Thanks for spelling out what the original comment was implying.
I find it bizarre how intensely a bunch of these child/grandchild comments are criticizing the notion that people would even think to analyze the meaning behind the words.
Hacker News has always had a unique culture in which thoughtful discussion is basically the main goal, and it's intentionally incentivized in numerous ways. It's been my experience that any thoughts added to a post's conversation are seen as valuable as long as they are thoughtful and seeking to understand.
So these comments are clearly coming from a place that's antithetical to HN's culture. What that in mind, it seems likely to me (Occam's Razor) that these comments are either:
1. Astroturfing: Claude employees acting like everyday folks, secretly trying to shift public opinion.
2. AI cult mindset: "AI is humanity's salvation; how dare you have perspectives outside of those accepted by the cult."
Am I missing another likely option?
To bolster my point, right now we're posting on the top top-level comment, meaning a majority of active HN users find it to be a great addition to the conversation. Commenting to shut down the discussion is a red flag.
The website is way more popular than before and it's all but taken over by the Twitter AI grifter class.
Many of the people who used to parttake in the interesting discussuons I came here for, have gotten tired of 80% of the posts at any given time being about the brand new AGI LLM that's so much better than last week's AGI LLM, and have left months ago.
> Many of the people who used to parttake in the interesting discussuons I came here for, have gotten tired of 80% of the posts at any given time being about the brand new AGI LLM that's so much better than last week's AGI LLM, and have left months ago.
I hope you are wrong, or rather, that HN's userbase can keep renewing itself on cycles of new users without getting into an eternal september situation. It's none of my affair (and yes, lately HN AI threads read suspiciously airheaded in tone, like they fell out of /r/codex and Grok-heavy online circles) overall, but I'd be curious if dang or whoever can easily get an idea as to what the current population of HN weekly/daily active users are and if that bag of users is similar to a year over year or decade over decade cohort. X% of our users are more than 10 years old, and so on.
But the above is an idle thought experiment, back to your point, there's definitely some bandwagon work going on, astroturfing and bot-controlled no doubts there too, and if I find one more Rationalist / Effective Altruist / AI doomer cult post, I may find a way to ship them 10 virtual spam palettes because there's more to the web than 'AI-chatterbox-class who's never actually read Neuromancer or Snow Crash or the meatier works of Asimov act superior to the rest of us' strawmen I have confirmation bias running into, yet overall, I still find HN has that spark here and there.
> Alice: ABC-library stinks, why did they write it that way?
> Bob Reply: Hi there, yak here, I wrote it because Dennis Ritchie was sick with a cold and we needed it for Los Alamos Labs.
There have always been software companies that care about quality, and those that don't.
Many who don't care about quality exist because their products are forced onto their users. (Due to footholds from enterprise relationships, regulation, etc.) I bet slop will abound in these kinds of companies, but their codebases and products were already terrible anyways.
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But research reliably shows users do care about things Just Working™ and feeling polished. With few exceptions, if software feels at all buggy or doesn't look visually amazing, you won't acquire/retain that many users.
Natural selection will teach hard lessons to the industry. Customers will notice things feeling "off" on products where AI slop is allowed to abound, and they'll flee to companies with sane approaches.
A sane approach: Humans actually guide the direction of the code which means they have to understand + review the code and course correct bad decisions. This doesn't mean agentic coding goes away, but it means this mad rush for insane velocity goes away.
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Compare vibe-coded apps you've interacted with against world-class polished apps like Spotify, Gmail, Slack, etc. Those apps aren't obviously showing signs of AI slop, because the organizational structure is in place in those companies to prevent engineers from just throwing slop over the fence. Those engineers are doing agentic coding but are being forced to go at a sustainable pace.
The industry will eventually be forced (by the reality of business results) to recognize that this is the only approach that will lead to success.
I think your framing is fair here. But I'd like to offer an even more complicated/nuanced take:
Designing in a group can be very difficult, and doing it well is a skill set that most people don't naturally have.
I think this explains your point 1. Why do people view designed docs as pointless? Because they really don't have a vision or model for what and effective and healthy collaborative design process would look like.
> Designing in a group can be very difficult, and doing it well is a skill set that most people don't naturally have
Not only is it a skill every participant needs to have, they also all need to have a similar amount of competence and knowledge about the domain as well as the current implementation, otherwise it's mostly pointless ime.
But if all ven diagram circles overlap ... It is nice.
I can count the times this materialized (in my professional life) on one hand. So I'm generally more towards the "make a prototype, then explain it to the others. Either it's the baseline for the discussion or the illuminating event that clears up wherever this approach works with that team.
It struck me today using Google Antigravity (Claude Code alternative) just how direct and usably terse Gemini is in prose.
I've complained plenty on here about Claude verbosity and TED-talk phrasing, and it seems by contrast Gemini has already arrived at the dream end-state of Claude from a prose standpoint.
Sometimes I ask for feedback, and I get back a list of multiple-choice options as if it's already ready to go. If I indicate I'm thinking about doing something, sometimes it'll just...do it. (Not in an annoying way.)
It seems very geared toward action in a way that's completely refreshing coming from months steeped in Claude essays.
For the amount of tokens you get, based on your comment, ALL subscriptions are heavily subsidized, and the most expensive ones are the most subsidized.
For OpenAI and Anthropic, the $100 subscriptions cost 5x the $20 subscriptions and give you 5x the tokens. And the $200 subscriptions are 10x the cost for 20x the tokens. (Tokens cost 50% as much.)
> there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself.
It's particularly frustrating that it's simultaneously superhuman and incredibly unreliable when it comes to cognition.
E.g. it can whip out 100,000 lines of code in the time you'd write 500...but 5% of that code will be janky, or subtly buggy, etc.
It's the "oh...you're absolutely right!" effect. I can't think of any other tools that are so powerful yet so finnicky and almost guaranteed to fail in ways that are so difficult to detect.
Yes, although the folks that said "this is the worst it will ever be" have some evidence in their court. The best models now are much better than the best models a year ago.
Some big gnarly problems remain (e.g. continual learning), but I think the fact of AI existing and being better than humans at cognition no longer seems like something out in the far future.
> The best models now are much better than the best models a year ago.
I went back to using Opus 4.8. I don't feel like the newest models are all that much better. The tooling around them has gotten better, and i guess mythos et al are good at hacking or whatever, but the models don't seem any better at not making mistakes than 6-8 months ago
I haven't tried with Claudette but did evaluate https://github.com/zachahn/vomit and https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english earlier today. I ended up using claudish-to-english with a prompt derived from the vomit one and some of my existing instructions. I ran a few local models through a test harness to see how they did, and the gemma4 ones added bad behavior back in less than any others I tested.
So for the parent's Macbook question `gemma4-26b-mlx` should work well.
For you with 24 GB VRAM, `gemma4-26b-a4b`. I tried higher VRAM models and they slowed down while still doing just as well or slightly worse.
If someone else tests and finds a better performing model though, please update me here, I'd love to try it.
Which is totally ironic, given that the article is largely about how untrustworthy LLMs can be. (Hallucination.)
Putting readers through this exercise disrespects their time. Even if as a writer you did the work of researching, reasoning, and fact-checking, you shoot yourself in the foot by running it through an LLM because there's no way for the reader to know which thoughts/research are from you. It demolishes the Ethos of the writing; readers feel they must do quality assurance on the reasoning, research, and facts.
This is edited not to sound like Claude wrote it, but is full of Claude-isms. It's exhausting to read.
What's going to happen long term when this style of writing is so ubiquitous that people get comfortable reading it? Is it going to fundamentally change English? Are people going to start talking like Claude?
* Goal: be the last fighter alive.
* Turns: each round every fighter takes one turn. Turn order is randomized every round.
* Actions: Move one cell up/down/left/right, attack an adjacent enemy for 15–24 damage, or wait. An action consumes 1 AP.
* Rocks/Obstacles: 4 random impassable cells.
* Power-ups: Gold +1 AP per turn.
* Kills: the killer gets +1 AP per turn, and heals 50 HP (no over-heal).
(Unclear while watching replays, found in README.)
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