[HN Gopher] Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project
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Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project
Author : stefanvdw1
Score : 273 points
Date : 2026-01-10 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openchaos.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openchaos.dev)
| kittikitti wrote:
| This is a very interesting experiment where I hope the
| metamorphosis is more like a butterfly than Kafka.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Yes, this could end up either turning into a Linux or like when
| Microsoft released Tay and Twitter users taught it to be a
| Nazi. Or anywhere in between, really.
| jibal wrote:
| It really can't for numerous reasons, one of them being that
| PRs have to be fairly low effort, and this will be even more
| so if the popular "merge daily" PR is voted in. People talk
| about this "evolving", but it's nothing like biological
| evolution or genetic algorithms. It's just a linear sequence
| of small changes, and without either planning and central
| authority or some stable fitness function (the ecological
| environment in biological evolution) the changes are
| directionless.
| sighansen wrote:
| Really interesting. I wonder if something good will come out of
| it. It feels like twitch plays pomemon.
| stavros wrote:
| If you want to see a speedrun, I made the same thing around a
| month ago:
|
| https://theboard.stavros.io
| mappum wrote:
| Excited to see how this plays out, I made something similar a
| while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Are guardrails, CI/CD, to make code at least compile-able and
| require minimal quality standards also possible to change via PR
| or managed somewhere else? With this possibility, it might went
| into oblivion indeed!
| 6r17 wrote:
| I mean.... it's the spirit of the project to eventually be able
| to reach to that state. I freaking love that project woaw
| hahaha
| noncoml wrote:
| Reading through the comments, it's remarkable how many of us have
| had the same idea at some point
|
| Beautifully executed
| electrodisk wrote:
| confused, what is this and what's going on exactly?
| jedberg wrote:
| Click through to the GitHub link at the bottom, which has the
| README. It explains everything.
| phreack wrote:
| https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos?tab=readme-ov-file#...
|
| Anyone makes a PR, there's a vote and highest voted one gets
| merged every week. It's marvelous.
| meltyness wrote:
| Like reddit but nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
| libertyit wrote:
| Genius.
| Dinux wrote:
| I'd expect even more chaos, let an LLM build the features and
| people vote.
| oniony wrote:
| I honestly thought that this is what it was initially.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Is most code not written by LLMs these days anyway?
| Kinrany wrote:
| Most code by lines, perhaps, but not most code that works and
| is useful
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Says who?
| all2 wrote:
| Says anyone who has tried to do anything requiring the
| smallest amount of computer science or computer
| engineering. These models are really great at boilerplate
| and simple web apps. As soon as you get beyond that, it
| gets hairy. For example, I have a clone of HN I've been
| working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding.
| Just those two features required a lot of hand holding.
| Figma Design nailed the UX, but the actual guts/business
| logic I had to spend time on.
|
| I expect that this will get easier as agentic flows get
| more mature, though.
|
| Then the only place that novelty will occur is in the
| actual study of computer science. And even then, a well
| contexted agentic pipeline will speed even R&D
| development to a great degree.
|
| One very bad thing about these things is the embedded
| dogma. With AI ruling the roost in terms of generation
| (basically an advanced and opinionated type-writer, lets
| be honest) breaking away from the standards in any field
| will become increasingly difficult. Just try and talk to
| any frontier model about physics that goes against what
| is currently accepted and they'll put up a lot of
| resistance.
| jibal wrote:
| The name of the person who said it is on the left above
| the comment.
| stavros wrote:
| Behold: https://theboard.stavros.io/
| fourthark wrote:
| The end product is... just the website?
|
| I feel like I'm missing something.
| danr4 wrote:
| It can evolve into anything based on community votes
| drdaeman wrote:
| It's an absurdist art software project, devoid of any
| consistent intent or purpose beyond the operating principles.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| codified dadaismus
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| It's not a product, it's a social experiment for programmers.
| patcon wrote:
| So it begins?
|
| Once you have governance that people stick around for, you can
| decide to do anything
| fwipsy wrote:
| Twitch plays Github?
| lucb1e wrote:
| I don't get the title. Do I understand correctly this is
| basically "Twitch plays Github" without Twitch?
| tedivm wrote:
| When I used to play Screeps[1], a MMO strategy game where you
| programmed to control your units and buildings, a group of us
| setup a player that was managed in this exact way called
| Quorum[2].
|
| If anyone wants to run their own project in this way I open
| sourced the code to do so under the GitConsensus[3] project.
| There's a Github App (which may not still work, but if there's
| interest I'll restart it) and a "run it yourself" python library
| and CLI you can run from Github Actions[4].
|
| 1. https://screeps.com/
|
| 2. https://github.com/ScreepsQuorum/screeps-quorum
|
| 3. https://www.gitconsensus.com/
|
| 4. https://pypi.org/project/gitconsensus/
| polyomino wrote:
| They should automate reading hacker news comments and generating
| PRs to address them
| staticassertion wrote:
| Open a PR and suggest this.
| strangescript wrote:
| This is cool, but once a week seems a little slow
| Kinrany wrote:
| The frequency should be adjusted based on the number of
| participants
| Kinrany wrote:
| It could merge any PR that reaches a set number of upvotes
| throawayonthe wrote:
| there's a PR for that! :p
|
| https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos/pull/51
| Towaway69 wrote:
| is it forkable to have even more chaos?
| fullstackwife wrote:
| Should votes get invalidated after major change in the ongoing
| PR?
| alexpadula wrote:
| Sorry to be a party pooper I just don't get the point.
| izietto wrote:
| I don't think there's a point. You can always submit a point,
| if it gets voted you will have your point
| stingraycharles wrote:
| This is exactly the point.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| It's a bit like bigtech but instead of product people voting on
| what gets merged, everyone gets a vote here.
| alexpadula wrote:
| You know it's kinda like a lottery the more I read it lol! If the
| repo got super popular and had lots of traffic say.
| anishgupta wrote:
| > The website IS the repo. The repo IS the website. I wonder if
| we get something productive by end of 2026 from this repo. Who
| knows, maybe we solve AGI
| Eldodi wrote:
| Would have been even more absurd if code AND PRs were all AI
| generated by different coding agents
| appplication wrote:
| Nothing is stopping that from happening tbh
| jibal wrote:
| It's not possible to generate anything productive this way.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Firefox warns of a security threat when I visit the site.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Merging the security threat is yet to be voted on
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Am I the only one who's noticing that this "open chaos" project's
| most voted PRs are to add structure to the project (e.g.,
| calculate +1/-1, etc.)?
|
| I guess people just desire a certain amount of structure to their
| chaos :)
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(page generated 2026-01-10 23:00 UTC)