The advent of coding agents killed Hacker News to some degree for me. Before I could always come here to get a pause from the hype, scandal and bait. Top comments were usually insightful; I really had this feeling to learn while browsing the feed. Today every brainfart about AI makes it to the frontpage. I know this sounds very dismissive, but most pieces really have no substance at all.
The good content is still there buts it drowns in noise and I'm not very good at filtering it out. I even suspect Hacker News is one of the prime advertisement targets of coding agent companies.
I would love to see if this is just my perception or if it can be found in the data.
Personally I don't care about what news articles end up on the front page - it's AI now, but there have been other trends in the past that did the same.
The bigger problem is the effect that it's had on "Show HN" postings, which in the past were things you could depend on were built by the person submitting it. That's why those posts tended to be more strongly moderated, because they often were seen as attacks on the person's art. Now I feel like most of the credibility has left the room on those posts.
Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with "vibe coding". I do plenty of it myself these days, for commercial purposes. But I feel it cheapens and waters down someone presenting work as their own.
A project was one of the easiest ways to evaluate a stranger. It was a great bullshit detector. If they can make something like this then they are probably someone with ability and experience and so the rest of what they have to say is probably worth listening to. But I also agree with the parent. HN seems to be flooded with hustle and rubbish since AI has taken off. It's eternal LLMber.
I wonder if the marketing/hustlebros who only value our art as a "get rich quick scheme" (IE: the people pushing "Learn to 'code' (I hate the term 'coding')and half the new faces from india) learnt about Show HN and decided to ruin something good by making a linkedin post about "how great of a marketing avenue" we are and the vibecoded slop pushers listened in full force because they know nothing about our industry and thus don't know how valuable a non-salesy place to talk trade is
I'm just going to wait it out, as these trends come and go; before AI it was Rust, before Rust it was IoT, before IoT it was big data, crypto was weaved through it, etc.
tl;dr of the essay, we need to move back to human-to-human recommendations and trust systems, and people are already doing that a lot of ways by retreating to DMs (iMessage, email, in-person conversations) and personal recommendations rather than relying on Google + the algorithm. What this means for public forums I don't know. I think they're gone and will never come back, probably.
It's probably in their interest to have as many vibed codebases out there as possible, that no human would ever want to look at. Incentivising never-look-at-the-code is effectively a workflow lockin.
I always review every single change / file in full and spend around 40% of the time it takes to produce something doing so. I assume it's the same for a lot of people who used to develop code and swapped to mostly code generation (since it's just faster). The spend I time looking at it depends on how much I care about it - something you don't really get writing things manually.
You absolutely can, either through the system prompt or by hardcoding overrides in the backend before it even hits the LLM, and I can guarantee that companies like Google are doing both
You can pattern match on the prompt (input) then (a) stuff the context with helpful hints to the LLM e.g. "Remember that a car is too heavy for a person to carry" or (b) upgrade to "thinking".
If they aren't, they should be (for more effective fraud). Devoting a few of their 200,000 employees to make criticisms of LLMs look wrong seems like an effective use of marketing budget.
It looks like they do. https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...
They patch it in the prompt and they eventually address it in the re-enforcement training. It seems the eventual goal is to patch all of these tiny "glitches" so as to hide the lack of cognition.
It's pretty good at dead code elimination. The size of Go binaries is in large part because of the runtime implementation. Remove a bunch of the runtime's features (profiling, stacktraces, sysmon, optimizations that avoid allocations, maybe even multithreading...) and you'll end up with much smaller binaries. I would love if there was a build tag like "runtime_tiny", that provides such an implementation.
You don't know what you want. That's why asking questions doesn't work. You think you know it, but only after you've spent some time iterating in the space of solutions, you'll see the path forward.
> You think you know it, but only after you've spent some time iterating in the space of solutions, you'll see the path forward.
I'd turn it around- this is the reason asking questions does work! When you don't know what you want, someone asking you for more specifics is sometimes very illuminating, whether that someone is real or not.
LLMs have played this role well for me in some situations, and atrociously in others.
I think what's lacking in LLMs creating code is they can't "simulate" what a human user would experience while using the system. So they can't really evaluate alternative solutions tothe humna-app interaction.
We humans can imagine it in our mind because we have used the PC a lot. But it is still hard for use to anticipate how the actual system will feel for the end-users. Therefore we build a prototype and once we use the prototype we learn hey this can not possibly work productively. So we must try something else. The LLM does not try to use a virtual prototype and thne learn it is hard to use. Unlike Bill Clinton it doesn't feel our pain.
Hey panos! I only had a short look at this for now, and it looks impressive! I'll have to dust off my Dreamcast and get this running.
I looked at gccgo when porting the runtime to n64, but at the time it wasn't updated since go1.18. Can we use Go Generics on the Dreamcast? I see that gccgo is obviously needed to support SH4.
I can provide another POV to that story. We checked in as a family of four, and we're assigned seats in four different rows, with a two and a four year old. Only when entering the plane we had the possibility address this to a human and we were assigned new seats.
So this might be the reason you had to change seats.
they claimed they had to change planes though
i had selected that seat when booking the flight, and there were no humans available to address such issues
The good content is still there buts it drowns in noise and I'm not very good at filtering it out. I even suspect Hacker News is one of the prime advertisement targets of coding agent companies.
I would love to see if this is just my perception or if it can be found in the data.