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Comment by incanus77 | Hacker News Reader

This looked great, I started reading things, and then I just kept reading and reading the voluminous description details, and it was an immediate indication to me that the whole thing was built up by Claude. Confirmed in the repo. I closed the tab.

I appreciate the topic, interest, and ambition, but if a human couldn’t be bothered to create and document it, I can’t be bothered to spend my time reading about it.

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"Author" of os8088 here. That's unfortunate. This is a hobby, and yes, it's all written with Claude. I have a bunch of videos up showing the process.

I'm updating the copy of the page to make it extremely clear that it's built using AI so that we can move past that point.

"I want this. I want that. No, not like this, like that. Add this to it."

Sounds like a weird hobby.

Don't kink-shame

Thanks. I want to restate: I respect the idea and the ambition. I'm reacting to this feeling I get when there is a lot of text and documentation (and often code) in a thing, stated in the particular style that Claude and other agents do. It asks a lot of the reader's time, when often there is no guarantee that it is internally consistent or (as noted in some other threads here) accurate. My mind wants to work through the text and understand, but there is no guarantee that for invested time in the length of text, I will reach a coherent place.

To put it another way: if a thing is written by a human from scratch, and there is a lot of text (often not the case, because things like this are built iteratively, in the open, so they reach eyeballs before that point), I can pretty quickly ascertain whether the person knows their stuff and if it is worth my time to continue to try to reach understanding with them, to learn from the coherent vision that they have created and are trying to communicate.

Or, if they are the ramblings of a lunatic, I am hopefully able to ascertain that pretty quickly and move on.

In the case of agent-written text at this volume, it feels written to fool the reader into reaching the first case, without the guarantees of the coherent vision. Maybe that gets better with time, but for me, for now, it's enough to note with interest and move on for now.

Don't give the haters any attention. Let them complain all they want, you're the one having fun and they're not.

But why do you all think we should spend our time reading your empty whining about it?

This is like clicking Google reviews on an eatery and reading “1 star we went there and it was closed!!!” “1 star they don’t let dogs in so we’re never giving them our money!”

Yeah if someone had spent 6 months coding this dead end from 1978 in assembly rather than getting Claude to do it in six days then I’d have given it more time too.

And now you'll understand why they didn't do that. Nobody would/will use either of them anyway. History went the way it did. All sorts of awesome things I saw at that time went nowhere. Awesomeness of the hack or depth of the skill has never equated to success in any kind of market, and the history of computing is filled with people who poured their lives into making something for love of the machine or hack or whatever and then it just sat there unused, unmarketed, or unsuccessful. I could give you a page long list of examples and I've victimized myself in the same way.

Now we can just do that much much faster.

Treat this like fan fiction. Nothing about it existing harms you in any way.

My sarcasm didn’t really come through for you.

Fair.

Also to be fair, the non-sarcastic reading of same comment would be entirely in keeping with other comments in this thread.

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