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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Back in 2019, it was more fair to have caution around the larger GPT-2 models since robust text generation (by 2019 standards) was a complete unknown. For something like Mythos in 2026, where now the social implications of better LLMs are more understood, it's more fair to call it (EDIT: specifically, the declaration of its danger) a marketing gimmick.

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This is a natural follow up question -- what kind of an escalation or message should frontier labs/companies publish to be seen as genuine and not marketing gimmick?

It's fine for the labs to publish model safety cards and stagger releases/limit it to a narrow test group as they are already doing, but saying they're doing it "because the models could be dangerous" comes off as unnecessary as best.

Unnecessary based on what exactly? Your vibes?

One of the main purposes of model cards, from the beginning, has been to outline the ways that a model could be harmful or dangerous, and mitigations that can be or have been taken to reduce those risks. How do you expect labs to publish model cards without talking about this rationale?

I think the point is that the model card should be released with the model, not foreshadowed by several months of ominous tweets from the CEO.

What? So it’s fine for them to be concerned about the safety, try to measure it, publish results about it, start with a cautious phased release approach, basically all the things they’re doing.

But if they say why they’re doing all those things, it’s too much? What?

These chicken littles have lied far too many times in far too extreme ways in their desperate attempts to obtain a monopoly by regulation.

The remaining 'worthwhile message' would be that they have deleted their models and are dissolving the company, because they believe the risk was too great and was worth losing the revenue and risk being civically prosecuted by their investors, and will take the chance that they'll be able to convince a court/jury that they acted properly.

In other words, putting their own skin on the line for the veracity of their claim-- rather than everyone elses.

Such as? Yes, yes, we know OpenAI isn’t as open as you want. What else? What are all these egregious lies that the frontier labs have told you?

Well, you can start with this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/11/musk-v-opena...

So the people who tried to kick him out of the company now have a bunch of vague statements like there being "a pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor". No other details. What a crushing indictment.

I dont think they can, their rhetoric is so silly these days that if they did accidentally release something dangerous no one would believe them. The Boy who cried Rokos Basilisk I guess.

I'd say it's almost impossible at that point. Specifically, Altman said so many lies in the past that people stopped believing anything he says.

I think the core of this distrust is the fact that these companies positioned themselves against humanity from the start by saying people will lose most jobs etc. Not only it didn't happen, but many people feel several aspects of their lives got worse because of LLMs, in spite of obvious advantages. So the distrust and reluctance are real.

How is this a gimmick?

It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.

We still didn't "solve" software engineering, try to give Claude code access to your friends or family and see what they do with it.

My partner wrote an android app which was doing what she wanted to do. She did this experiment 5 month ago and she did this in one day.

My wife has 0 knowledge how any of this works.

That was shocking to see.

Progress is not stoping and Fable proves that.

You can scaffold out a simple app pretty easily. Anything large or complex things break down. If you don’t know what you’re doing you end up leaking secrets like the dozens of examples we’ve seen so far.

You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

I was working in a company before which used md5 in 2015! Databases on the internet with a 5 character password. No tests.

A person i know would have broken the whole production DB if i wouldn't have stoped the PR.

Another ex-collegue thought its okay to 'encrypt' with a basic shift cyper creditcard data.

I don't think any of these companies care that much

Yes the same applies to junior and inexperienced developers.

> You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

Indeed. Is Mythos going to change this?

Yes. It is going to make better decisions for people that don't know better.

On one side, it means that a certain amount of business will just use it even if you think its not safe/good enough and they will throw out people and will still succeed.

And on the other side: yes because they will also use LLM review or other tooling and will be fine whatever the 'security llm agent' tells them.

You could always do this, though.

Before gen code killed the freelance business model, there were hoards of people on Upwork/Fiverr willing to fuck other freelancers over and underpay themselves to make whatever barely-working slop you wanted.

Hell, before managers got the idea of AI layoffs, they had been off-shoring to low-quality code sweatshops for years. That was supposed to kill software engineering in the States 20 years ago. And it was just as frustrating (if not moreso) to get them to actually fulfill the project requirements.

I'd say creating a project is 5% of the job and maintaining it over time 95% of it.

It's true that they can start amazing projects without guidance but then the real work begins.

There is almost no maintenance work for bespoke apps apart from infrequent updates to keep OS and hardware compatibility as the environment slowly changes.

Keep in mind, these are not products in the endless feature treadmill promoted by scrum.

I've worked on an app and I'd say the opposite, I even abandonned the app at some point due to the maintenance work involved.

I don't particularly doubt your experience. But if you have struggled to maintain an app that is effectively complete upon inception, it means that changes in your environment are so common that it's a surprise you get anything at all done.

Welcome to the world of apps, apps fits this definition yes.

Thats what the agentic layer will fix, but this is currently getting build.

My non-programmer friends have created:

- A mod manager for Vintage Story in Swift.

- A GameShark Pro adapter using an ESP32 that hosts a web app for dumping N64 ROMs and searching for cheat codes.

For starters it makes you able to bypass having to go on Reddit to find incomplete trace of solution to some niche problem and acts as a sophisticated (but sometimes wrong) search engine. This already is worth every penny and improved my mental health immensely.

Fortunately you still get the reddit experience with AI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hxa3kj/ai_reached...

I don't think my comment adds anything useful to this thread but thanks for sharing this, I was having a rough week and this made me burst out laughing

I am not clicking that link. I have blocked all reddit domains in my router, using AI to retrieve answers from Reddit.

You can copy paste it in reply if you want

Sure.

The quote from Gemini is: "one reddit user says kill yourself"

> It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine

I assure, it doesn't.

It already has!

It’s mind-boggling that anyone could deny this in mid-2026. Virtually every software engineer I know is no longer writing the majority of their code. Many are not writing any code, myself included. And I’m a staff engineer with 20 yoe, formerly at big tech, and now building a (profitable) SaaS of my own. The way I work is wildly different from a year ago.

And no one is going back.

My experience is different. I hear a lot of developers, old and young, scaling back their LLM use now that the bills are coming in. And I don't just mean the financial bills, mostly it's about them realising that there's a lot lf shit they need to fix that the model can't handle, and they no longer understand it enough to either do it or properly prompt a model to.

The most prevalent trend I see around me today is that people are going back to using the LLMs as research, review, and sketching tools, but writing most actual code themselves again. And it's not just AI skeptics doing that, it's those who went all-in and are finally seeing the downsides and limitations of this technology, now that the hype is waning.

I'm happy to have a discussion with you if you bring any argument.

Before GPT what would have been your choise of architecture, setup, alogorithm if someone comes to you and says "write a tool/system which can generate code" "what do you mean generate code? How do i control it?" "by writing what you want in natural language" "puh 50 years of development, 100 billion, top tier team of linguists and software engineers perhaps?"

Ask StackOverflow if they think it didn't change anything for them.

Programming is the reification of decision-making processes. If you don't understand the decision-making process that you want, you get a different one, which at best approximates the one you want but couldn't articulate.

If you do this with COBOL or Python, at least you get consistent operation and errors when you're wrong. If you do this with any LLM, consistency is dropped in favor of obsequiousness.

The base problem is that people aren't equipped naturally to think about all the details of their problems.

Fine for the initial phase were you have to define the architecture and guardrails etc.

But doesn't matter anymore if you just add things.

Has it been released to the public yet? Genuine question. Because if you didn't try it yourself, you have to rely on others' reports. And different people who tried it on different projects got different results, leading to different conclusions.

it was released a few hrs ago as "Fable 5". it's an incremental improvement over Opus 4.8.

It was bullshit in 2019 it's bullshit now too.

They just keep threatening governments in hope they get a legal monopoly.

Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic loves people switching to Codex. Brilliant marketing.

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