The pains we code for

A relevant pain that doesn't fit any code above. Collected so the next version of the codebook can add codes.

Example: “Show HN: Tolgee – developer-friendly localization tool Software localization has been broken for years. That's why I created Tolgee. Eight years ago, I worked…”

Code from AI tools is wrong, bloated or hard to maintain, and it creates rework or tech debt.

Example: “We aren't seeing productivity gains in software either. What we are seeing is a lot of people who claim to be more productive, but in fact are building piles of…”

Reviews are slow, clogged or shallow, often because of the volume or size of PRs (including AI-generated ones).

Example: “Code reviews kill velocity - introduce context switching, and are make work, it feels like you’re doing something to make a PR etc but your not. The context it…”

Requirements are unclear, incomplete or keep changing, so work is redone or estimates are wrong.

Example: “Yep AI will just invent the missing stuff; that's not purely an AI thing, we do the same as well until we become experienced enough to know what questions to as…”

Docs are missing or outdated, knowledge sits with a few people, onboarding is slow.

Example: “Hard to avoid some tribal knowledge. To be free of it you need full reference documentation and tutorials for everything you do. And to update it as you go. And…”

Tech debt and quality work keep losing out to features.

Example: “I'd rather see a TODO in the source file than in the commit message because of discoverability issues with commit messages. Maybe that can be fixed? If I need…”

Teams are asked for estimates or metrics they can't give reliably, and those numbers become commitments or KPIs.

Example: “What is a healthy [bug cards]/[total cards] ratio for game development? The product manager of my development team wants to use this ratio as a KPI, which alle…”

Running, watching or trusting several AI agents takes attention, causes overload, or produces output that can't be trusted unattended.

Example: “I probably spend even more than 20% of my time away from the computer these days. AI is great for this. I task Claude with something and while it's working I ha…”

Pings, meetings or switching between tools and tasks break people's focus.

Example: “I just upgraded to a 49" curved display because it lets me view everything I need _for the current task_ at one time. One virtual desktop is Messages, Slack, a…”

Work is spread across too many tools, or tools don't fit the team's process or partners.

Example: “OneNoughtOne – AI That Turns Conversations into Actions Across Your Digital Life Hey HN, I've spent the last 2 years wrestling with the growing chaos of digit…”

Product, design, engineering or management step into each other's decisions, or someone is responsible without the authority.

Example: “The Product Owner ... suggest[ed] possible technical causes, such as a permissions issue. Reasonable. By brainstorming and chatting with the dev team, PO can…”

Standups, status updates and tracking for different audiences take time and nobody gets value from them.

Example: “I realize now what total bogus nonsense standups are. You get asked the same pish everyday and nobody listens to what you say. Ten different ways to track thing…”

Writing code got faster and the constraint moved downstream: review, QA, CI, design, product, ops or support can't keep up.

Example: “I work at a 20-year-old mid-sized SaaS company. As long as the company has been around, product managers have longed for more engineers and strategies for engin…”

No QA, too little QA time, the manual testing load, or back-and-forth between QA and development.

Example: “"What I understood the requirements to be" That is a way to get your changed approved quickly, so it is good for you. It is terrible for a project that values…”

Whether the right thing was built only gets discussed at review or after the build. Requirements get handed over instead of being understood.

Example: “Ask HN: What experience do you have with 'specs –> design –> code' orchestration Hi, We are currently researching automating a lot of the 'specs -> design ->…”

People can't follow code they didn't write (especially AI-generated code), so reviewing, debugging or changing it is slow or risky.

Example: “Show HN: Claude Bootstrap – Opinionated Guardrails for Claude Code I've been using Claude Code for more than 100 projects over the past year (since Feb 24, 202…”

Pressure to ship skips steps that protect quality: design review, copy review, brand checks, testing.

Example: “I feel like this was always true to an extent, now product and design are just more tolerant of it because leadership is cracking a whip over their heads becaus…”

AI tools don't know the team's conventions, docs, decisions or codebase rules, so people repeat them or fix the output.

Example: “The thing is, humans make do. Given lacking, outdated documentation somewhere on sharepoint, big picture revealed somewhere in passing at some meetings or water…”

Tests that fail randomly, break on small UI changes, or CI that takes too long to give an answer.

Example: “Taken to its logical conclusion, what you are saying is do not write (or commit? but in practice, why write them if not to run in CI) any tests except for end-t…”

A change spreads further than expected (to other files, services, tests or configs) and breaks something, or nobody can tell what a change will affect.

Example: “Show HN: A tool to visualize and map dependency hell in legacy COBOL codebases We built this tool after years of frustration working on massive, undocumented C…”

Feedback from customers, sales or support doesn't get to the product team, gets lost, or gets ignored.

Example: “Show HN: I built an all-in-one feedback system to ship the right features faster Hi HN, I’ve always believed that great products are built with continuous use…”

Work waits on reviews or approvals from other people or teams (design sign-off, architecture, security, stakeholders), often several in a row.

Example: “You have two basic choices: Time box each review and approval process, clearly state the project assumptions for incorporating feedback and rework, and the esc…”

The UI in code drifts from the design system or Figma. AI tools don't follow it either.

Example: “I tried it for two tasks using Claude Code, on max effort. 1. Web platform, asking it to analyse a feature to create reports, and coming up with better solutio…”

Design and engineering work in separate tools, and handoffs between them lose information.

Example: “Ask HN: How do you structure front end workflows before using AI tools? I've been using AI tools to help with frontend development, but it's been pretty ad hoc…”

PMs, designers or other non-engineers build features, tools, scripts or PRs themselves with AI tools. Their changes then need engineers to review, fix or take them over.

Example: “My point on the initial discussion remains, but I think that it also seems like we disagree on the foundations/premise of the technology. The actions of a few…”

People outside engineering can't make product changes themselves and wait for engineering, or are kept out of the code.

Example: “This is a fascinating model, thanks for sharing. The classic "engineering as the bottleneck" problem is something every product engineer feels, so I deeply appr…”