[stub for offtopicness]
Since the article has been changed to tone down its provocative opener, which clearly had a kicking-the-anthill effect, I'm moving those original reactions to this subthread.
Since the article has been changed to tone down its provocative opener, which clearly had a kicking-the-anthill effect, I'm moving those original reactions to this subthread.
This is such an insane statement. Is this satire?
I think the subtext here is actually revealing a deeper issue. Installing software sucks. It’s error prone and every project does it a slightly different way. What we need is standardization, and I can see why prose could be an attractive middle ground. Easier to understand but less precise may result in marginally better outcomes.
I’m concerned that this approach serves to fix the obvious problems while simultaneously introducing subtler problems.
Tangentially, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. There are projects like nix that are excellent at fixing a lot of problems in the software packaging and installation space that are great from a security perspective but are famously difficult to use. I’d personally like to see more work leveraging AI to increase the accessibility of these paradigms and not throw the bathwater out with the baby, so to speak.
What?? How do I get off of this train? I used to come to hacker news for a reason...what the fuck am I reading
> How does install.md work with my existing CLI or scripts?
> install.md doesn't replace your existing tools—it works with them. Your install.md can instruct the LLM to run your CLI, execute your scripts, or follow your existing setup process. Think of it as a layer that guides the LLM to use whatever tools you've already built.
(It doesn't X — it Ys. Think of it as a Z that Ws. this is LLM speak! I don't know why they lean on these constructions to the exclusion of all else, but they demonstrably do. The repo README was also committed by Claude Code. As much as I like some of the code that Claude produces, its Readmes suck)
Any other feedback you have about the general idea?
If the installer was going to succeed in a particular environment anyway, you definitely want to use that instead of an LLM that might sporadically fail for no good reason in that same environment.
If the installer fails then you have a "knowledge base" to help debug it, usable by humans or LLMs, and if it fails, well, the regular installer failed too, so hopefully you're not worse off. If the user runs the helper LLM in yolo mode then the consequences are on them.
I think I agree with you on it needing to assist in event of failure instead of jumping straight to install though. Will think more about that.
Just like installing spice racks is a task which which should be left to military engineer corps.
> Installing software is a task which should be left to AI.
Absolutely I don't think so. This is a very bad idea.
$ curl | bash was bad enough. But $ curl -fsSL | claude looks even worse.
What could possibly go wrong?
How we've all been blue-pilled. Sigh..
That is such a wild thing to say. Unless this whole thing is satire...
Does that make any sense or am I just off my rocker?
An LLM will run the probabilistically likely command each time. This is like using Excel’s ridiculous feature to have a cell be populated by copilot rather than having the AI generate a deterministic formula.
Most of the largest trends in "how to deploy software" revolve around making things predictable and consistent. The idea of abandoning this in favor of making a LLM do the work seems absurd. At least the bash script can be replicated exactly across machines and will do the same thing in the same situation.
I wouldn't use it for anything serious, but that being said, I think it's in better shape than when I was running it.
(If LLMs can follow it, so be it, but at least humans remain the target audience.)
This is a "solution" looking for a problem.
What pushed me over the edge was actually feeding bash install scripts into agents and seeing them not perform well. It does work, but a lot worse than this install.md thing.
In the docs for the proposal I wrote the following:
>install.md files are direct commands, not just documentation. The format is structured to trigger immediate autonomous execution.[1]
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
So, after teaching people to outsource their reasoning to an LLM, LLMs are now actively coaching folks to use LLMs for tasks for which it makes no sense at all.