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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

Not normal. This a new trend of people who use too much Ai, or maybe more specifically the Claw/Ralph loops where you end up with a few commits touching 1000s of files. For about the last year, many Show HN to github projects are often just a single commit

We need to think more about what we are doing as an industry, instead of letting the machines think for us (imo)

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Let any who read this be aware: You should be immediately suspicious of AI code that is much much faster than established code bases. AIs are even better at benchmarkmaxxing than humans are, and humans were already pretty good.

It is by no means impossible for an AI-written code base to be faster than a conventionally-written one, of course. It's just a time to be suspicious. Especially if there's little to no evidence that the human has subjected the code base to any further testing of their own. AIs seen to be able to benchmarkmax even in the presence of a lot of unit tests that would generally speaking have prevented a human from going too far down that road.

The project author seems to have prompted Claude to add a test to catch Claude cheating, but will Claude change this test as a workaround in a future commit, no one knows because no one is reading the project code...

https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/38634b408dea373f3944...

I am getting increasing disillusioned by the number of peers I am seeing completely hand over their thinking to a tool. Agents are great, but if you can't explain to me how your PR changes a system and why design choices were made you are no longer an engineer.

Agreed. Used to be prevalent in the frontend world (now I think it's the only thing that exists seemingly), where programmers would copy-paste stuff from Stack Overflow until things worked, and when you asked "So why did this actually fix the issue?" they usually said "I'm not sure, but it works now, that's what matters". This seems to be standard practice across the entire stack now.

I've even wasted my time jumping on calls (requested by the other party) where after 5 minutes of conversation, it's extremely clear this "technical founder" doesn't even understand the basics of their own design and architecture of the product itself, even less the technical parts.

This seems more a product of the incentives we have in society, namely seeing the rich and wealthy on social media and then wanting that quick and easy. So many of those cases are not people with passion for the problem.

Good things take real effort, bring back the TLC!

> Good things take real effort, bring back the TLC!

Ain't no one willing to reward the real effort any more. I take pride in not using LLMs beyond the capability of IntelliJ's advanced autocomplete, but then again, I only code for fun these days given I fled IT for electrical engineering.

> Ain't no one willing to reward the real effort any more.

A product of the times we currently live in, but which can also be changed.

This is a recent Michael Sandel talk I watch that has my brain gears turning on this subject

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo

What we don't want to do is mirror the partisan political environment in the Ai yay, nay, or how. We need to be able to talk to each other in understanding and a shared reality of facts. Too much hyperbole right now, starting from the top of the big US labs. They need to step down a few ego and sycophancy pegs

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