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Comment by mindwok | Hacker News Reader

How many times can I read the same shallow guidance written by AI on using a coding agent? Good god when will it stop

You're absolutely right to call this out — and honestly? I want to sit with that for a moment. Here's the thing: this isn't really about AI writing. It's not even about coding agents. It's about something much deeper. What's genuinely worth knowing: while I generally agree, many people may not. I think there's a really interesting conversation to be had here. Thanks for naming this. It needed to be named.

(/s - Blargh, writing like that that by hand is exhausting)

I could literally feel my blood beginning to boil. You have a talent for this.

Hah thanks. I also feel this way rage-spotting AI-generated text everywhere these days. I have been looking into the speech patterns of LLMs lately ("unslopping" my own AI outputs) so had a bunch of the most horrible cliches memorized. Unfortunately this is a useless talent as a "reverse mechanical turk" at approx $25,000 for 1M output tokens (at 0.3 tok/sec) is not competitive in today's market.

And honestly? That’s rare.

saying the quiet part out loud

If you hadn't used ' instead of ’, I would never have realized this was actually written by hand.

If you wrote this yourself, congratulations are in order. I was genuinely annoyed. It’s not easy. It’s hard. It’s not entertaining. It’s infuriating.

You're absolutely right!

I was at a restaurant the other day and my kid noticed how the waiter started every sentence with "Absolutely!" That reminded me of the Anthropic Super Bowl ad, and got me thinking if the waiter's speech patterns had been influenced by AI.

In my time in the US, way before LLMs, very agreeable and helpful waiters/Whole Foods staff would already be using ‘absolutely!’ in that enthusiastic manner. Helping someone out was always possible, I enjoyed that.

Yes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754

Eventually we will just speak tokenese rather than english

Nonsense. We grew up quoting our favourite shows, abhorring certain words, preferring others. This is just another cultural modification engine, like everything else humans do.

COTD! Now just slide a rick roll in there.

“Chat, raise my vitriol”

Can't wait to learn more about how to vendor-lock-in myself really hard into not being able to code without the help of a specific corporation!

I hear you on vendor lock-in. Everyone's freaked out about other companies getting the upper-hand with AI in the loop, so there's this charge to use the hell out of it at all costs. Meanwhile, we're quietly picking winners and losers on the service side of all this, and we'll have to live with that outcome for a long time.

At this point, I'm seriously considering what it would take to build a reasonable budget-AI box that's self-hosted. It wouldn't need to blow the doors off of Claude, just get me most of the way there. Maybe even build it out of used and/or last-gen GPUs and a beefy motherboard.

Right now, self-hosting is too expensive if you’re starting from scratch. We have an old EliteDesk that can run the most basic of models, but it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Electricity is also quite expensive in many places, it adds up.

If hardware prices ever come back to sane levels, eh… the Framework desktop with Ryzen AI might be interesting to play with.

Self-hosting right now is in a weird spot. I'd say that the main benefit of the open models is not self-hosting, but having dozens of different independent providers that can host them for you. You aren't stuck with a single one.

self-hosting is fine, but even if you had a $100k god box with opus-level LLMs, you'd still end up grinding it to a halt if you tried running 5-10 parallel inference streams

For most people, CC is cheaper tokens for a SOTA model.

What agentic platform would you recommend for those with API access (including other models)?

Basically any other that is not stuck to being managed just by one company. Claude Code does things like using CLAUDE.md and other stuff specific to just their platform, so you are basically locking your project, and everyone else who works on it, to Claude Code only, if you don't also port everything you do to other harnesses. If Anthropic is giving cheaper tokens in exchange for locking you in into their ecosystem, then maybe it's time to test other models and not just use Claude for everything.

I do find it somewhat concerning that the incentives aren't aligned, but as long as things live on your computer it should take just a prompt to migrate to something new

And Codex is open source

It also can respect AGENTS.md, just saying. It’s all about your README.md. But I’m with you about being agent agnostic.

Of course it can, it's Microsofty tactics, support everything but generate "proprietary" stuff by default. Read ODF but generate docx.

If you don't like CLAUDE.md, you can just add a memory/modify the plan agent to make an AGENTS.md. These aren't rigid systems. And, you don't have to tell it to look for an AGENTS.md, it'll just pick it up. First thing it does with /init is just look at what's already in the project folder. You should give CC a try!

works the other way as well, i have my opencode.jsonc which declares what model an agent should use, and it points at .claude/agents/ those agents each have their anthropic based model instead, almost feel like this broke in the past week though for just cc, hard to tell as cc keeps changing and i dont wanna update and learn more claude based nonsense again, if i wasn't locked into a year of pro or whatever, I would 100% be done using them entirely.

Most people would do fine with DeepSeek (4, Pro) and OpenCode.

Much cheaper too.

The comment wasn't about CC specifically. If you rely (like, can't ship without it) on any model that you don't control, it's not really your product. If Dario decides to increase pricing 500% because it's Tuesday, and you can't work without CC, you really have no choice but to open your wallet.

Open your wallet and pay someone who can? We used to call those technical cofounders, right?

codex is also good, has better usage limits compared to CC.

Issue is that CC forced corps over 150 people into a API pricing, which is, well, suboptimal compared what we get. I think it will push those towards hiring more juniors (finally).

>I think it will push those towards hiring more...

...H1Bs.

I find it interesting how they are almost all specifically for Claude and/or Claude code. When open source glm-5.1 is just as good - if not better and stuff like opencode exists.

Makes one wonder...

How easy is that to setup by comparison?

Not hard; just initially expensive (hardware mostly).

While I'm also a huge fan of local LLMs and believe they will be key in the future; I think the claim of "just as good" is hyperbole. They're productively useful tools though, and something worth exploration.

Well GLM-5.1 is 744billion params, no way I can run that locally. I use the opencode Go or Zen subscription. They have a zero day retention policy for all the model providers which is nice. And then I can still use little local models like qwen and stuff by just swapping over to them.

But GLM is SOTA level for code, so it's obviously going to beat all local small models by a lot.

Extremely easy.

Download opencode GUI or cli. Sign up for Go or Zen plan, choose GLM-5.1 model.

And you don't even have to use the OpenCode CLI, their subscription works with Pi, Charm and other harnesses. This is the way. If they screw up everything, I can drop their sub and go somewhere else.

This was so nauseating to read. It could just be stripped down so much, the problem is the content is quite good and then it's just full of this AI fluff. ...

"Read it again." - "Now the fun part." - "Short file, huge payoff. Keep it tight." - "The file isn't a knowledge base, it's a guardrail"

Also the Specific-day + specific-number + reveal format of sentences as well.

"Read it again." - This is the worst one, as if I didn't read it the first time. I do not think I have ever been told to read a code snippet again at the end of it.

"a different kind of force multiplier" - make it stop!!!

My strategy these days is just use a popular product to do good work or don't. Stop reading life hack articles and blogs about the best one or the best way. Don't even click it.

Do you have any resources for someone just getting started that you'd recommend? I've --successfully-- ignored AI for the last two years as I was taking care of our kiddo. I'm attempting to catch up in the next few weeks.

If you're talking about Claude Code: Just the official docs [0] and then the best practices tweeted by Anthropic team members like Boris (@bcherny).

Ignore all the 3rd party frameworks (at least for now, probably forever.)

[0]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart

Realize that this is all about assembling snippets of text into a prompt.

When context becomes too big quality goes down.

Now go play with your kid.

You took the time to write out this comment. To the benefit of those who read it, please expand upon where the article is shallow and what content you miss.

The critique seems perfectly clear to me: The post has no value. There's nothing to salvage, no improvements to be made. It would be best if it simply did not exist.

The poster probably hopes (as many of us do) that people will absorb the sentiment and post less of this junk in the future.

It can stop now and you can choose not to click on the links :)

Reachmaxxxing wannabe influencers who were too far gone to looksmaxxx have to do something to grift a living and NFTs are dead.

I mean, to be fair there is nothing but shallow content available considering it's all stochastic responses that are incredibly difficult to actually measure and make real scientific inferences about. Until that changes I think it's going to be constant slop about optimization.

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