Hacker News Reader

Another supply chain attack waiting?

Have you tried just adding an instruction to be terse?

Don't get me wrong, I've tried out caveman as well, but these days I am wondering whether something as popular will be hijacked.

View on HN

People are really trigger-happy when it comes to throwing magic tools on top of AI that claim to "fix" the weak parts (often placeboing themselves because anthropic just fixed some issue on their end).

Then the next month 90% of this can be replaced with new batch of supply chain attack-friendly gimmicks

Especially Reddit seems to be full of such coding voodoo

> coding voodoo

Well, we've sacrificed the precision of actual programming languages for the ease of English prose interpreted by a non-deterministic black box that we can't reliably measure the outputs of. It's only natural that people are trying to determine the magical incantations required to get correct, consistent results.

My favorite to chuckle at are the prompt hack voodoo stuff, like, “tell it to be correct” or “say please” or “tell it someone will die if it doesnt do a good job,” often presented very seriously and with some fast cutting animations in a 30 second reel

Make no mistakes!

That's the same thing employees were told... right?! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com