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Comment by stschaef | Hacker News Reader

I posted a sharp critique in the original discussion, aiming to be civil while critiquing the project. I may have been a bit terse, and would probably rephrase some of it now to avoid confusion, but I don't think I was ever outwardly disrespectful.

I received several very emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author. They felt very out of place and did not engage substantively with any of the things I said. It was indeed very weird

The author, who I hadn't heard of before yesterday, actually seems like a cool dude. He was quite responsive, normal, and engaged with my feedback, which makes other random accounts being offended on his behalf all the more uncanny

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I think people responded that way because you strongly implied he was an unserious vibecoder who was just fooling around, and you called him suspicious as fuck.

Your post and the ones that followed are a good example of the contrarian dynamic that dang often talks about. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

OOTL, could you give a link to a relevant @dang post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140587

> called him suspicious as fuck

I don’t see anything from your parent commenter on the other thread that deserves that classification. On the contrary, while they initially had suspicious of vibe coding, on later comments they are cordial and even admit their own misunderstanding.

What am I missing? Where does “called him suspicious as fuck” come from?

Edit: Answered below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754311). Thank you.

"you [...] sound sus af" at the end of the comment. sus means suspicious and af stands for as fuck.

Thank you. I did indeed miss that. I did do a ⌘F for the individual words, but it didn’t occur to me they could’ve been written like that.

To be fair, writing "sus af" is different from writing "suspicious as fuck" (just like "wtf" reads differently from "what the fuck", etc).

Not to mention the author themselves say "Yes, there's a lot of vibe-coding in many places [...] We'll prune AI slop over time.", and then they both moved on to discussing the actual questions.

The whole "Wow, looks AI" > "Yeah, some of it is, we'll fix it later" was such a small part of the conversation, but then there are countless of other people chiming in about specifically the "Is It Slop Or Not?", rather than the meat of the conversation. And here we are adding even more meta-comments about it.

>who was just fooling around

In my own professional life, I've found this to be a very divisive statement. For some, it is a sign of wasting time and effort. For others, they use this to describe themselves when they want to do exploration for the goal of finding improvements, without any clear goal because they have a few ideas but none worth putting forward. I've been told to spend time learning AI and have found that saying "Yeah, I'm playing around with it." was the wrong thing to say because it was seen as not doing anything worthwhile. It doesn't matter that I would also say the majority of my tech skills were developed when I was "playing around".

I wonder if this is purely a linguistics breakdown, or if this is tied to some deeper difference in a person's relationship to tech?

Agree it's divisive, and I would argue it speaks more to a person's perception of work vs play more than a relationship to tech. If (the general) you think that play is for children and work is serious biz, then yeah I could see how you wouldn't take someone seriously when they say they're "playing around with it". It's usually not obvious which attitude a person has though without getting to know them a little bit.

Yes, I think it can be a sign of a very deep difference. When they say "spend time learning AI," they mean work through some teaching materials to learn how to replicate what others are doing. This often doesn't result in a deep understanding, but it can be enough to allow them to do their job.

Ironically, people with this mindset will sometimes ask people who they recognize as having strong skills to share their magic secret, which is assumed to be some books they read, videos they watched, courses they attended, etc. If you tell them that experimenting, playing around, etc. is a key element, they may assume you're just selfishly hoarding your fount of knowledge.

> I received several very emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author

I took a look and honestly the replies were a lot more reasonable than I was expecting them to be. I don't think it's that out of place for people to inform you that the author has been in this space for some time and has prior work to look at (pre-vibe coding era). Really there was one reply citing his prior work, you responded to it calling it a very strange reply and were "very confused" why they would point to his history, even though you had just said things like:

>I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering

To me, it makes sense why someone would say the author has been interested in this area for a long time and pointed you to some prior work that was not vibe-coded, given your comment strongly implies they are just messing around and don't know much about the field.

To be clear, I share much of your feelings in your original comment. I just felt the replies weren't so unreasonable either. At least, I was expecting them to be a lot worse.

I don't think it was reasonable to call other poster a bully academic in need of a therapist. Calling the project vibecoded (perj.) and sus is very mild compared to what Reviewer #2 would have to say.

I agree with the other poster that is was very suspicious initially (sus af is not how I would put it, that sounds like a generational term) the author nuked their commit history while simultaneously pointing to a (Fable-written) paper which referenced the commit history in benchmarks. Then they seemingly had no understanding of why that's trust-breaking.

So to me, it sounds like the author didn't even read the paper they wrote, because otherwise they'd have remembered referencing the commit history, and wouldn't be asking us why we'd even care about it. “They” told us care! I'm glad they restored it but apparently that wouldn't have happened without the criticism.

I’ve posted a follow up somewhere else in this thread about how I can retroactively see why some people would read rudeness in my comment. Even though this isn’t intended, I agree I need better choice of words

What I didn’t understand when expressing confusion with the responses, and still don’t, is the personal nature of the response. It wasn’t pushing back against anything I said really, moreso it tried to bring up the credentials of the speaker; and, I guess this feels a nonsequitr

Like, if I say “I have these problems with thing X”, it doesn’t really matter who made X. Sure, it’s context I didn’t have and there is something to be gained in saying it; but, it doesn’t really change any of the critiques I had. Appealing to the authority of the creator doesn’t engage with nearly everything I said

> I guess this feels a nonsequitr

How is that a non-sequitur? You're the one who brought up the topic of credibility in the first place. The comment was simply made in response to that.

It was a fair critique, but if you're looking for feedback I think people were probably responding to your last line.

"I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding" comes across as very backhanded and condescending. It sounds like you may have actually meant that genuinely, but it doesn't read that way in text form.

"you sound sus af" is not respectful or constructive in my opinion. It's a description of your own feelings, not a critique of the project, and there's not really any way for the author to respond besides ignoring it or saying "sorry you feel that way" or something.

I think that line undermines the rest of your comment, because I'm left thinking that you don't really expect good answers to your questions and you just think the whole thing is dumb.

Yeah, reading it again it sounds far bitchier than initially intended. Thanks for the response

I was writing the comment very stream of consciousness and not really think about how it may come across

If I were trying to boil down what I’m attempting to communicate, it would be 1. The project seems cool, but it’s also making some very strong claims that I’m hesitant to accept

2. The coolness of the thing is undermined by the presentation of it. It comes across as putting the cart is put before the horse, and the overly strong claims and marketing speak read as trying to rhetorically sway the audience rather than engage with them technically.

3. I genuinely am happy that the creator made this, but modulo the above worries I think it should be reeled in a bit. In part because of the concerns I have about the content, and further because it is the kind of language that I expect others to have a strong averse reaction to. Possibly to the point of also reaching the top of HN with their negative response

To a friend, it might be easy to capture some of this message with “you sounds sus af”, but to a stranger in the internet I see how I just sound like a jerk. Words do matter, and I think I’ll be more careful about this in the future

I'm not familiar with the author, and I'm still mildly offended by your comment.

If I have years of experience on the topic and invested significant time into the project, I'd not be as civil as the author if someone came in and essentially called it vibecoded slop.

There is nothing weird about how others pointed out that the project appears to have merit contrary to how it at first might have looked to you.

You posted a passive aggressive as personam and are (or at least act) surprised for getting called out.

[checks profile]

If this is your first HN account and you haven't seen the site in the prior decade, the "emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author" is the SOP. The site has yielded to that attitude because dang never enforced a sensible code of conduct, and relies mostly on favoritism and in-groups. Who says is more important than what is said, and the critiques you give are ranked according to whom you are critical of.

Think of this as a propaganda channel of a VC startup incubator who is brazenly looking for a product-market fit for anything and everything AI. Look at the roster of the recent startups and how many are AI-focused. Adjust expectations from there.

Do you have examples of sites that you prefer that achieve this, or have a relatively high signal to noise ratio that also have a high volume of discussion? (preferrably not an individual's blog + comment section)

Lobste.rs

Hmm.. anything else?

I am relatively new to the site, and I guess I’m just surprised by this. I thought the dweebs here would mostly care about the technical content

But I guess I totally ignored the YC context in that interpretation

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