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Comment by wartywhoa23 | Hacker News Reader

Lost me at the first OpenClaw mention.

I am not necessarily against AI, but in this case, I also lost interest at that point. I love reading about reverse engineering, and to me the first part of the article felt like it was leading up to that. But then it ended with what to me feels like "and then I asked AI to finish the project for me, which it did". That's not a criticism by the way, there's nothing wrong with the author using AI to reach a certain goal. I just don't find that interesting personally.

Felt this way too.

I may not have felt this way if the article had discussed this step in as much detail as the first steps - describing what was done by the agent rather than just that an agent was used and the results. It all felt a bit “then it drew the rest of the goddamn owl”.

I’m not sure though - part of the appeal of this kind of article for me is the description of the human emotions - the highs and lows of doing the task - and that would possibly still have felt missing.

Edit: Actually, now that I say that, there was a lot missing. How was the circuit designed, for example? How were components selected?

Surprised me too. In the end, I guess it's a time-saving tool for a tedious task. But reduces the old-school grittiness of the adventure. Still an enjoyable read.

I was not evicting expecting to see OpenClaw here either. It's out of keeping with the rest of the article...

At least there's acknowledgement of limitations and it's not just hype. Overall a useful data point in terms of what's possible.

I did finish the article, but for me, it was missing a discussion and review, probably manual improvement, of the code that came out of the LLM. Reverse-engineering means understanding a system that you didn't previously understand, which is still (with some degradation) possible while using an LLM.

Why? It seems foolish to have a knee jerk reaction to someone using a tool that got them where they needed to be.

I suppose its a bit like winning a first person shooter game with aim assist on

It is not an authentic display of pure skill

That’s a good question, and I can’t speak for the parent, but for me, I like reading about a person’s journey of discovery. There were many insights this person did not have because he turned the task over to a power tool. People can use whatever tools they want. I also can spend my attention however I like. Reading about someone using AI is just boring to me.

Almost every commenter in this thread explained this better than I could.

It's a bit like watching a 2 hour movie about a knight who'd been preparing to save his beloved princess from a dragon for 1h 59s, and then the screen fades to black, the narrator proclaims that the dragon is done, the knight marries the princess and they live happily ever after. Closing credits!

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