutions, calling APIs is a small part of that.
humbleharbinger•1h ago
Delivering a software solution is often tantamount to reading multiple codebases, getting some alignment with a team on a proposal and then writing the code and deploying. Most of which can be done by calling APIs (apart from aligning a team of humans)
blinkbat•1h ago
and with no team of humans, who is the solution for?
humbleharbinger•1h ago
One can imagine a manager given an outcome to achieve or a director and then a team of agents carrying out the task. Perhaps the agents are adversarial to some extent so they get reasonable pushback on their decisions (ex one agent always sides on taking a long term approach, another agent wants to be scrappy, another agent is on a PIP and approves everything etc).

LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code

https://twitter.com/katanalarp/status/2029928471632224486
1•danjc•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CC Usage Bar – Check Claude Code usage from your macOS menu bar

https://github.com/lionhylra/cc-usage-bar
1•root-cause•3m ago•0 comments

Nintendo DMCA takedown for several projects on GitHub

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2026/02/2026-02-12-nintendo.md
1•mtlebe•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Contrabass – Go and Charm Stack Implementation of OpenAI's Symphony

https://github.com/junhoyeo/contrabass
1•junhoyeo•18m ago•0 comments

Why New Zealand is seeing an exodus of over-30s

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/world/new-zealand-australia-emigration-midlife-intl-hnk-dst
4•Tomte•19m ago•1 comments

Two mechanisms for dynamic type checks

https://wingolog.org/archives/2026/02/18/two-mechanisms-for-dynamic-type-checks
1•PaulHoule•23m ago•0 comments

Dupeless Reeducation

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/dupeless-reeducation
2•Tomte•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: RedwoodSDK (v1.0 in a Few Days)

https://rwsdk.com
1•pistoriusp•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SlideHTML – render HTML files as slides

https://yourhrh.github.io/slidehtml/
1•creativegodong•30m ago•0 comments

Front End Rust Without Node

https://blog.urth.org/2022/02/14/frontend-rust-without-node
1•mahirsaid•31m ago•0 comments

What your phone knows could help scientists understand your health

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/03/screenome-digital-habits-smartphone-mental-physical-health
2•XzetaU8•31m ago•0 comments

Scientists Transfer Longevity Gene

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-successfully-transfer-longevity-gene-paving-the-way-for-exten...
2•thunderbong•33m ago•0 comments

AI Error May Have Contributed to Girl's School Bombing in Iran

https://thisweekinworcester.com/exclusive-ai-error-girls-school-bombing/
11•apolloartemis•38m ago•2 comments

How many options fit into a boolean?

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/11/how-many-options-fit-into-a-boolean/
1•luu•47m ago•0 comments

SK lays off nearly 1k workers at Georgia plant amid cooling automaker EV plan

https://apnews.com/article/georgia-electric-vehicle-battery-manufacturing-layoffs-workers-79a4ec7...
2•josephh•48m ago•0 comments

Ships in Gulf declare themselves Chinese to dodge attack

https://www.ft.com/content/eaecc3ce-ba4e-4e19-9d0a-6cf1536a5aed
4•KnuthIsGod•51m ago•0 comments

Doomscroll 14,333 cat pictures

https://cat.aadishv.dev/
2•aadishv•52m ago•3 comments

Unemployment Reasons, by Age and Education

https://flowingdata.com/2026/03/05/unemployment-reasons/
3•gslin•55m ago•2 comments

Using Rust and Postgres for everything: patterns learned over the years

https://kerkour.com/rust-postgres-everything
3•olalonde•57m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Quantum-PULSE – compress-then-encrypt vault for LLM training data

https://github.com/Naveenub/quantum-pulse
1•naveenub•58m ago•0 comments

You can get better code by exploiting model weights

https://kelvinfichter.com/pages/thoughts/train-harder/
1•kfichter•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: BurnRate – Track what you spend on AI coding tools

https://getburnrate.io/
1•mwong17•1h ago•0 comments

Worming out molecular secrets behind collective behaviour

https://iisc.ac.in/events/worming-out-molecular-secrets-behind-collective-behaviour/
3•rainhacker•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Resend-CLI, unofficial Resend CLI built for AI agents and humans

https://github.com/shubhdeep12/resend-cli
1•Shubhdeep_12•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Rai – Add AI steps in your shell, scripts or CI/CD pipelines

https://appmakes.github.io/Rai/
1•perkit•1h ago•0 comments

Full-Text RSS site config files

https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config
1•microflash•1h ago•0 comments

Astronomers Spot a Cosmic Laser Halfway Across the Universe

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/astronomers-using-meerkat-spot-a-cosmic-laser-halfway-acro...
3•johnbarron•1h ago•0 comments

Trump has privately shown serious interest in U.S. ground troops in Iran

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-privately-shown-serious-interest-us-ground-tro...
9•johnbarron•1h ago•3 comments

Semi-formal reasoning helps agents reason about code without executing the code

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01896
1•dnw•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: EdgeDox – Offline document AI on Android using Qwen3.5-0.8B

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.cyberfly.edgedox&hl=en_US
1•cyberfly-labs•1h ago•0 comments