Hacker News Reader

Comment by broodbucket | Hacker News Reader

I hate that 5 years ago I'd see a headline like this and think it was awesome, and now it's just "look at what someone's spent tokens on today"

View on HN

Written by AI and not nearly as impressive at all. Such a shame because I thought someone had spent real time and effort producing this. The output is commoditised and now neither important nor precious. Damn near anyone could repeat it.

To paraphrase another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900086), this project is fun and fun should be encouraged, as experimentation is what leads to more innovative things. The existence of this project doesn't take away from anything.

I don't think it's wrong to do this and I'm glad it's fun for some, it's just not the same as seeing a project like this that was human authored

except it’s not really fun.

addendum because that was admittedly a bit of a low effort reply.

throwing a token generator at an idea is not really fun. there’s a reason show hm rules say something about not posting quick one offs (pretty sure this was originally posted as a show hn?). the fun for someone like me is in the appreciation of the effort, not the result.

quirky idea? sure. but not fun

I have many times chastised commenters about shitting on other peoples toy/hobby/side projects, but like many others I'm a bit lost on the fun of iterating on "get the Linux 0.whatever source code and rewrite it in rust..." and then crowing "LOOK WHAT I DID!" on HN. If the OP had documented "this is how I prompted the code generating LLM du jour to produce an equivalent to this early Linux kernel, this is the AI workflow I used, and this is how I overcame the problems along the way..." or some such, I'd be all in on this being interesting. As it is, it's Yet Another LLM generated bit of self promotion avoiding saying 'AI did this' and disguised as 'innovation', just like the other ten thousand 'I took something people did all the hard work on and had AI gen up a clone in rust/go/python/whatever in an afternoon...aren't I clever'.

I feel like we are past the point where using an AI tool to translate some code, to write some code, to copy some code, is considered interesting or novel.

just putting "rewritten by AI" in the headline would prevent the missed expectation feeling I got from clicking into it. but it would also sound less cool and probably get fewer upvotes, so...

I wish people who do this stuff could at least write their own docs.

I can't help but glaze over any AI written documentation. If it wasn't worth the time to write then it's surely not going to be worth the time to read

In our internal repos, I carefully mark out AI generated stuff versus human generated stuff. Of course, the AI generated stuff is often excellent, but its main purpose is to be there to prompt some AI in the future of what to do.

"look at what someone's spent tokens on today"

Water, drinking water. Fsck these tokens.

I hate LLMs so, so much. They are destroying everything that used to be cool about programming. Or maybe the problem is that a bunch of people who don't actually like programming joined the industry, and now they have a tool that lets them phone it in even harder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com