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Comment by ray_v | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering if the obvious (and stated) fact that the site was vibe-coded - detracts from the fact that this tool was hand written.

> jai itself was hand implemented by a Stanford computer science professor with decades of C++ and Unix/linux experience. (https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/faq.html#was-jai-written-by-an-...)

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Human author here. The fact that I don't know web design shouldn't detract from my expertise in operating systems. I wrote the software and the man page, and those are what really matter for security.

The web site is... let's say not in a million years what I would have imagined for a little CLI sandboxing tool. I literally laughed out loud when claude pooped it out, but decided to keep, in part ironically but also since I don't know how to design a landing page myself. I should say that I edited content on the docs part of the web site to remove any inaccuracies, so the content should be valid.

Indeed!

Kinda reminds me of this: https://m.xkcd.com/932/

I'm not a web UI guy either, and I am so, so happy to let an AI create a nice looking one for me. I did so just today, and man it was fast and good. I'll check it for accuracy someday...

It seems that the LLM has not only designed the site, but also written the text on at least the frontpage, which is a pretty bad signal.

You need to rewrite all the text and Telde it with text YOU would actually write, since I doubt you would write in that style.

any negative signal you get from the front page should probably end up cancelled out by the whole decades of experience + stanford professor thing.

Except that the "this was generated by an LLM" feeling you get from the front page would then make you automatically question whether the "decades of experience + stanford professor thing", as you put it, was true or just an LLM hallucination.

Author would, indeed, be wise to rewrite all the text appearing on the front page with text that he wrote himself.

>question whether the "decades of experience + stanford professor thing", as you put it, was true or just an LLM hallucination.

the scs.stanford.edu domain and stanford-scs github should help with that.

Excellent point, though not everyone pays close enough attention to the domain shown in the browser (if they did, some of the more amateurish phishing attempts would fool a lot fewer people). But yes, anyone who notices the domain will have a clue to the truth.

Needs to? Is there some new law mandating all landing pages must contain exclusively handwritten text that people haven’t heard of?

To your actual point, the people that would take the landing page being written by an LLM negatively tend to be able to evaluate the project on its true merits, while another substantial portion of the demographic for this tool would actually take that (unfortunately, imo) as a positive signal.

Lastly, given the care taken for the docs, it’s pretty likely that any real issues with the language have been caught and changed.

> You need to rewrite

No they don't. The text is very clearly conveying what this project is about. Not everyone needs to cater to weirdos who are obsessed with policing how other people use LLM.

The people who don't care about LLM slop being shoved down their throat at every turn are the "weirdos" here. The project might not be slop, but the website certainly is, and it's perfectly reasonable for people to stop reading immediately and decide that they don't care about what could be an otherwise useful project when they determine that the author didn't give enough of a shit to even write the text on the website themselves.

But there is an old-school README.me at the github homepage: https://github.com/stanford-scs/jai The repository has an old-school ASCII INSTALL file.

If you don't like the vitepress site, just use github and read the human-written README and man page there. All the information you need to use the software is available without laying eyes on any AI slop. Of cource, if you hate AI so much that you can't get past a vibe-coded landing page, you might not be the target audience for jai, because you probably aren't doing a lot of vibe coding. But maybe jai is still useful to you for grading programming assignments or running installer scripts.

Nice tool, def gonna try it. I was looking for the source and it took a while before I found the github(0) link. Like a lot software, I like to take a look at source. Maybe you can make it more prominent on the website

0: https://github.com/stanford-scs/jai

I think it will, in the modern AI slop era, look more legitimate when the web UI looks a) hand rolled and b) like not much time was spent on it at all. Which makes me a tad embarassed as someone who used to sell fancy websites for a living.

I've been building my own tooling doing similar sorts of things -- poorly with scripts and podman / buildkit as well as LD_PRELOAD related tools, and definitely clicked over to HN comments with out reading much of the content because I thought "AI slop tool", and the site raised all my hackles as I thought I'll never touch this thing. It'll be easier to write my own than review yet another AI slop tool written by someone who loves AI.

I'm glad I read the HN comments, now I'm excited to review the source.

Thanks for your hard work.

ETA: I like your option parser

I think most people in this space are having the same EXACT same sets of dilemmas - you can EASILY have a flashy website, except that it's totally against the previous norms for things like you've written! A plain-text bare-bones website is typically what a tool like this is presented with - instead of a flashy looking promotional website that's visually appealing and has all the accessibility and proper UI/UX, etc.

We've truly entered a new, better era of the Internet (IMHO).

Also, thank you for this tool - it looks like a great piece of software!

It’s a good page!

<suspicious-Fry-from-Futurama meme />A little too good...

To be less abstract, it was written by David Mazieres, who was been writing software and papers about user level filesystems since at least 2000. He now runs the Stanford Secure Computer Systems group.

David has done some great work and some funny work. Sometimes both.

Doesn't detract from it. The jai tool is high-stakes, the static website isn't. The tool is designed to be used with LLM coding agents, so if anything it makes sense to vibecode the website, even better if the author used jai in that.

Sigh, I'd still have preferred a basic HTML page with hand-written succinct information instead of this crap verbosity.

There is a man page.

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