Simon, this HN post didn't need to be about Gen AI.
This thing is really inescapable those days.
This thing is really inescapable those days.
People can argue about where to insert it in the list, but it is certainly in the top 5 of many decades (smartphones, web, PCs, etc.) That's why it's inescapable.
Your complaint isn't really about simonw's comment, but rather the fact that it was heavily upvoted - in other words, you were dissenting from the community reaction to the comment. That's understandable; in fact it's a fundamental problem with forums and upvoting systems: the same few massive topics suck in all the smaller ones until we get one big ball of topic mud: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I should have replied there instead, my mistake.
I'm excited about them and I think discussion on how to combine two exciting technologies are exactly what I'd like to see here.
You can't just roll in to a random post to tell people about your revolutionary new AI agent for the 50th time this week and expect them not to be at least mildly annoyed.
The entire thing is just quotes and a retelling of events. The closest thing to a "take" I could find is this:
> I have no idea how this one is going to play out. I’m personally leaning towards the idea that the rewrite is legitimate, but the arguments on both sides of this are entirely credible.
Which effectively says nothing. It doesn't add anything the discussion around the topic, informed or not, and the post doesn't seem to serve any purpose beyond existing as an excuse to be linked to and siphon attention away from the original discussion (I wonder if the sponsor banner at the top of the blog could have something to do with that...?)
This seems to be a pattern, at least in recent times. Here's another egregious example: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/claws/
Literally just a quote from his fellow member of the "never stops talking about AI" club, Karpathy. No substance, no elaboration, just something someone else said or did pasted on his blog followed by a short agreement. Again, doesn't add anything or serve any real purpose, but was for some reason submitted to HN[1], and I may be misremembering but I believe it had more upvotes/comments than the original[2] at one point.
That second Karpathy example is from my link blog. Here's my post describing how I try to add something new when I write about things on my link blog: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
In the case of that Karpathy post I was amplifying the idea that "Claw" is now the generic name for that class of software, which is notable.
It's very much a bimodal distribution: an enthusiast subset and an allergic subset. It's impossible to satisfy both, but that's the dynamic of HN anyhow: guaranteed to dissatisfy everybody! It's a strange game; the only to win is to complain.
It's turtles all the way down ....
;)
I mean I don’t have to remember the horrible git command line anymore which already improves my exprience as a dev 50%.
It’s not all hype bs this time.
Every time I see a comment like this, I have to wonder what the heck other devs were doing. Don’t you know there were shell aliases, and snippet managers, and a ton of other tools already? I never had to commit special commands to memory, and I could always reference them faster than it takes to query any LLM.
Because it’s custom there is no standard curriculum you could point me to etc.
So it’s great you’ve found a setup that works for you but I hope you realize it’s silly to become idignant I don’t share it.
> Because it’s custom there is no standard curriculum you could point me to etc.
Not true. There are tons of resources out there not only explaining the solutions but even how different people use them and why.
If I sat with you for ten minutes and you explained me the exact difficulties you have, I doubt I couldn’t have suggested something.
So the only time I need terminal, it’s for something non-obvious.
”There are tons of resources”
This is not a standard curriculum as such though.
I’ve tried to come to terms with posix for 25 years and am so happy I don’t need to anymore. That’s just me!