Products · Broad category
Build tools
Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 16 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Basic build tasks take a day of googling to figure outUnreviewed
20152026- Takes a day of googling to get build tools to do basic things2023-03-02
- Pre-2000 build tools and IDEs were awful and hard to work with2020-09-21
- Build tool documentation is very poor and build tools are overly complex2019-12-10
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 15 complaints
- Most coding time goes to build tools and platform setup rather than actual coding2025-07-15
- Every trivial change takes at least 15 seconds to rebuild and restart, making work frustrating2024-03-17
- Takes a day of googling to get build tools to do basic things2023-03-02
- Hidden compiler command lines make failed compilations hard to reproduce and fix2021-11-07
- Doesn't know which tools to learn or where to find a quick overview2021-03-10
- Pre-2000 build tools and IDEs were awful and hard to work with2020-09-21
- Site shows only a 'enable JavaScript' message and requires a modern browser, blocking access2019-12-28
- Build tool documentation is very poor and build tools are overly complex2019-12-10
- Actual plans are hard to find; many pages blank or broken2019-11-03
- Runs very slowly in Firefox2019-02-25
- Builds fail because they need specific cmake, Maven, or other tool versions installed2018-10-28
- Build rules are undocumented, so users must reverse engineer intent to build the library2018-08-08
- Extremely frustrating to use; could not get it to work at all2017-12-18
- Configuration setup is hard to learn because docs and books skip explaining why steps are needed2017-03-31
- UI feels sluggish and overly glamorized, distracting from the text2015-03-15