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Comment by tuesdaynight | Hacker News Reader

I trust that Claude Code is good, and I believe that most people commenting here are truthful to their experiences. However, I have a strange feeling that companies are using bots on these announcements comments.

Maybe I'm being overcautious, but one of the worst things (for me) that came from the AI rush of these past years is this feeling that everything is full of bots. I know that people have preferences, but I feel that I cannot trust anymore that a specific review was really made by a human. I know that this is not something new, but LLMs take it to the next level for me.

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Totally agree, but that said, I just fired up Cursor on a paid account and after a few chats immediately hit the same issue I've been facing for weeks:

'Connection failed. If the problem persists, please check your internet connection or VPN'

I've contacted support and they have been no help. You can see tons of people having this issue in user forums. Meanwhile, bypassing the giant monstrosity that is VScode (and then a Cursor as a fork on top of it) gives me no such issues.

So I wouldn't be so dismissive that anyone frustrated with Cursor is a bot.

> So I wouldn't be so dismissive that anyone frustrated with Cursor is a bot.

Not GP, but my suspicions are actually of the other end of the spectrum - i.e., it's the glowing reviews of AI things that make my bot-sense tingle.

Though I usually settle on the idea that they (the reviewers) are using LLMs to write/refine their reviews.

I’ve hit this error many times. Oddly closing and reopening cursor typically fixes it…

All of these reviews are irrelevant anyway because of the variations in the problems, skillset, project attributes (size, structure, etc), human variations in prompting, and a million other reasons.

You should just set aside some time to try out different tools and see if you agree there's an improvement.

For trying models, OpenRouter is a big time saver.

Sadly, I don't think this astroturfing is limited to announcement threads. It seems it is becoming increasingly hard to source real human opinions online, even on specialized forums like this or Reddit communities.

I hope that I am wrong, but, if I am not, then these companies are doing real and substantial damage to the internet. The loss of trust will be very hard to undo.

I'm not sure about bots but it looks like they have real peoples on payroll or who paid per comment or something like that. And they trying push narrative 'use it now or you will be left behind' on every place where someone could share experience of using ai tools.

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