Ask HN: I created a web browser using Claude, everybody hates it | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I created a web browser using Claude, everybody hates it

4 pointsroschdal9 comments

I created a web browser, Northstar web browser, using Claude, Gemini and Chatgpt Codex, everybody hates it, insults me personally and calls it AI slop.

https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser

Does this mean that the AI coding services are a failure? Claude is a failure?

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Well you led with mentioning that you used AI and didn’t say what your personal contribution was. If that answer is zero or near zero, it’s not valuable as a project. In a world where AI can write code, your job as a human is acting as a quality gate.

For better or worse, the online tech community on many social media sites is heavily against AI generated projects, and will usually be highly negative about them. If you're showing it off on Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc, you'll basically get obliterated in the comments and quotes the second you mention AI has been used in any capacity.

Does that mean AI coding services are a failure? Not necessarily, they can help you make things more quickly.

But don't expect people to treat the output of said tools as a serious effort in the field, since the general attitude seems to be "why should I care about anything made using AI if I can just generate the same thing myself?"

Having been in this racket for some time, it's very rare to not have pockets of extreme criticism of the things you share online. It doesn't matter how passionate you are or how honest, there will always be armchair critics that are interested in finding reasons to discredit whatever youre up to.

Right now, there is a special cadre of people who think they can stop what's currently happening with llms by being abusive and extremely negative. And for some reason, the abuse is just totally accepted in communities that have historically touted themselves as inclusive.

These folks are borderline mentally ill, or at least exhibit extreme and over the top reactions that are symptomatic of mental distress. Feel empowered to ignore them completely. Take it as a signal that you're in the right space. Nothing that ever mattered was extremely popular at first. Challenging the status quo is painful.

The vocal minority is always loudest on platforms that give them a voice. I'll share some anecdata with you: I'm in an IC leadership position in big tech, I see what's happening in a lot of the top tech companies. In the "real world" (bay area, fortune 10, 50, 100) these companies are all-in on things like what you're showing here. It will never go back to the way things were.

Your project serves as part of interesting case studies for what llms are capable of. Only you can give an honest assessment to your question:

Given what you've seen with this project, do you think that coding services are a failure? What did you learn?

I had an idea for a browser that connects to an LLM provider of your choice (local or API) and the browser has a native prompt where you can tell the browser to do whatever you like including building all its own extensions and capabilities. Rather than installing, say, an adblocker extension built by some dev you don't know, you would tell the browser to write it's own adblocker extension to your exacting specifications. One browser, no third party extensions, all the functionality you can prompt for. Might work on it someday when Im not busy.

Have you considered that MAYBE, if you weren't spamming Reddit with the same nonsense every 2 days, people there would have hated you less, and the moderators wouldn't have deleted your posts?

It's also a problem that, although the browser supports most web apis, it can't pass Google botguard checks, because it's an excessively complex, undocumented and secretive botguard system, so people complain the browser doesn't support Google and YouTube.

That's an exaggeration. 2 minute search and I found positive feedback but I didn't see nobody calling with AI slop. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48751910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49017314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49188235

Reddit in particular is very, very negative.

I think this is awesome and you should be proud. The people who are disparaging this because it’s AI, just ignore these noisemakers.

Keep building

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