FreeBSD risks losing relevance by ignoring AI tooling like Claude Code | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD risks losing relevance by ignoring AI tooling like Claude Code

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6 pointsspeckx10 comments

Or, and hear me out, maybe FreeBSD wants to position itself as a secure server OS that doesn't get all its data leaked by some rando simply asking it to do it the right way?

Weird, this is a link to an aggregator, not the article itself:

https://stevengharms.com/posts/2026-03-04-freebsd-users-we-n...

I'm not so sure about his "real value," but I think he makes a decent argument, and he acknowledges the limitations of LLMs at the bottom. As someone who is critical of slop-coding and limits my use of the weighted random code generators, I think his points are worth reading.

The post isn't about the FreeBSD community. It's specifically about how Anthrophic is saying "f-you" to any type of cross-platform agent at all. They've closed issues for OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, and many others:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22564

This gets into the issue so many others have brought up: the death of open source. You can just get Claude or GPT to write you a new tool based on other's tests and specs. Now something that was GPLv3 can now be whatever your want, although it will probably be slower, shittier and more difficult (if not impossible) to understand and maintain.

The future is here folks, and it's stupid.

Am I reading it right that this is just about the installer not being ported? I guess I'm old but I feel like packaging is a long-solved problem. Bizarre...

No I don't think that's it. If it was just the installer, this person should have gotten it working. I was under the impression it was no longer Javascript and was instead some compiled, closed native code, and the either BSD ELF loader or its C library was missing some functionality it needed? /shrug

LLM enthusiasts will always point to whatever scraps of personal value they've extracted from their use of genai as a rationale for their indispensability. Arguing from personal utility rings hollow for anyone who takes the externalities of these "tools" seriously: their erasure of the authorship of their training corpus, their erosion of social contracts, their putrefaction of the commons with endless waves of slop, etc. I'm glad FreeBSD has managed to hold the line against this sort of shortsighted ends-justify-means thinking, and I hope they don't soften their stance against slop in the future.

Agreed, but for some reason the majority of folks don't care about these externalities at all.

I see the externalities and the harm they are and may cause, and at the same time I find it increasingly difficult to avoid using LLMs as there is personal value to be extracted. Further, so many others are using LLMs to pump their productivity numbers (reality may differ and time will tell) its hard to keep up without using LLMs.

Aren't there several papers that indicate that the productivity boost doesn't exist when you start measuring productivity instead of going by feels?

The (original) headline is backwards; this is about Anthropic's interest in FreeBSD, not the other way around.

I get a lot of personal enjoyment from seeing things spring to life from Claude Code.

I'm an AI-Skeptic through and through, it's clear the hype doesn't match reality, though I have had some fun with it for sure, I might even have made some things that I would have otherwise not bothered with- that's a win.

But boy, I think I couldn't give less of a shit to be "left behind" by AI-bros.

Well thankfully Steven's opinion binds him only.

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