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)
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.
What we don't want to do is mirror the partisan political environment in the Ai yay or nay. 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 pegs
Sounds kind of like Claude was "cheating" and the humans are engaged in eyes-free coding. Diff so big github refuses to render. I suspect they are reaching the limits of what this new vibe "paradigm" of programming can do. If you haven't pushed a vibe project far, eventually progress becomes near impossible because the slop has grown and the conditions are overly complex, locally focused. Ai is not good at writing reusable software (on their own).
It was certainly assisted by AI, but there isn't an agent out there that does that kind of cheating without deliberate prompting by the operator.
I've taken a vibe-coded project pretty far, with even better testing than most other things: the main factor is that it's big on falsifiability, i.e. it has to see a test for a new feature actually fail before it considers the test any good. Not just the red/green from being originally unimplemented, it does a mutation test to ensure it flips back to red. But wow did it ever make that test framework complicated, byzantine, and ultimately brittle until I step in and force a consolidation and simplification pass.
Yup. These are people who have gone full Claude. The dopamine seeking is at previously unseen levels. they think this pr is some factual item that means something so they post it on HN as click bait. But no it only means something to a fulltime ai slopper
If the Ai came back to me with a 1600x improvement (still in pgrust readme), I would be highly suspicious of the Ai and the code it wrote
The hype factory must grow, I suppose, though I would prefer if the model makers would stop with this "complete the task by any and every means possible" and replace it with "I don't know, I should ask or do more learning"
At least they have added a test which looks to make sure the Ai doesn't do it again... if you need this kind of test, something is wrong
I've noticed it with a lot of random stuff i've been trying
I'll tell claude, "write an implementation of an AAC decoder that is 50% faster than ffmpeg"
and it will do it! Amazing!
Then i tell it "hmm ffmpeg has been really well optimised, are you sure?" and it says "oh, i was running our code directly but running ffmpeg executables with loads of overhead, ffmpeg is actually 50% faster"
If I saw that test in a PR I would not only reject the PR and ask a lot of questions but someone would likely take a forced vacation to deslop their brain.
2nd round: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/2751
Hope the ClickHouse maintainers stand their ground and do not let pgrust back in until it and the maintainer has matured more.
Oh lord. I thought pgrust was a serious project.
This idea of "here's the beta, I'll release the code in a few weeks" sounds counter intuitive to me. is it normal in open source? Any reason for it?
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)
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!
What we don't want to do is mirror the partisan political environment in the Ai yay or nay. 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 pegs
Sounds kind of like Claude was "cheating" and the humans are engaged in eyes-free coding. Diff so big github refuses to render. I suspect they are reaching the limits of what this new vibe "paradigm" of programming can do. If you haven't pushed a vibe project far, eventually progress becomes near impossible because the slop has grown and the conditions are overly complex, locally focused. Ai is not good at writing reusable software (on their own).
stay in the loop friends
It was certainly assisted by AI, but there isn't an agent out there that does that kind of cheating without deliberate prompting by the operator.
I've taken a vibe-coded project pretty far, with even better testing than most other things: the main factor is that it's big on falsifiability, i.e. it has to see a test for a new feature actually fail before it considers the test any good. Not just the red/green from being originally unimplemented, it does a mutation test to ensure it flips back to red. But wow did it ever make that test framework complicated, byzantine, and ultimately brittle until I step in and force a consolidation and simplification pass.
Yup. These are people who have gone full Claude. The dopamine seeking is at previously unseen levels. they think this pr is some factual item that means something so they post it on HN as click bait. But no it only means something to a fulltime ai slopper
If the Ai came back to me with a 1600x improvement (still in pgrust readme), I would be highly suspicious of the Ai and the code it wrote
The hype factory must grow, I suppose, though I would prefer if the model makers would stop with this "complete the task by any and every means possible" and replace it with "I don't know, I should ask or do more learning"
At least they have added a test which looks to make sure the Ai doesn't do it again... if you need this kind of test, something is wrong
https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/38634b408dea373f3944...
I've noticed it with a lot of random stuff i've been trying
I'll tell claude, "write an implementation of an AAC decoder that is 50% faster than ffmpeg"
and it will do it! Amazing!
Then i tell it "hmm ffmpeg has been really well optimised, are you sure?" and it says "oh, i was running our code directly but running ffmpeg executables with loads of overhead, ffmpeg is actually 50% faster"
Transformers will def get us to AGI /s
My new definition for The Singularity is not about Ai intelligence, it is about humans handing over critical thinking regardless of Ai capabilities
Ai companions are where I put the highest p(doom)
If I saw that test in a PR I would not only reject the PR and ask a lot of questions but someone would likely take a forced vacation to deslop their brain.
that requires someone (1) using PRs (2) looking at the PR
the project has 3 mega commits of claude slop
https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/commits/main/