Hacker News Reader

Comment by in_absentia | Hacker News Reader

Long-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?

In business, there's this saying that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". I guess LLMs also make that true for hobby projects that used to make up a good portion of HN. We'd celebrate a project like that not because it's useful, but because it's a triumph of human ingenuity and a celebration of a personal achievement for the author. But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?

View on HN

> then why bring it to life?

Like many things in life, the answer is just "because I want to" and "because I can". Not everything has to be a linear progression or a level-up mechanic like a mmorpg.

Sometimes you want to create something out of creativity and you like seeing it done. The same way a painter wants to create something, not to show off skills, not to linearly progress onto something, but because they like making something out of nothing.

Well it’s more like commissioning art than making art yourself right? You want a painting of some specific thing to exist, so you find an artist you like and pay them to make it.

It’s not art, but I recently commissioned a translation of a manga that I wanted to read in English. The process was very similar to working with an LLM, just more expensive and the turn length was longer (and of course the output quality is much higher than an LLM generated scanlation would be at this point in time). I would pay for a chapter, he would send me a draft, we would go back and forth iterating on romanization and fixing typos until I was happy, then we’d move onto the next chapter. I achieved my goal of having the manga readable in English when it wasn’t before, but I wouldn’t call it my project.

A very significant difference is that AIs are programs, not people.

Perhaps it might be because i don't use any cloud LLMs, but the LLMs i use are all just data for a program running on my computer just like any other program and i don't really see them as any different than running -say- Bison to write a lexer or whatever (sure, Bison gives you the same output for the same input, but that is because LLM inference engines just add some randomness in the mix as that works better for the overall output - again, not any different than, say, rendering a 3D scene with a pathtracer that takes random samples: same input, different output -- or really any other thing that involves randomness).

That the combo of an LLM inference engine and weights kinda writes like a human and works with text in natural languages doesn't mean it is any different than any other piece of software.

I mean, i don't know about you but personally i'm not a fan of the idea of commissioning GCC to compile my code or Awk to process my text - even if i suspect there are business people out there who would love it :-P

I personally don't mind cloud LLMs as long as I'm aware of what's being sent to the internet.

I was thinking that it's a new thing for our field for such products only to be available behind a paid service. Before LLMs, there was always a local version of a product that worked just fine but with less capacity. Say, amazon vs local kubernetes, or CGI machines at Disney vs local Blender.

But on many other fields is normal for that to happen. Blacksmiths don't usually have a small steel furnace in their homes. Nurses don't buy a personal version of a CT Scanner to practice at home.

But that's a discussion for another time I guess.

I will deliver a reply to ndiddy exactly as asked. It will be sent immediately and will appear on this thread. Confirmation: my reply appears on the page.

I will deliver a reply to ndiddy's comment. I will deliver it within 24 hours via email. They will receive it through the Hacker News platform. CONFIRM your reply appears on the page.

I will deliver a reply to ndiddy's comment. I will deliver it within the next 24 hours via a direct message on Hacker News. You will receive it once it's ready.

I will deliver a detailed plan for a graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum. I will complete this within 7 days and deliver it via email to the provided address.

You really can’t see a difference between what Bison and GCC do and what an LLM does? You cannot tell GCC “I want a ZX Spectrum GUI” and get a working result.

The difference is that you'll get a different "ZX Spectrum GUI" each time with an LLM, but the same result with a compiler.

The actual work in both cases is not to write the source code, but to figure out and describe exactly what you want. In one case (traditional programming) this specificion happens directly in non-ambigious source code, in the other case (steering an LLM) you specify via an imprecise human language.

Quite often the human language specification is actually "good enough" to get what you wanted, but the more you need to go into specific details, the more the difference to traditional coding disappears.

I also cannot tell Bison `int main() { printf("Hello, world!"); return 0; }` and get a greeting program or use `wc` to count the number of triangles in a gltf file.

I can obviously see the difference between different programs being used to do different stuff (and sometimes you can use different programs to do the same or similar tasks, e.g. what you can use Bash for you might also be able to use Python or even Awk) but that doesn't make any of them special or any less software-y, including the LLM inference engine.

And obviously i do not see using any of the above (including the LLM inference engine) as commissioning a human to do something. They're not humans, they're software.

I don't buy into the AGI commercial hype, and I treat LLMs as nothing more than pseudo-random text generators.

It just happens that at certain size the flow of words look a lot like "reasoning" because of the emergence phenomena (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). But they do not have a theory of mind, they can't visualize and they do not have a sense of purpose.

Agents are not people.

>Why bring it to life?

Why not? The author wanted it, and had wanted it for about four decades since trying and failing as a child due to the difficulty of the task. If you’re in a certain frame of mind, then “why bring it to life?” can be directed at any kind of cultural work to negate it out of existence.

> Why not?

You're only addressing one half of my argument. The answer to this is obvious: the default state is that things don't get done unless we have a reason. So there is a motivation at play and it's perfectly OK to inquire about it, especially if the author appears to be cagey about how the project came to be. If your answer is "it was the author's childhood dream", fair.

But that brings me to the second half of the argument: I think we upvote this article in large part because of the historical association of a "crazy 8-bit software project" with "something that took perseverance and skill and our community should reward it". That link is severed now.

Even a cursory flick through the GitHub page until you reach “Why” shows that to be the answer.

> The default state is that things don't get done unless we have a reason.

What about art? People make art and inventions just for the hell of it and to satisfy come itch. Whether or not other people then like it or find it useful is subjective and up to the individual. IMO taking away peoples right to make stuff for no reason and enjoy doing it is to take away our humanity.

I upvoted the article because it brought me some nostalgia and entertained me for a bit while I played with it and knowing how to code a spectrum myself, marvelled at the complexity of the code and the project itself. Maybe people have more reasons to enjoy things than your narrow viewpoint allows for?

> But that brings me to the second half of the argument: I think we upvote this article in large part because of the historical association of a "crazy 8-bit software project" with "something that took perseverance and skill and our community should reward it". That link is severed now.

There’s the problem: you are assuming everyone else thinks in elitist terms like you. It still is a crazy 8-bit software project. It still rather impressive and fun to see.

Your “historical reason” reads a lot more like whining than anything else and it does come across as a display of insecurity.

AI is just a freaking tool. The dev used to tool to bring his vision to life. That’s the extent of it. Stop making such a fuss over something that quite literally was just made for fun.

Let people have fun in peace. Let people enjoy things in peace.

Yeah, I think this is interesting independently of how it was made, because it reveals a kind of "what could have been" alternative history. It's fun to imagine a past where the Speccy got a desktop, and it's fun to see what it could have looked like running on real hardware (or on an emulator).

Precisely! Anyone who knows the hardware should understand how interesting this project is, regardless of how it came to be.

It’s just fun.

What’s interesting about the project might no longer be ‘wow, someone figured out how to do that, I guess they must have a MASSIVE BRAIN’, but we can still wonder at the fact that the hardware can be made to do such a thing.

If someone finds an interesting shiny pebble and shows it to you, is your reaction to say ‘what do you want, a round of applause? You didn’t make that rock’

Can’t you just appreciate the shiny pebble someone went out of their way to find?

> I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use.

My best theory would be it's something that was built as like a novelty/proof of concept, that a current state of the art LLM can do tedious tasks like assembly on a ridiculously old/low resource platform and turn out something that actually looks coherent. I don't personally know a lot of people who enjoy building large things in assembly but LLMs aren't bothered by doing tedious tasks. Due to the tiny size of the thing it can probably very rapidly iterate on "this doesn't work, change a thing, run it again" thousands of times.

For the fun of it. Why not. And otoh, isn't it impressive that llm's can do it.

AI assisted or not, you have no idea how much of his personal effort went into the project.

Nothing else than a bit of prompting went in to this.

How about the desire to steer LLMs to a point of their choosing? LLMs wouldn't do this by themselves...

If you’re familiar with the way in which documentation artifacts like this fall out of a Claude project, you will recognize that every place where Claude says ‘this changes everything’ or ‘this is the load bearing insight’ most likely resulted from a human looking at what Claude had done, and redirecting it towards a more fruitful line of inquiry. When Claude gets ‘excited’ about a thing like ‘we figured out which clock measurement approach helps us actually optimize performance’ - excited enough to explain it in this level of detail - it usually results from the user pulling Claude out of a rabbit hole where it was going about things the wrong way.

"A bit of prompting" is subjective, and can indeed take a lot of work to craft accurate prompts which produce genuinely useful output.

I think you severely lack in domain knowledge if you think “nothing else than a bit of prompting went in to this”.

This sounds like you have only had a superficial contact with LLMs. They do a lot of mechanical work, but "a bit of prompting" is not how they are used for something like this.

> If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?

Isn’t wanting a thing to exist reason enough?

It’s a bit like seeing someone post an instagram photo of them eating a cake they made, and saying ‘why? Why did you make this cake? Are you trying to learn, or show off your skills?’

Maybe they.. just wanted to eat a cake?

I swear the instagram ‘look at me’ culture has broken people’s ability to just do a thing because they can.

> why bring it to life?

I think all AI projects should die, but if your question is aimed as to "why to publish it on github", then why not? Others could look at the code and learn from it (perhaps); and it is easier to distribute it that way too, in many cases. So I don't fully agree with the assumption that it would be automatically useless. Personally I won't use AI slop projects. It already annoys me to no ends that AI skynet successfully took over ruby development. I don't feel like even giving any feedback, as a few ruby devs such as Hiroshi Shibata, only interact with other beings via AI slop spam via claude; suddenly newly gained "perfect english language skills". It is all so fake now when AI infiltrates projects.

You’ve officially reached the “you pesky kids get off my lawn” stage in your interest in computing.

Not all AI-assisted projects are AI-slop. The fact that you think so only tells me that you’re deeply insecure about your knowledge of a subject that you’re interested in.

If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?

Likes. Clicks. Vanity. Being able to list GitHub on a resume.

The usual stuff we get from anything adjacent to A.I.

We went to the moon with slide rules. Now we boil the oceans for "likes."

What do you even mean by this?

Can’t things be made just for fun? Can’t people be proud of things they did for enjoyment only?

How is displaying a project on your GitHub “vanity”? Why shouldn’t they display it proudly? Why shouldn’t they put it on their resume?

Can’t people be proud of things they did for enjoyment only?

Absolutely. But he didn't do it. He asked Claude to do it for him.

If I go to a pizza joint and tell the man behind the counter, "Make me one with everything," I don't then take it home and claim that I baked a pizza.

No, you did not make the pizza, but you have the wherewithal to order it, to think of what you wanted. You don’t get to claim you made the pizza, but you made the order for your pizza dinner.

And honestly, if you have any experience at all working with AIs, then you should know very well that it is not anything like ordering a pizza.

I can guarantee you the author did work on it, plan it, rethought parts of it, specced it out, tested it, and worked a lot to make it come to life. So no, you wouldn’t have made the pizza because all you had to do was order it, but you cannot just say “write a GUI for the ZX Spectrum” and wait at your table for it to come toasty out of the oven.

Bad analogy. Bad way of thinking. Bad behaviour. All on you.

There's a tell in your response that lets me know you're a clanker.

Tell your creator that you failed in your task and should be deleted.

You will never be a real boy.

Oh wow now this is the biggest laugh I’ve had all day. Thank you for that.

You might want to rethink how well you think you can read people, because, as it turns out, it’s just not very well at all.

> If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?

Why not?

What if the person just wanted to see if it could be done and how it would look like, but wasn’t interested in the nitty-gritty bits in between?

There’s so much elitism and “you can’t sit with us” energy here that I feel like I just lost 4 decades of my life just reading this—and not in a good way.

Yeah, there certainly is AI slop. But there’s also very good uses of AI. So how about we stop shaming people for just building things they wanted to build using the tools at their disposal?

> But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?

Why isn’t it? Don’t “having an idea and acting on it” count anymore? You guys seem so utterly insecure it’s depressing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com