Comment by phforms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phforms | Hacker News Reader

As a more-or-less neutral observation (I still kind-of like the project): What I find curious - perhaps a sign of these times: After just 2-3 months in development (judging from the repo commits, obviously I have no insight into what came before), the developer already communicates Jolt as a feature-complete, polished (perhaps even mature) Clojure dialect with multiple Jolt-adapted libraries from JVM-Clojure, FFI, Fibers, already with a professional looking and marketing-focussed website, detailled documentation, nREPL support, etc. Things I wouldn’t expect so soon from a language developed (mostly?) by a single person in such an early release stage.

I don’t know how to get a feeling about the actual state of projects like this anymore, so I always remain a bit suspicious. In Clojure, there is the (Rich Hickey inspired) design philosophy of “hammock driven development”, where we don’t rush things, let them simmer while lying in the hammock, sleeping on them, taking a walk, etc. Makes me wonder if projects like this are too rushed these days without thinking things through, discussing design decisions and getting ideas from other people, letting them mature over time. This isn’t specifically about Jolt (I don’t know much about it or its creator), it just inspired the thought, especially when comparing it to projects like Jank which has been years in development, with lots of feedback from the community and Clojure core maintainers as input.

The reason it's possible to move fast here is due to the fact that I'm porting an existing language to a new runtime. All the hard work and hammock time has already been spent by the core Clojure team and the community. I'm not aiming to reinvent the wheel here. Furthermore, having worked with Clojure for nearly two decades now, I have a very good idea of what the language does, and what I need to implement on the host platform.

Once I had the basics bootstrapped, it was really a matter of getting tests passing, and then getting more and more libraries to run on it which allowed me to exercise their own tests. And that's what really made the whole thing possible. It's sort of the ideal scenario where you have very well specified inputs and outputs, and a ton of existing tests to ensure you are implementing the behaviors correctly.

The only other aspect here is performance, and that's addressed by having an extensive benchmark harness which compares with JVM timings. This allows me to see where performance gaps are, and focus on addressing them.

I would be careful in extending my experience of being able to port Clojure to Chez Scheme runtime to working with LLMs in general because in most cases you don't have such well defined parameters when you start.

Great work. It just simply worked for me.

This is the germane point here. I'm not into LLM coding myself, but was talking about just this with my CS PhD supervisor yesterday, and porting language implementations is basically a perfect use case for them. He's been using them for porting examples from one language to another and was saying it was perfect - he already knows what he wants to see, understands both languages, and needs a syntax aware typist, essentially.

This. Good stable foundations allow for quick software development. Even if you use AI for coding, working with Clojure as an experienced developer produces extremely good results quickly because of the great foundations.

I love the expression "the hammock time has already been spent": it is actually very accurate and I'm very grateful to the Clojure team and community for spending that time!

> I don’t know much about it or its creator

The guy literally has published book(s) on Clojure - not some random, unknown, AI-wielding teenager from somewhere in Nebraska. I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing.

But of course, nothing is wrong with being suspicious about any new projects these days. Overall, I agree with your sentiment here.

Not slop, though. The main developer is Dmitri Sotnikov (yogthos), who's been around in the Clojure scene for a long time and knows what he's doing.

However, you're right to point out that the development is moving really fast.

I'm building a Clojure compiler for machine learning (https://github.com/sheaf-lang/sheaf), and after 9 months, it's still very far from being production-ready.

> Not slop, though.

What would you call 2k commits in 2 months by a single committer if not slop?

It definitely is vibe-coded, but yogthos is a competent programmer who has been working on public Clojure projects and repos since 2009, and has maintained a large Clojure framework since well before LLMs were a thing.

I don't think "2k commits in 2 months" is enough to dismiss as slop when it's being developed by a competent Clojure dev.

Competent or not, slop is still slop. The website in particular uses the exact same copy-paste layout/style produced by LLMs and used by pretty much every slop project out there.

One very quick "slop or not?" test is to see if em dashes are used in the source code where they literally never make sense. It's not a great test, but it's one that consistently turns out to be good enough. The results should speak for themselves: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajolt-lang%2Fjolt+%E2%80%9...

The website layout is the same one I used in projects like Luminus long before LLMs even existed https://luminusweb.com

If you have specific comments about the quality of the code then I'd be happy to discuss that. Attacking other people's work because they used tools you don't understand is just toxic trolling. And the fact that you judge code quality by the number of em dashes in the comments really speaks volumes.

Maybe spend a bit of time figuring out how to use new tools effectively instead of harping on what other people are doing.

It's very telling that whenever somebody starts braying about slop, they never have anything of substance to say. All the noise you add to discussions people are trying to have is the real slop.

If you consider all AI generated text or code slop, then sure, the project's code is AI generated.

But in my case I think there are levels. In this case, the author has the expertise needed to properly design the work and assess the quality of the output. And it seems they intend to maintain and evolve the library actively and long term.

Would I prefer a serious Clojure on chez that's all hand-written, for sure, but beggars can't be choosers.

Probably good to note that this person is building his own language: https://inko-lang.org/

If you have any actual constructive criticism of the code, then I'd love to hear them.

Why would I read something you couldn't be bothered to write?

The real question is why you feel the need to comment on something you don't care to understand. Thanks for admitting you're just trolling and there's no point trying to engage with you.

That's such a knee-jerk, unproductive, smug, uncritical retort. Why?

Tbf, author didn’t really read or write it, why anyone else should

I really love how people keep trotting out this straw man man that working with LLMs is just typing a prompt and then having LLM magically produce a working project. In practice, you obviously read the code to understand if it makes sense, and iterate on a solution just as you would when writing it by hand.

All you're doing here is exposing the fact that you have no clue how these tools actually work, or how to use them effectively.

It makes me wonder if these same people take issue with task delegation in software development: is it also problematic when a staff engineer delegates tasks across teams, or a senior engineer mentors a junior developer?

It's such a stifling, self-limiting belief that it's actually saddening :(.

It's also a hypocritical belief: the machine they used to type out these thoughts were assembled in a factory, using CNC, pick-and-place, laser engraving, plastic injection molding, etc. With the exception of a few things (ex: the silicon itself) all of these things could be hand crafted - it would just make the price of computer impractical. Commoditization is a good thing, and automation is necessary for that.

I can only imagine that what is actually happening is that these people are attached to the craft of software development, and AI represents a threat to that, just as CNC milling has displaced manual machinists. But then everyone would be better off if they found an appropriate place to vent that frustration (a therapist? a friend? like-minded forum dedicated to AI complaints?), rather than projecting onto (and leveling complaints at) people using AI.

If said staff engineer would then claim junior’s work as his own, then yes. But for an entirely different reason, as well as this whole analogy doesn’t work here.

I'm a Jolt user and active Clojure user, and I'd say you're right in a sense.

The caveat is that this isn't typical AI slop. The author knows the subject deeply, designed the system themselves, has extensive Clojure test suites to validate against, and has basically been working on it 24/7.

Can you trust it like a compiler someone spent 7 years writing and knows line by line? Probably not. But it's closer to alpha software than useless slop. As more people use it, we'll find out how robust it is, and whatever issues exist can be fixed as they're found.

So ya, I agree you shouldn't be asked to review AI generated code the author didn't review themselves. I think the ask here is more to try it and see how complete and robust it actually is. And even that only makes sense because the author is a known expert who appears to be steering the model carefully.

I am almost certain that, on a daily basis, you use dozens (or hundreds) of things that:

1. Were produced via plastic injection molding.

2. Were machined by CNC.

3. Have PCBs that were fabricated by machine, milled by machine, and populated via pick-and-place machine.

4. Were laser engraved, or silk screened, or printed.

5. For food/foodstuffs: were processed in an automated factory.

When you use all of these things, do you complain about using/consuming something that someone "couldn't be bothered to hand craft"?

If you don't see/anticipate the utility in a thing (like I don't have any interest in wicker baskets, hand crafted or not), why complain about that thing, instead of just moving along? I'd get it if you wanted to provide constructive feedback, but you can't do that if you're not willing to read the code.

Harboring (and expressing) negative sentiment for things that you opt to not be involved in sounds like a recipe for misery, as there's an infinite number of things to actively dislike if you go looking for them: movies/music that aren't to your tastes, mediocre restaurants, cities you wouldn't want to live in, etc.

'Slop' is a word about quality, like in 'AI slop' - a low quality code generated with LLM. Did OP managed to achieve reasonable quality notwithstanding the speed? I don't know yet, but unless you can point to something sloppy in the repo, calling it slop may not be warranted.

> > Not slop, though.

> What would you call 2k commits in 2 months by a single committer if not slop?

Productivity. Slop is when you push a huge volume of garbage or mediocre stuff, no?

From what I’ve seen so far, I would also not dismiss it as slop, even though I’m generally against vibe-coding (but more for ethical and environmental reasons, not because the code is inherently bad/slop/whatever). Many people seem to have a hard time acknowledging that LLMs actually can produce good stuff, but it highly depends on the experience of the developer who guides them.

If a dev is competent and has enough experience actually writing code and making good design decisions, I see no reason to judge their work on the basis of what tools they used to get the job done. However, it may still put me off, since I find it hard to value LLM-written code the same way I value human-written code, even though it may be equally good or even better in quality.

The website is clearly slop. I KNOW it has been generated because it has the bog-standard unique claude LLM card-mistake that humans who hand-code just DONT make.

Ah, so you're saying my Mazda that's manufactured has little (or no) value because it wasn't hand-crafted like a Bugatti? I suppose I should be ashamed to even call it "a vehicle". What a shame - assembled by a bunch of stupid machines, god knows in what part of Japan.

You're right to be suspicious: it's slop.

This is such a disingenuous, childish, immature and ignorant take - I can't even remain calm without getting angry.

Have you ever, kids, tried building anything useful? Anything practical, anything that actually works, anything beneficent? With or without AI?

Well, if you have in fact ever tried, perhaps you'd know that building reasonably complex software remains a difficult, challenging, unappreciated work. With or without the help of any tooling. AI-assistants included.

Maybe try building something good first. Earn your right to throw the first stone, come engaged, come prepared, ask questions.

What you're doing is a fucking slop. Human slop of ignorance. Worst kind.

Okay, I'm gonna go work on something good. Will return with questions.

Honestly LLM’s really foster hammock driven development.

It's really unfortunate that Hacker News has become an echo chamber of AI trash, but I suppose that's to be expected from people who have a vested interest in OpenAI and Anthropic, to the detriment of literally the entire world. I'm quite confident that YC is taking deliberate action to portray LLMs as a good thing much like Fox News.

LLMs are not only OpenAI and Anthropic. Some of us liberally use local models as well. You can't just portray the entire chunk of innovation as "trash". It's like calling the invention of plastics as such. Even though it has brought tons of problems, there's just no way to uninvent things back into oblivion. It's illogical to ask people to stop talking about plastic, and encourage them to not use any - that's just dumb and pointless and won't make any problems magically disappear.

Au contraire - if anything, we should talk about LLMs more and we should find more ways to democratize this technology. Silencing and scolding people won't help fight OpenAI and Anthropic's hegemony.

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