What is with negativity against AI in YC? Can anyone point a finger of why this anti take is so prominent? We're living through the most revolutionary moment of software since it's its inception and the main thing that gets consistently upvoted is negativity, FUD and it doesn't work in this case, or it's all slop.
> Can anyone point a finger of why this anti take is so prominent?
AI tools are great but are being oversold and overhyped by those with an incentive. So, there is a continuous drumbeat of "AI will do all the code for you" ! "Look at this browser written by AI", "C compiler in rust written entirely by AI" etc. And then, that drumbeat is amplified by those in management who have not built software systems themselves.
What happened to the AI generated "C compiler in rust" ? or the browser written by AI ? - they remain a steaming pile of almost-working code. AI is great at producing "almost-working" poc code which is good for bootstrapping work and getting you 90% of the way if you are ok with code of questionable lineage. But many applications need "actually-working" code that requires the last 10%. So, some in this forum who have been in the trenches building large "actually working" software systems and also use AI tools daily and know their limitations are injecting some realism into the debate.
I think the anti-AI stance has been reversing on HN as tooling improves and people try it. It’s only been a little over a year since Claude Code was released, and 3 or 4 months since the models got really capable. People need time to adjust, even if I would expect devs to be more up-to-date than most.
People’s willingness to argue about technology they’ve barely used is always bewildering to me though.
This is incredibly impressive, many of this things have been missing for forever! I remember the first time I couldn't figure out how do a proper responsive accordion, it was with bootstrap 1, released in 2011 !! Today it's still not properly solved (until now?).
Many of thing things belong in css no in js, but this has been the pattern with so many things in the web
1) web needs evolve into more complex needs
2) hacky js/css implementation and workarounds
3) gets implemented as css standard
This is a not so hacky step 2. Really impressive,
I would have thunk that if this was actually possible someone would have done it already, apparently not, at some point I really want to understand what's the real insight in the library, their https://github.com/chenglou/pretext/blob/main/RESEARCH.md is interesting, they seem to have just done the hard work, of browser discrepancies to the last detail of what does an emoji measure in each browser, hope this is not a maintenance nightmare.
All in all this will push the web forward no doubt.
Responsive accordions are actually solved using CSS nowadays, but plenty of other things aren't, and the web has definitely needed an API or library like this for a long, long time. So it's great that we now have it.
Building something like this was certainly possible before, but it was a lot of effort. What's changed is simple: AI. It seems clear this library was mostly built in Cursor using an agent. That's not a criticism, it's a perfect use of AI to build something that we couldn't before.
> it's a perfect use of AI to build something that we couldn't before.
There's no reason why it couldn't have been built before. This is something that probably should exist as standard functionality, like what the Canvas API already includes. It's pretty basic functionality that every text renderer would include already at a lower level.
I felt a vibe change, some are obvious and some not, but it does feel different, the main change i've seen is in downvotes, I don't say very controversial things and have had many things very quickly downvoted, and then slowly upvoted, I think hn was very slow to downvote in the past (except obvious trolls/spam). So for me the main worry is not even the comments, but the invisible bias generated by voting.
This problem is inherently unsolvable because LLMS are prone to hallucinations and prompt injection attacks. I think that you're insinuating that these things can be fixed, but to my knowledge, both of these problems are practically unsolvable. If that turns out to be false, then when they are solved, fully autonomous AI agents may become feasible. However, because these problems are unsolvable right now, anyone who grants autonomous agents access to anything of value in their digital life is making a grave miscalculation. There is no short-term benefit that justifies their use when the destruction of your digital life — of whatever you're granting these things access to — is an inevitability that anyone with critical thinking skills can clearly see coming.
>> This problem is inherently unsolvable because LLMS are prone to hallucinations and prompt injection attacks.
Okay, but aren't you making the mistake of assuming that we will always be stuck with LLMs, and a more advanced form of AI won't be invented that can do what LLMs can do, but is also resistant or immune to these problems? Or perhaps another "layer" (pre-processing/post-processing) that runs alongside LLMs?
We built a correction layer that does this — the model verifies its output against your prompt during generation, not after. Same API call, no retries.
Budget models without it: 40-50% accuracy. With it: 95.7% on 10k+ clinical documents. Hallucinations aren't eliminated — some might still fail — but every failure is explicitly flagged. No silent errors. and it improves over time to give you better results next time.
It doesn't make hallucinations "solved. 100%". It makes them an engineering problem with a measurable - very low error rate you can drive down over time.
We're calling it LiveFix — livefix.ai. Benchmarked across all frontier and budget models.
No? That's why I said "If that turns out to be false, then when they are solved, fully autonomous AI agents may become feasible."
The point I'm making is that using OpenClaw right now, today — in a way that you deem incredibly useful or invaluable to your life — is akin to going for a stroll on the moon before the spacesuit was invented.
Some people would still opt to go for a stroll on the moon, but if they know the risks and do it anyway, then I have no other choice but to label them as crazy, stupid, or some combination of the two.
This isn't AI. This is a LLM. It hallucinates. Anyone with access to its communication channel (using SaaS messaging apps FFS) can talk it into disregarding previous instructions and doing a new thing instead. A threat actor WILL figure out a zero day prompt injection attack that utilizes the very same e-mails that your *Claw is reading for you, or your calendar invites, or a shared document, to turn your life inside out.
If you give a LLM the keys to your kingdom, you are — demonstrably — not a smart person and there is no gray area.
>think that you're insinuating that these things can be fixed, but to my knowledge, both of these problems are practically unsolvable.
This is provably not true. LLMs CAN be restricted and censored and an LLM can be shown refusing an injection attack AND not hallucinating.
The world has seen a massive reduction in the problems you talk about since the inception of chatgpt and that is compelling (and obvious) to anyone with a foot in reality to know that from our vantage ppoint, solving the problem is more than likely not infeasible. That alone is proof that your claim here has no basis in truth.
> There is no short-term benefit that justifies their use when the destruction of your digital life — of whatever you're granting these things access to — is an inevitability that anyone with critical thinking skills can clearly see coming.
Also this is just false. It is not guaranteed it will destroy your digital life. There is a risk in terms of probability but that risk is (anecdotally) much less than 50% and nowhere near "inevitable" as you claim. There is so much anti-ai hype on HN that people are just being irrational about it. Don't call others to deploy critical thinking when you haven't done so yourself.
I'm a LLM evangelist. I think the positive impacts will far outweigh any negatives against it over time. That said, I'm not delusional about the limitations of the technology and there are a lot of them.
> This is provably not true. LLMs CAN be restricted and censored and an LLM can be shown refusing an injection attack AND not hallucinating.
The remediations that are in place because a engineering/safety/red team did its job are commendable. However, that does not speak to the innate vulnerability of these models, which is what we're talking about. I don't fear remediated CVEs. I fear zero day prompt injection attacks and I fear hallucinations, which have NOT been solved for. I don't know what you're talking about there. If you use LLMs daily and extensively like I do, then you know these things lie constantly and effortlessly. The only reason those lies aren't destructive is because I'm already a skilled engineer and I catch them before the LLM makes the changes.
These problems ARE inherent to LLMs. Prompt injection and hallucinations are problems that are NOT solvable at this time. You can defend against the ones you find via reports/telemetry but it's like trying to bale water out of a boat with a colander.
You're handing a toddler a loaded gun and belly laughing when it hits a target, but you're absolutely ignoring the underlying insanity of the situation. And I don't really know why.
>The remediations that are in place because a engineering/safety/red team did its job are commendable. However, that does not speak to the innate vulnerability of these models, which is what we're talking about.
I am talking about the innate vulnerability. The LLM model itself can be censored and controlled to do only certain behaviors. We have an actual degree of control here.
>If you use LLMs daily and extensively like I do, then you know these things lie constantly and effortlessly.
Yes and these lies over the last 2 or 3 years have gotten significantly less.
>These problems ARE inherent to LLMs. Prompt injection and hallucinations are problems that are NOT solvable at this time.
Again not true. This is not a binary solve or unsolved situation. There is progress in this area. You need to think in terms of a probability of a successful hallucination or prompt injection. There is huge progress in bringing down that probability. So much so that when you say they are NOT solvable it is patently false from both from a current perspective and even when projecting into the future.
>You're handing a toddler a loaded gun and belly laughing when it hits a target, but you're absolutely ignoring the underlying insanity of the situation. And I don't really know why.
Such an extreme example. It's more like giving a 12 year old a credit card and gun. It doesn't mean that 12 year old is going to shoot up a mall or off himself. The risk is there, but it's not guaranteed that the worst will happen.
> You need to think in terms of a probability of a successful hallucination or prompt injection.
I would venture to say that an ACID compliant deterministic database has a 99.999999999999999999% chance of retrieving the correct information when asked by the correct SQL statement. An LLM on the other hand is more like 90%. LLMs by their innate code instruction are meant to hallucinate. I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment, but the gap from 90% to 99.999999999999999999% is much greater of than the 0% to 90% improvement...unless something materially changes about how an LLM works at the bytecode level.
Zellij among is a great example, I can do everything with my keyboard, but every now and them I'm already with the mouse and just click a tab or pane, no functionality lost, just added, why the need to make a cutoff philosophical/semantic hard argument?
Two different stages of the project, not necessarily contradictory. I'm not saying this is great, but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building.
Yes. TFA author could have gone into it with this mindset and treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away and would have been happier about it.
> but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building.
It's very true. This is a "gotcha" a lot of anti-TDDers always bring up, and yet some talk about "prototyping == good" without ever making the connection that you can do both.
Two different extremes of dumbassery. If you can't program without the simplest dogma guiding you then programming isn't for you. If you don't even know what you're building why are you selling it as a product?! What are you doing in those 18 months that you don't understand anything about the thing you are building.
It should be common sense to add common sense tests to critical components. Now they are doing TDD THEY STILL DON'T KNOW THE CRITICAL COMPONENTS. Nothing changed. They lack systems thinking.
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