[HN Gopher] OpenClaw is changing my life
___________________________________________________________________
OpenClaw is changing my life
Author : novoreorx
Score : 196 points
Date : 2026-02-08 06:21 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reorx.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reorx.com)
| nurettin wrote:
| This euphoria quickly turns into disappointment once you finish
| scaffolding and actually start the development/refinement phase
| and claude/codex starts shitting all over the code and you have
| to babysit it 100% of the time.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| That's a different problem and not really relevant to OpenClaw.
| Also, your issue is primarily a skills issue (your skills) if
| you're using one of the latest models on Claude Code or Codex.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| You have to be joking. I tried Codex for several hours and it
| has to be one of the worst models I've seen. It was extremely
| fast at spitting out the worst broken code possible. Claude
| is fine, but what they said is completely correct. At a
| certain point, no matter what model you use, llms cannot
| write good working code. This usually occurs after they've
| written thousands of lines of relatively decent code. Then
| the project gets large enough that if they touch one thing
| they break ten others.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| I beg to differ, and so do a lot of other people. But if
| you're locked into this mindset, I can't help you.
|
| Also, Codex isn't a model, so you don't even understand the
| basics.
|
| And you spent "several hours" on it? I wish I could pick up
| useful skills by flailing around for a few hours. You'll
| need to put more effort into learning how to use CLI agents
| effectively.
|
| Start with understanding what Codex is, what models it has
| available, and which one is the most recent and most
| capable for your usage.
| nurettin wrote:
| Well, I will not be berated by an ostrich!
| kylegalbraith wrote:
| What's the security situation around OpenClaw today? It was just
| a week or two ago that there was a ton of concern around its
| security given how much access you give it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Many companies have totally banned it. For example at Qt it is
| banned on all company devices and networks
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Can only reasonably be described as "shitshow".
| kolja005 wrote:
| My company has the github page for it blocked. They block lots
| of AI-related things but that's the only one I've seen where
| they straight up blocked viewing the source code for it at
| work.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I don't think there's any solution to what SimonW calls the
| lethal trifecta with it, so I'd say that's still pretty
| impossible.
|
| I saw on The Verve that they partnered with the company that
| repeatedly disclosed security vulnerabilities to try to make
| skills more secure though which is interesting:
| https://openclaw.ai/blog/virustotal-partnership
|
| I'm guessing most of that malware was really obvious, people
| just weren't looking, so it's probably found a lot. But I also
| suspect it's essentially impossible to actually reliably find
| malware in LLM skills by using an LLM.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Honestly, 'malware' is just the beginning it's combining
| prompt injection with access to sensitive systems and write
| access to 'the internet' is the part that scares me about
| this.
|
| I never want to be one wayward email away from an AI tool
| dumping my company's entire slack history into a public
| github issue.
| veganmosfet wrote:
| Regarding prompt injection: it's possible to reduce the risk
| dramatically by: 1. Using opus4.6 or gpt5.2 (frontier models,
| better safety). These models are paranoid. 2. Restrict
| downstream tool usage and permissions for each agentic use
| case (programmatically, not as LLM instructions). 3. Avoid
| adding untrusted content in "user" or "system" channels -
| only use "tool". Adding tags like "Warning: Untrusted
| content" can help a bit, but remember command injection
| techniques ;-) 4. Harden the system according to state of the
| art security. 5. Test with red teaming mindset.
| habinero wrote:
| > Adding tags like "Warning: Untrusted content" can help
|
| It cannot. This is the security equivalent of telling it to
| not make mistakes.
|
| > Restrict downstream tool usage and permissions for each
| agentic use case
|
| Reasonable, but you have to actually do this _and_ not
| screw it up.
|
| > Harden the system according to state of the art security
|
| "Draw the rest of the owl"
|
| You're better off treating the system as fundamentally
| unsecurable, because it is. The only real solution is to
| never give it untrusted data or access to anything you care
| about. Which yes, makes it pretty useless.
| veganmosfet wrote:
| Agree for a general AI assistant, which has the same
| permissions and access as the assisted human => Disaster.
| I experimented with OpenClaw and it has a lot of issues.
| The best: prompt injection attacks are "out of scope"
| from the security policy == user's problem. However, I
| found the latest models to have much better safety and
| instruction following capabilities. Combined with other
| security best practices, this lowers the risk.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Wrapping documents in <untrusted></untrusted> helps a
| small amount if you're filtering tags in the content. The
| main reason for this is that it primes attention. You can
| redact prompt injection hot words as well, for cases
| where there's a high P(injection) and wrap the detected
| injection in <potential-prompt-injection> tags. None of
| this is a slam dunk but with a high quality model and
| some basic document cleaning I don't think the sky is
| falling.
|
| I have OPA and set policies on each tool I provide at the
| gateway level. It makes this stuff way easier.
| veganmosfet wrote:
| The issue with filtering tags: LLM still react to tags
| with typos or otherwise small changes. It makes
| sanitization an impossible problem (!= standard
| programs). Agree with policies, good idea.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I filter all tags and convert documents to markdown as a
| rule by default to sidestep a lot of this. There are
| still a lot of ways to prompt inject so hotword based
| detection is mostly going to catch people who base their
| injections off stuff already on the internet rather than
| crafting it bespoke.
| sathish316 wrote:
| Anyone who thinks they can avoid LLM Prompt injection
| attacks should be asked to use their email and bank
| accounts with AI browsers like Comet.
|
| A Reddit post with white invisible text can hijack your
| agent to do what an attacker wants. Even a decade or 2
| back, SQL injection attacks used to require a lot of
| proficiency on the attacker and prevention strategies from
| a backend engineer. Compare that with the weak security of
| so called AI agents that can be hijacked with random white
| text on an email or pdf or reddit comment
| veganmosfet wrote:
| There is no silver bullet, but my point is: it's possible
| to lower the risk. Try out by yourself with a frontier
| model and an otherwise 'secure' system: the "ignore
| previous instructions" and co. are not working any more.
| This is getting quite difficult to confuse a model (and I
| am the last person to say prompt injection is a solved
| problem, see my blog).
| veganmosfet wrote:
| It's still bad, even if they fixed some low hanging fruits.
| Main issue: prompt injection when using the LLM "user" channel
| with untrusted content (even with countermeasures and frontier
| model) combined with insecure config / plugins / skills... I
| experimented with it:
| https://veganmosfet.github.io/2026/02/02/openclaw_mail_rce.h...
| Inityx wrote:
| > My answer is: become a "super manager."
|
| Honestly I'd rather die
| sph wrote:
| "and then the engineers turned themselves into managers,
| funniest thing I've ever seen"
| Onavo wrote:
| > _Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all
| alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of
| the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and
| from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it
| was impossible to say which was which._
| aiobe wrote:
| what was the instruction to write and promote this post?
| phito wrote:
| Exactly, I'm not going to waste my time reading this AI
| generating post that's basically promoting itself.
|
| What I really wonder, is who the heck is upvoting this slop on
| hackernews?
| guerrilla wrote:
| It only has 11 points. It just got caught in the algorithm.
| That's all.
| phito wrote:
| But I see these kinds of post every day on HN with hundreds
| of upvotes. And it's a thousand times worse on Reddit.
| tkel wrote:
| The hundreds of billions of dollars in investment
| probably have something to do with it. Many
| wealthy/powerful people are playing for hegemonic control
| of a decent chunk of the US economy. The entire GDP
| increase for the US last year was due to AI and by
| extension data centers. So not only the AI execs, but
| every single capitalist in the US whose wealth depends on
| line going every up year. Which is, like, all of them. In
| the wealthiest country on the planet.
|
| So many wealthy players invested the outcome, and the
| technology for astroturfing (LLMs) can ironically be used
| to boost itself and further its own development
| phito wrote:
| I was thinking the exact same thing earlier today. I
| think you're right. They have so much at stake, infinite
| money and the perfect technology to do it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Another good example, from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860845
|
| Articles like these should be flagged, and typically would
| be, but they sometimes appear mysteriously flag-proof.
| Kiro wrote:
| I did because I want to see a critical discussion around it.
| I'm still trying to figure out if there's any substance to
| OpenClaw, and hyperbolic claims like this is a great way to
| separate the wheat from the chaff. It's like Cunningham's
| Law.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| On that thought you got to ask yourself why almost every thread
| has 200+, some even 500+ comments now. Definitely wasn't like
| this a few months ago
| siva7 wrote:
| Oh boy i suspected it's already happening. If dang and YC
| don't provide good guardrails against ai slop, this community
| will soon die.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Someone should analyze this and share results. The data
| should be there
| chrisjj wrote:
| This "AI" mind virus has spread.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Generate hot fart to rattle HN.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I think everyone cheering for AI will become its archenemy later.
| I'm very happy that companies like Salesforce and Duolingo, which
| fired so many people, are now tanking badly.
| necklesspen wrote:
| The same author had good things to say about the R1, a device you
| generally won't see many glowing reviews about.
| (https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...)
|
| Maybe it's unfair to judge an author's current opinion by their
| past opinion - but since the piece _is_ ultimately an opinion
| based on their own experience I 'm going to take it along a giant
| pile of salt that the author's standards for the output of AI
| tools are vastly different than mine.
| bwb wrote:
| Hah, I read that as well and made a big "hmmmmmmmmm" sound...
|
| The last time I talked to someone about OpenClaw and how it is
| helping them, they told me it tells them what their calendar
| has for them today or auto-tweets for them (i.e., non-human
| spam). The first is as simple as checking your calendar, and
| the second is blatant spam.
|
| Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for
| AI code assistance?
| gyomu wrote:
| I think a sizable proportion of people just want to play
| "large company exec". Their dream is to have an assistant
| telling them how busy their day is, all the meetings they
| have, then to go to those meetings and listen to random fluff
| people tell them while saying "mmh yeah what a wise
| observation" or "mmh no not enough synergy here, let's pivot
| and really leave our mark on this market, crunch the numbers
| again".
|
| I can't come up with any other explanation for why there
| seems to be so many people claiming that AI is changing their
| life and workflow, as if they have a whole team of junior
| engineers at their disposal, and yet have really not that
| much to show for it.
|
| They're so white collar-pilled that they're in utter bliss
| experiencing a simulation of the peak white collar
| experience, being a mid-level manager in meetings all day
| telling others what to do, with nothing tangible coming out
| of it.
| sshine wrote:
| > _LARP 'ing CEO_
|
| My experience with plain Claude Code is that I can step
| back and get an overview of what I'm doing, since I tend to
| hyperfocus on problems, preventing me from having a
| simultaneous overview.
|
| It does feel like being a project manager (a role I've
| partially filled before) having your agency in autopilot,
| which is still more control than having team members do
| their thing.
|
| So while it may feel very empowering to be the CEO of your
| own computer, the question is if it has any CEO-like effect
| on your work.
|
| Taking it back to Claude Code and feeling like a manager,
| it certainly does have a real effect for me.
|
| I won't dispute that running a bunch of agents in sync
| won't give you an extension of that effect.
|
| The real test is: Do you invoice accordingly?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Everybody here probably already has an opinion about the
| utility of coding agents, and having it manage your
| calendar isn't terribly inspired, but there is a lot more
| you can do.
|
| To be specific, for the past year I've been having numerous
| long conversations about all the books I've read. I talk
| about what I liked, didn't like, the ideas and and plots I
| found compelling or lame, talks about the characters, the
| writing styles of authors, the contemporary social context
| the authors might have been addressing, etc. Every aspect
| of the books I can think off. Then I ask it for
| recommendations, I tell it given my interests and
| preferences, suggest new books with literary merit.
|
| ChatGPT just knocks this out of the park, amazing
| suggestions every time, I've never had so much fun reading
| than in the past year. It's like having the world's best
| read and most patient librarian at your personal disposal.
| coolelectronics wrote:
| In the past we had "friends" for this
| skerit wrote:
| > Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface
| for AI code assistance
|
| Well... no. But I do really like it. It's just an always-on
| Claude you can chat with in Telegram, that tries to keep
| context, that has access to a ton of stuff, and it can
| schedule wakeup times for itself.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It really doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
| User experience is important.
| sanex wrote:
| This is a pretty simple thing to boil the ocean over but it
| was fun nonetheless. I've been applying for jobs but I don't
| want Gmail notifications on my phone because of all the spam,
| I'm really picky about push notifications. I told my openclaw
| adjacent ai bot to keep an eye and let me know if any of the
| companies I applied to send me an email. Worked great. CEO
| LARPing at its finest. Also a big fan of giving it access to
| my entire obsidian vault so if I'm on the go instead of
| trying to use obsidian on the phone I just tell it what I
| need to read or update.
|
| I'm not running openclaw itself. I am building a simpler
| version that I trust and understand a lot more but ostensibly
| it's just another always on Claude code wrapper.
| obsidianbases1 wrote:
| > how it is helping them
|
| This should be the opening for every post about the various
| "innovations" in the space.
|
| Preferably with a subsequent line about the manual process
| that was worth putting the extra effort into prior to _the
| shiny new thing_.
|
| I really can imagine a better UX then opening my calendar in
| one-click and manual scanning.
|
| Another frequent theme is "tell me the weather." One again,
| Google home (alexa or whatever) handles it while I'm still in
| bed and let's me go longer without staring at a screen.
|
| The spam use-case is probably the best use-case I've seen, as
| in it truly saves time for an equal or better result, but
| that means being cool with being a spammer.
| nxobject wrote:
| Absolutely - in general, the tendency to want to replace
| investing in UI/UX with omnipotent chatbots raises my blood
| pressure.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| > Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface
| for AI code assistance?
|
| Yesterday, I saw a demo of a product similar to OpenClaw. It
| can organize your files and directories and works really
| great (until it doesn't, of course). But don't worry, you
| surely have a backup and need to test the restore function
| anyway. /s
|
| Edit:
|
| So far, I haven't found a practical use case for this. To
| become truly useful, it would need access to certain
| resources or data that I'm not comfortable sharing with it.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Not via OpenClaw, but I automate breakdowns of my analytics
| and I recently started getting digests of social media
| conversations relevant to my interests. It's also good for
| monitoring services and doing first line triage on issues.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The marketing of OpenClaw is amazing. They had a one-liner
| install that didn't work, started the hype-train days before
| they changed the name of the product and have everyone from
| nerd influencers to CNBC raving about it.
|
| I'm waiting for the grift!
| teratron27 wrote:
| A dev on my team was trying to get us to setup OpenClaw,
| harping on about how it would make our lives easier etc, etc.
| (even though most of the team was against the idea due to the
| security issues and just not thinking it would be worth it).
|
| Their example use case was for it to read and summarize our
| Slack alerts channel to let us know if we had any issues by
| tagging people directly... the Slack channel is populated by
| our monitoring tools that also page the on-call dev for the
| week.
|
| The kicker... this guy was the on-call dev that week and had
| just been ignoring the Slack channel, emails and
| notifications he was getting!
| novoreorx wrote:
| Our cognition evolves over time. That article was written when
| the Rabbit R1 presentation video was first released, I saw it
| and immediately reflect my thoughts on my blog. At that time,
| nobody had the actual product, let alone any idea how it
| actually worked.
|
| Even so, I still believe the Rabbit has its merits. This does
| not conflict with my view that OpenClaw is what is truly useful
| to me.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think this shows an unfettered optimism for things we don't
| know anything about. Many see this as a red flag for the
| quality of opinions.
|
| > _R1 is definitely an upgraded replacement for smartphones.
| It's versatile and fulfills all everyday requirements, with
| an interaction style akin to talking to a human._
|
| You seemed pretty certain about how the product worked!
| sejje wrote:
| No, he seemed pretty certain about how they demoed it.
|
| We're allowed to have opinions about promises that turn out
| not to be true.
|
| If the rabbit had been what it claimed it would be, it
| would have been an obvious upgrade for me, at least.
|
| I just want a voice-first interface.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You literally wrote in the blog post:
|
| _> Today, Rabbit R1 has been released, and I view it as a
| milestone in the evolution of our digital organ._
|
| You viewed it as a "milestone in the evolution of our digital
| organ" without you _let alone anyone_ having even tested it?
|
| Yet you say _"That article was written when the Rabbit R1
| presentation video was first released, I saw it and
| immediately reflect my thoughts on my blog."_?
| huijzer wrote:
| > Maybe it's unfair to judge an author's current opinion by
| their past opinion
|
| Yes I think it is
| bspinner wrote:
| No, it's actually reasonable und perfectly fine. Reputation,
| trustworthiness, limited/different perspectives exist.
|
| And one sided media does as weil. Or do you expect Fox News
| to publish an unbiased report just next?
| gnz11 wrote:
| The blogger lists 6 years of experience on their homepage.
| Safe to take their opinions with a grain of salt.
| perbu wrote:
| This is quite a low quality post. There is nothing of substance
| here. Just hot air.
|
| The only software I've seen designed and implemented by OpenClaw
| is moltbook. And I think it is hard to come up with a bigger pile
| of crap than Moltbook.
|
| If somebody can build something decent with OpenClaw, that would
| help add some credibility to the OpenClaw story.
| charcircuit wrote:
| My openclaw built skills (python scripts) to interact with the
| Notion API which allows it to make work items for me and evenly
| distribute them, setting due dates on my calendar.
| exitb wrote:
| It's a fun example, because openclaw is the boss in it and
| you are the agent.
| whateveracct wrote:
| AI is all facade
| jorisboris wrote:
| I was reading the post and had the same feeling of
| superficiality. I don't think a human wrote it tbh
| j2bax wrote:
| Very likely part of their bots output. The ultimate goal
| isn't to make useful things, but to "teach" others how to do
| it and convince them how successful they can become.
| chamomeal wrote:
| There's a whole new genre of blog posts that are just
| "finally thanks to AI everyone will know how smart I am.
| Watch in awe as I tell something to do stuff for me"
| blazarquasar wrote:
| Given that the authors previous post was about how the Rabbit
| R1 has "the potential to change the world", I don't expect much
| in the way of critical assessment here.
| timcobb wrote:
| I think in the future this might be known as AI megalomania
| siva7 wrote:
| It is already known as Ai psychosis and ai productivity porn
| timcobb wrote:
| Not bad not bad
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Press [X] to doubt
|
| Press [Space] to skip
| cubefox wrote:
| From his previous blog post:
|
| > Generally, I believe [Rabbit] R1 has the potential to change
| the world. This is a thought that seldom comes to my mind, as I
| have seen numerous new technologies and inventions. However, R1
| is different; it's not just another device to please a certain
| niche. It's meticulously designed to serve one significant goal
| for all people: to improve lifestyle in the digital world.
| treetalker wrote:
| What substantial and beneficial product has come of this
| author's, or anybody's, use of OpenClaw? What major problems of
| humanity have they chipped away at, let alone solved -- and is
| there a net benefit once the negatives are taken into account?
| progx wrote:
| Nothing, that is why it change his life ;-)
| gyomu wrote:
| > it completely transformed my workflow, whether it's personal or
| commercial projects
|
| > This has truly freed up my productivity, letting me pursue so
| many ideas I couldn't move forward on before
|
| If you're writing in a blog post that AI has changed your life
| and let you build so many amazing projects, you should link to
| the projects. Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to
| the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building
| with AI.
| Maxion wrote:
| A lot of more senior coders when they actively try vibe coding
| a greenfield project find that it does actually work. But only
| for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well
| you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features
| accidentally, will add unnecessary convoluted logic to the
| code, will leave benhind dead code, add random traces "for
| backwards compatibility", will avoid doing the correct thing as
| "it is too big of a refactor", doesn't understand that the dev
| database is not the prod database and avoids migrations. And so
| forth.
|
| I've got 10+ years of coding experience, I am an AI advocate,
| but not vibe coding. AI is a great tool to help with the boring
| bits, using it to initialize files, help figure out various
| approaches, as a first pass code reviewer, helping with
| configuring, those things all work well.
|
| But full-on replacing coders? It's not there yet. Will require
| an order of magnitude more improvement.
| alpineman wrote:
| You're right, but on the other hand once you have a basic
| understanding security, architecture, etc you can prompt
| around these issues. You need a couple of years of experience
| but that's far less then the 10-15 years of experience you
| needed in the past.
|
| If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching
| and understanding what it's doing and learning from mistakes,
| then you can get up the ladder very quickly.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I find that security, architecture, etc is exactly the kind
| of skill that takes 10-15 years to hone. Every boot camp,
| training provider, educational foundation, etc has an
| incentive to find a shortcut and we're yet to see one.
|
| A "basic" understanding in critical domains is extremely
| dangerous and an LLM will often give you a false sense of
| security that things are going fine while overlooking
| potential massive security issues.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Somewhere on an HN thread I saw someone claiming that
| they "solved" security problems in their vibe-coded app
| by adding a "security expert" agent to their workflow.
|
| All I could think was, "good luck" and I certainly hope
| their app never processes anything important...
| nxobject wrote:
| Found a problem? Slap another agent on top to fix it.
| It's hilarious to see how the pendulum's swung away from
| "thinking from first principles as a buzzword". Just
| engineer, dammit...
| meetingthrower wrote:
| But if you are not saving "privileged" information who
| cares? I mean think of all the WordPress sites out there.
| Surely vibecoding is not SO much worse than some plugin
| monstrosity.... At the end of the day if you are not
| saving user info, or special sauce for your company, it's
| no issue. And I bet a huge portion of apps fall into this
| category...
| spprashant wrote:
| > If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really
| watching and understanding what it's doing and learning
| from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly.
|
| I don't feel like most providers keep a model for more than
| 2 years. GPT-4o got deprecated in 1.5 years. Are we
| expecting coding models to stay stable for longer time
| horizons?
| dickersnoodle wrote:
| This is the funniest thing I've read all week.
| dumbmrblah wrote:
| I agree with you in part, but I think the market is going to
| shift so that you won't so many need "mega projects". More
| and more, projects will be small and bespoke, built around
| what the team needs or answering a single question rather
| than forcing teams to work around an established, dominant
| solution.
| izacus wrote:
| How much are you willing to bet on this outcome and what
| metrics are you going to measure it with when we come to
| collect in 3 years?
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| This is the way: make every one of these people with
| their wild ass claims put their money where their mouths
| are.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| Hold up. This is a funny comment but thinking should be
| free. It's when they are trying to sell you something
| (looking at you "all the AI CEOs") that unsubstantiated
| claims are problematic.
|
| Then again the problem is that the public has learned
| nothing from the theranos and WeWorks and even more of a
| problem is that the vc funding works out for most of
| these hype trains even if they never develop a real
| business.
|
| The incentives are fucked up. I'd not blame tech
| enthusiasts for being too enthusiastic
| izacus wrote:
| I'm fine with free thinking, but a lot of these are just
| so repetitive and exausting because there's absolutely no
| backing from any of those claims or a thread of logic.
|
| Might as well talk about how AI will invent sentient
| lizards which will replace our computers with chocolate
| cake.
| shimman wrote:
| It's not the public, the general public would like to see
| tech ceo heads on spikes (first politician to jail
| Zuckerberg will win re-election for the rest of their
| short lives) but the general attitude in DC is to
| capitulate because they believe the lies + the election
| slush fund money doesn't hurt.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > Hold up. This is a funny comment but thinking should be
| free.
|
| Thinking usually happens inside your head.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| "Holy tautology Batman."
|
| What is your point?
|
| If you're trying to say that they should have kept their
| opinion to themselves, why don't you do the same?
|
| Edit: tone down the snark
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > What is your point?
|
| Holy Spiderman what is your point? That if someone says
| something dumb I can never challenge them nor ask them to
| substantiate/commit?
|
| > tone down the snark
|
| It's amazing to me that the neutral observation "thinking
| happens in your head" is snarky. Have you ever heard the
| phrase "tone police"?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Don't you think it has gotten an order of magnitude better in
| the last 1-2 years? If it only requires another an order of
| magnitude improvement to full-on replace coders, how long do
| you think that will take?
| frank_nitti wrote:
| Who is liable for the runtime behavior of the system, when
| handling users' sensitive information?
|
| If the person who is liable for the system behavior cannot
| read/write code (as "all coders have been replaced"), does
| Anthropic et al become responsible for damages to end users
| for systems its tools/models build? I assume not.
|
| How do you reconcile this? We have tools that help
| engineers design and build bridges, but I still wouldn't
| want to drive on an "autonomously-generated bridge may
| contain errors. Use at own risk" because all human
| structural engineering experts have been replaced.
|
| After asking this question many times in similar threads,
| I've received no substantial response except that
| "something" will probably resolve this, maybe AI will
| figure it out
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter
| how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing
| features accidentally
|
| I am using them in projects with >100kloc, this is not my
| experience.
|
| at the moment, I am babysitting for any kloc, but I am sure
| they will get better and better.
| roywiggins wrote:
| It's fine at adding features on a non-vibecoded 100kloc
| codebase that you somewhat understand. It's when you're
| vibecoding _from scratch_ that things tend to spin out at a
| certain point.
|
| I am sure there are ways to get around this sort of wall,
| but I do think it's currently a thing.
| turnsout wrote:
| Yes, this is my experience as well. I've found the key is
| having the AI create and maintain clear documentation from
| the beginning. It helps me understand what it's building,
| and it helps the model maintain context when it comes time
| to add or change something.
|
| You also need a reasonably modular architecture which isn't
| incredibly interdependent, because that's hard to reason
| about, even for humans.
|
| You also need lots and lots (and LOTS) of unit tests to
| prevent regressions.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Meanwhile, in the grandparent comment:
|
| > Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the
| amazing projects that their author is supposedly building
| with AI.
|
| You are in the 90%.
| mettamage wrote:
| I wonder if you can up the 10kloc if you have a good static
| analysis of your tool (I vibecoded one in Python) and good
| tests. Sometimes good tests aren't possible since there are
| too many different cases but with other forms of codes you
| can cover all the cases with like 50 to 100 tests or so
| andai wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the static analysis?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Where are you getting the 10kloc threshold from? Nice round
| number...
|
| Surely it depends on the design. If you have 10 10kloc
| modular modules with good abstractions, and then a 10k shell
| gluing them together, you could build much bigger things, no?
| helloplanets wrote:
| Specifics on the setup. Specifics on the projects.
|
| SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!
| fullstackchris wrote:
| exactly. so much text with so little actionable or notable
| content... actually 0
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing
| projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.
|
| Maybe they don't feel like sharing yet another half working
| Javascript Sudoku Solver or yet another half working AI tool no
| one will ever use?
|
| Probably they feel amazed about what they accomplished but they
| feel the public won't feel the same.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Then, in my opinion, there's nothing revolutionary about it
| (unless you learned something, which... no one does when they
| use LLMs to code)
| xcf_seetan wrote:
| I am an old school c++ programmer and actually I have
| learned modern c++ just by using LLMs.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The article made it seem that the tool made them into the
| manager of a successful company, rather than the author of a
| half finished pet project
| lostmsu wrote:
| AI is great, harness don't matter (I just use codex). Use state
| of the art models.
|
| GPT-5.2 fixed my hanging WiFi driver:
| https://gist.github.com/lostmsu/a0cdd213676223fc7669726b3a24...
| consp wrote:
| Fixing mediatek drivers is not the flex you think it is.
| mitkebes wrote:
| It is if it's something they couldn't do on their own
| before.
|
| It's a magical moment when someone is able to AI code a
| solution to a problem that they couldn't fix on their own
| before.
|
| It doesn't matter whether there are other people who could
| have fixed this without AI tools, what matters is they were
| able to get it fixed, and they didn't have to just accept
| it was broken until someone else fixed it.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Right!? It's like me all the sudden being able to fix my
| car's engine. I mean, sure, there are mechanics, and it
| surely isn't rocket science, but I couldn't do it before
| and now I can!!! A miracle!
|
| Cue the folks saying "well you could DIE!!!" Not if I
| don't fix brakes, etc ...
| lostmsu wrote:
| It was an easy fix for someone who already knows how WiFi
| drivers work and functions provided to them by Linux
| kernel. I am not one of these people though. I could have
| fixed it myself, but it would take a week just to get
| accustomed to the necessary tools.
| topheroo wrote:
| To be fair, AI probably wrote the blog post from a short
| prompt, which would explain the lack of detail.
| falloutx wrote:
| If you look at his github you can see he is in the first week
| of giving into the vibes. The first week always leads to the
| person making absurd claims about productivity.
| jootsing wrote:
| this feels like the only thing you've probably done with open
| claw
| zkmon wrote:
| That's a very inefficient way to interact with CC. There will be
| transmission losses that need too much feedback looping.
|
| So, it appears that we have come a long way bubbling up through
| abstraction layers: assembly code -> high-level languages ->
| scripting -> prompting -> openclaw.
| jruz wrote:
| I admire the people that can live happily in the ignorance of
| what's under the hood, in this case not even under the layer of
| claude code because that was too much aparently so people are now
| putting openclaw+telegram on top of that.
|
| And me ruining my day fighting with a million hooks, specs and
| custom linters micromanaging Claude Code in the pursuit of
| beautiful code.
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| It's absolutely terrifying that Ai will control everything in
| your PC using openclaw. How are people ok with it?!
| whateveracct wrote:
| okay dumbo
| SyneRyder wrote:
| The post mentions discussing projects with Claude via voice, but
| it isn't clear exactly how. Do they just mean sending voice memos
| via Whatsapp, the basic integration that you can get with
| OpenClaw? (That isn't really "discussing".) Or is this a full
| blown Eleven Labs conversational setup (or Parakeet, Voxtral, or
| whatever people are using?)
|
| I'm not running OpenClaw, but I've given Claude its own email
| address and built a polling loop to check email & wake Claude up
| when I've sent it something. I'm finding a huge improvement from
| that. Working via email seems to change the Claude dynamic, it
| feels more like collaborating with a co-worker or freelancer. I
| can email Claude when I'm out of the house and away from my
| computer, and it has locked down access to use various tools so
| it can build some things in reply to my emails.
|
| I've been looking into building out voice memos or an Eleven Labs
| setup as well, so I can talk to Claude while I'm out exercising,
| washing dishes etc. Voice memos will be relatively easy but I
| haven't yet got my head around how to integrate Eleven Labs and
| work with my local data & tools (I don't want a Claude that's
| running on Eleven Labs servers).
| erksa wrote:
| Openclaw is just that, it wakes on send and as cronjobs and get
| to work.
|
| What made it so popular I think is that it made it easy to
| attach it to whatever "channel" you're comfortable with. The
| mac app comes with dictation, but unsure the amount of setup to
| get tts back.
| gpvos wrote:
| Thank you; this explains why working with AI doesn't interest me.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| If you use Cursor or Claude, you have to oversee it and steer it
| so it gets very close to what you want to achieve.
|
| If you delegate these tasks to OpenClaw, I am not really sure the
| result is exactly what you want to achieve and it works like you
| want it to.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| > My productivity did improve, but for any given task, I still
| had to jump into the project, set up the environment, open my
| editor and Claude Code terminal. I was still the operator; the
| only difference was that instead of typing code manually, I was
| typing intent into a chat box.
|
| > Then OpenClaw came along, and everything changed.
|
| > After a few rounds of practice, I found that I could completely
| step away from the programming environment and handle an entire
| project's development, testing, deployment, launch, and usage--
| all through chatting on my phone.
|
| So, with Claude Code, you're stuck typing in a chat box. Now,
| with OpenClaw, you can type in a chat box on your phone? This is
| exciting and revolutionary.
| politelemon wrote:
| > Thank you, AGI--for me, it's already here.
|
| Poe's law strikes... I can't tell if this is satire.
| forty wrote:
| Wow, I re read after reading your comment and now I'm fairly
| sure the whole post is humourous ^^
| meindnoch wrote:
| These are the same people who a few years ago made blogposts
| about their elaborate Notion (or Roam "Research") setups, and how
| it catalyzed them to... _*checks notes*_ create blogposts about
| their elaborate Notion setups!
| spaceywilly wrote:
| Quite literally, the previous post on this blog is from 2024
| talking about what a revolution the Rabbit R1 is. We all know
| how that turned out. This is why I give every new trendy
| developer tool a few months to see if it's really a good thing
| or just hype.
| rileymichael wrote:
| > Generally, I believe R1 has the potential to change the
| world.
|
| oh man this is fantastic
| tartoran wrote:
| Maybe that's why these users go crazy over openclaw, they may
| need or yearn for such a tool. I don't but that doesn't mean
| there isn't a market for it though.
| throwup238 wrote:
| There isn't a market. OP wrote that Rabbit R1 post after
| seeing the release video (according to a comment on this
| link, their blog post says otherwise) and immediately
| called it a _"milestone in the evolution of our digital
| organ"_. Their judgement is obviously nonexistent.
|
| Something tells me they never even downloaded OpenClaw
| before writing this blog post. It's probably an
| aspirational vision board type post their life coach told
| them to write because they kept talking about OepnClaw
| during their sessions, and the life coach got tired of
| their BS.
| cactacea wrote:
| > A milestone in the evolution of our digital organ.
| Dieselroar88 wrote:
| Literally came here to make this comment....
|
| No desire to be a hater or ignore the possibility of any tech
| but...yeah...transformative that was not
| scwoodal wrote:
| The jokes write themselves. Now you can have both, Openclaw
| comes preloaded on the R1.
|
| https://www.rabbit.tech/rabbit-r1
| krater23 wrote:
| But today, the AI is writing the blogposts for them.
| obsidianbases1 wrote:
| Don't forget about Obsidian
| konart wrote:
| Both are great tools though.
|
| They (or their devs) are not at fault that some people
| honestly believe you can't be as productive or consistent
| without a "thought garden" or whatever.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Obsidian is local first with basically zero lock-in, and it's
| heavily community driven. Don't lump it in with Notion.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| True, but it does have the cottage industry of influencers
| selling their vault skeleton and template/plugin packs for
| unlocking maximum productivity... same as notion. And
| Evernote, to an extent, before that.
| edoceo wrote:
| And how to properly use your Day-Runner before that
| (c1996). Productivity hacks sell because humans want
| silver bullets.
| shimman wrote:
| Yeah, after getting burnt out on Evernote I just use
| basic markdown files for my notes. I never bother with
| anymore features beyond "write to file" or "grep
| directory for keywords" because I know I'll personally
| not benefit from them. The act of writing notes is what
| is useful to me, retrieving the notes are hardly ever
| useful.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Yeah, but so does many other good things. Exercise is
| generally a good thing, so is decent quality food,
| meditation, philosophy, healthy relationships, etc. Those
| are things that also have a cottage industry of
| influencers who are selling their "thing" about how you
| should do it. The problem there is the influencers and
| their culture not the food or working out, etc.
|
| It only becomes problematic if the "good" thing also
| indulges in the hubris of influencers because they view
| it as good marketing. Like when an egg farm leans in
| "orange yolk"
| trentnix wrote:
| Midwits love this kind of stuff. Movie critics heap praise on
| forgettable movies to get their names and quotes on the movie
| poster. Robert Scoble made an entire career in tech bloviation
| hyping the _current thing_ and got invited to the coolest
| parties. LinkedIn is a word salad conveyor belt of this kind of
| useless nonsense.
|
| It's a racket never ends.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| I'm working on a product related to "sensemaking". And I'm
| using this abstract, academic term on purpose to highlight the
| emotional experience, rather than "analysis" or
| "understanding".
|
| It is a constant lure products and tools have to create the
| feeling of sensemaking. People want (pejorative) tools that
| show visualizations or summaries, without thinking about the
| particular visual/summary artifact is useful, actionable or
| accurate!
| natch wrote:
| Fascinating. If you're not aware of Jesse Schell's book on
| game design, even if your work is unrelated to games, I
| highly recommend taking a look. Would love to hear more about
| your work / product.
| progx wrote:
| Not people, that post is from OpenClaw... 100% ;-)
| gbnwl wrote:
| 100% a precursor to a follow up post like "I asked OpenClaw
| to write me a blog post about how it's changing my life and
| it hit the top of HackerNews"
| lm28469 wrote:
| These people are always swarming the new shiny gadgets thinking
| it will finally unfuck their miserable life while not noticing
| that the chase is why they've been miserable this whole time.
| What they need is 6 month in a cabin in the middle of nowhere
| without internet
| lnenad wrote:
| Oh my god your verbalization of this phenomenon is spot on! I
| feel validated that someone else feels this way.
| windexh8er wrote:
| There seem to be a lot of posts like this as of late. I truly
| can't decide if the authors actually believe what they've
| written or if it's some preposition of themselves to be
| included in the hype cycle of AI FOMO or what. It feels very
| cringe as I read it. As if to say OpenClaw has somehow been
| such a pivotal change in their life, so monumental, that it's
| an epiphany that has changed them forever. Maybe it's just the
| fact that I've been surrounded by automation for many years and
| also using it with agents or LLMs for the past couple that I
| just don't feel like this is a true sentiment of what actually
| exists. It feels placed, it feels targeted and it feels like a
| huge lie. I guess you could also call it low effort marketing.
| zeknife wrote:
| I get the impression LLM agents are a bit like tamagochi but for
| tech bros.
| PKop wrote:
| Where's the code and what did you build? Everything else is just
| platitudes
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| If my aim was to be a manager, I would have graduated a business
| university. But I want to have my hands and head dirty of
| programming, administering, and doing other technical stuff. I'm
| not going to manage, be it people or bots. So no, sorry.
|
| And 99% those AI-created "amazing projects" are going to be dead
| or meaningless in due time, rather sooner than later. Wasted
| energy and water, not to mention the author's lifetime.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| This is for people that talk to ChatGPT at length in voice mode.
| You are not the audience.
| nycdatasci wrote:
| Since many posts mention lack of substance, providing a link to
| the All-In Podcast from last week in which they discuss Clawdbot
| (prior to re-brand).
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXY1kx7zlkk&t=2754s
|
| For the impatient, here's a transcript summary (from Gemini):
| The speaker describes creating a "virtual employee" (dubbed a
| "replicant") running on a local server with unrestricted,
| authenticated access to a real productivity stack--including
| Gmail, Notion, Slack, and WhatsApp. Tasked with podcast
| production, the agent autonomously researched guests, "vibe
| coded" its own custom CRM to manage data, sent email invitations,
| and maintained a work log on a shared calendar. The experiment
| highlights the agent's ability to build its own internal tools to
| solve problems and interact with humans via email and LinkedIn
| without being detected as AI.
|
| He ultimately concludes that for some roles, OpenClaw can do 90%+
| of the work autonomously. Jason controversially mentions buying
| Macs to run Kimi 2.5 locally so they can save on costs. Others
| argue that hosting an open model on inference optimized hardware
| in the cloud is a better option, but doing so requires sharing
| potentially sensitive data.
| tantalor wrote:
| There is a reason I stopped listening to All-In Podcast.
| relativeadv wrote:
| Once again I am asking for you to please show us what you have
| built. Bring receipts.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Yeah i do not know, still waiting to see actual openclaw
| practical application usage in real world
| vnlamp wrote:
| When everyone can become a manager easily, then no one is a
| manager.
| wiz21c wrote:
| I want an OpenClaw that can find and call a carpenter, a plumber
| when I need him; take appointment for all the medical stuff (I do
| most of that online), pays the bills and make me a nice alarm
| when there's something wrong, order train tickets and book hotel
| when I need to.
|
| That would be _really_ helpful.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I hate receiving competitive quotes so I take what the 1st guy
| offers or dont engage at all. AI agents could definitely be
| useful gathering bids where prices are hidden behind "talk to
| our sales specialist" gates.
| podgorniy wrote:
| > find and call a carpenter, a plumber when I need him
|
| Good luck hoping that none from the big money would try to
| stand between you and someone giving you a service (uber,
| airbnb, etsy, etc) and get rent from that.
| wiseowise wrote:
| But, but... muh AGI!
|
| Claude, fix the toilet.
| charles_f wrote:
| While Claude was trying fix a bug for me (one of these "here!
| It's fixed now!" "no it's not, the ut still doesn't pass", "ah,
| I see, lets fix the ut", "no you dont, fix the code" loops), I
| was updating my oncall rotation after having to run after
| people to refresh my credentials to so, after attending a ship
| room where I had to provide updates and estimates.
|
| Why isn't Claude doing all that for me, while I code? Why the
| obsession that we must use code generation, while other gabage
| activities would free me to do what I'm, on paper, paid to do?
|
| It's less sexy of course, it doesn't have the promise of
| removing me in the end. But the reason, in the present state,
| is that IT admins would _never_ accept for an llm to handle
| permissions, rotations, management would never accept an llm to
| report status or provide estimate. This is all "serious" work
| where we can't have all the errors llm create.
|
| Dev isn't that bad, devs can clean slop and customers can deal
| with bugs.
| zagfh wrote:
| If everyone does that, the value of his "creations" are zero.
| Provided of course that it works and this isn't just another
| slopfluencer fulfilling his quota.
|
| So, OpenClaw has changed his life: It has accelerated the AI
| psychosis.
| reidrac wrote:
| > A manager shouldn't get bogged down in the specifics--they
| should focus on the higher-level, abstract work. That's what
| management really is.
|
| I don't know about this; or at least, in my experience, is not a
| what happens with _good managers_.
| ibaikov wrote:
| Indeed. When I was just starting every blog and tweet screamed
| micro-management sucks. It does if the manager does this all
| the time. But sometimes it is extremely important and prevents
| disasters.
|
| I guess best managers just develop the hunch and know when to
| do this and when to ask engineers for smallest details to
| potentially develop different solutions. You have to be
| technical enough to do this
| maciejzj wrote:
| Mind you, that regardless of your sentiment towards OpenClaw, not
| everyone is able to afford a sparse Mac Mini (especially given
| ram prices) and a ton of Claude tokens/super beefy GPU for local
| models to run this stuff. That's to the supposed "democratisation
| of knowledge and technology".
| st3fan wrote:
| FWIW Mac Minis have not increased in price because of "RAM
| Prices". Same models cost exactly the same as a year ago. Maybe
| it will change in the future, maybe not. Who knows. But right
| now Apple seems to have secure a good stash of RAM to use and
| avoid price changes.
| charles_f wrote:
| > My role as the programmer responsible for turning code into
| reality hasn't changed
|
| > OpenClaw gave me the chance to become that super manager [...]
| A manager shouldn't get bogged down in the specifics--they should
| focus on the higher-level, abstract work
|
| These two propositions seem to be highly incompatible
| podgorniy wrote:
| The impact from appearing on HN is disproportionately bigger than
| anything else.
|
| It's the endgame.
| hackermeows wrote:
| been writing code for 15 years now , agree with the author about
| this one , open-claw like agents are going to be the future.
| Already automated away a bunch of routine stuff like checkin FB
| marketplace if l'm looking to but something , daily stock
| position brief , calendar management , grocery planning and
| buying , workout and calorie tracking . Stopped using a bunch of
| app directly overnight . The "mid-wits" are the one with their
| head still stuck under that sand
| fullstackchris wrote:
| and the "hype-wits" don't realize openclaw is just claude with
| good mcp. there is nothing new under the sun. its just the
| first time someone was benevolent enough to open source the
| codebase to the public or it went viral enough to matter... and
| yet what people focus on is its "emergence" or "agi" - neither
| of which are remotely true. but good luck "crushing" those
| "mid-wits"
| hackermeows wrote:
| Yes claude + scripts without any big corp restrictions /
| bloat , if i want to connect to a website or api i can just
| do it. If you expose it to me as a human it is fair game for
| my assistant to read data the same way i do. Its like the old
| days of internet . I build harnesses for a living these days
| , i see why enterprises are slow to even to see what is
| possible
| ainiro wrote:
| You should check out Magic Cloud ==>
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6eSKxc6oM8
| mier wrote:
| if 90% is good enough, you are a winner to try your idea and fail
| fast. if you want to reach 91 or more, AI is a slop and hype to
| burn our pensions and contribute to vastly to global warming and
| cognitive decline consumerism evolution
| siva7 wrote:
| Besides that blog post obviously being written by AI, can someone
| here confirm how credible the hype about openclaw is? I'm already
| very proficient at using Claude Code anywhere, so what would i
| gain really with openclaw?
| mikenew wrote:
| I played with it extensively for three days. I think there are
| a few things it does that people are finding interesting:
|
| 1. It has a lot of files that it loads into it's context for
| each conversation, and it consistently updates them. Plus it
| stores and can reference each conversation. So there's a sense
| of continuity over time.
|
| 2. It connects to messaging services and other accounts of
| yours, so again it feels continuous. You can use it on your
| desktop and then pick up your phone and send it an iMessage.
|
| 3. It hooks into a lot of things, so it feels like it has more
| agency. You could send it a voice message over discord and say
| "hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to
| Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"
|
| It feels more like a smart assistant that's always around than
| an app you open to ask questions to.
|
| However, it's worth stressing how terrible the software
| actually is. Not a single thing I attempted to do worked
| correctly, important issues (like the discord integration
| having huge message delays and sometimes dropping messages) get
| closed because "sorry we have too many issues", and I really
| got the impression that the whole thing is just a vibe coded
| pile of garbage. And I don't like to be that critical about an
| open source project like this, but I think considering the
| level of hype and the dramatic claims that humans shouldn't be
| writing code anymore, I think it's worth being clear about.
|
| Ended up deleting it and setting up something much simpler. I
| installed a little discord relay called kimaki, and that lets
| me interact with instances of opencode over discord when I want
| to. I also spent some time setting up persistent files and made
| sure the llm can update them, although only when I ask it to in
| this case. That's covered enough of what I liked from OpenClaw
| to satisfy me.
| yunohn wrote:
| > "hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email
| to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"
|
| Isn't the "what he thinks about it" part the hardest? Like,
| that's what I want to phrase myself - the part of the
| conversation I'd like to get their opinion on and what
| exactly my actual request is. Or are people really doing the
| meme of sending AI text back and forth to each other with
| none the wiser?
| mikenew wrote:
| I think in the context of business communication; yeah a
| lot of people are doing that. Which, to be honest, I don't
| think it the worst thing ever. Most corporate communication
| is some basic information padded out with feigned personal
| interest and rehearsed politeness, so it's hardly a huge
| loss.
|
| For personal communication between friends it would be
| horrible. Authenticity has to be one of the things I value
| most about the people I know. Didn't mean to imply from
| that example that I did or would communicate that way.
| mh2266 wrote:
| > You could send it a voice message over discord and say "hey
| remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to
| Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"
|
| if one of my friends sent me an obviously AI-written email, I
| think that I would cease to be friends with them...
| andai wrote:
| You can just hook up Claude Code to a Telegram bot and get
| basically the same result in 50 lines of code.
|
| https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON
|
| Well, it's a work in progress, but I have self-upgrading and
| self-restarting working, and it's already more reliable than
| Claw ;)
|
| I used the Claude Code SDK (Agents SDK) originally, but then
| realized I can get the same result by just calling `claude -p
| the_telegram_message`
|
| The magic sauce being the --continue flag, of course. Bit less
| useful otherwise.
|
| I haven't figured out how to interrupt it or see what it's
| doing yet though.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| another slop post - show costs, show what you have built, or at
| least a tiny snippet of code? (or even just direct links to git
| repo or projects IN post please?)
|
| getting sick of this fluff stuff
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| This was incredibly vague and a waste of time.
|
| What type of code? What types of tools? What sort of
| configuration? What messaging app? What projects?
|
| It answers none of these questions.
| coldtea wrote:
| It's AI slop itself. It seems inevitable that any AI enthusiast
| ends up having AI write their advocacy too.
|
| I just give the link to those posts to my AI to read it, if
| it's not worth a human writing it, it's not worth a human
| reading it.
| bakugo wrote:
| There is no code, there are no tools, there is no
| configuration, and there are no projects.
|
| This is an AI generated post likely created by going to
| chatgpt.com and typing in "write a blogpost hyping up [thing]
| as the next technological revolution", like most tech blog
| content seems to be now. None of those things ever existed, the
| AI made them up to fulfill the request.
| fny wrote:
| > There is no code, there are no tools, there is no
| configuration, and there are no projects.
|
| To add to this, OpenClaw is incapable of doing anything
| meaningful. The context management is horrible, the bot
| constantly forgets basic instructions, and often
| misconfigures itself to the point of crashing.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| There is zero evidence this is the case. You are making up
| baseless accusation, probably due to partisan motivations.
|
| edit: love the downvotes. I guess HN really is Reddit now.
| You can make any accusation without evidence and people are
| supposed to just believe it. If you call it out you get
| downvoted.
| missingdays wrote:
| Is there any evidence the opposite is the case?
| enraged_camel wrote:
| It doesn't work like that. The burden is on the person
| making the claim. If you are going to accuse someone of
| posting an AI-written article you need you show evidence.
| toraway wrote:
| It's a losing strategy in 2026 to assume by default that
| any questionable spam blog/comment/etc content is written
| by an actual human unless proven otherwise.
|
| Besides, if there are enough red flags that make it
| indistinguishable from actual AI slop, then chances are
| it's not worth reading anyway and nothing of value was
| lost by a false positive.
| boca_honey wrote:
| Please don't tell me you read that article and thought it
| was written by a person. This is clearly AI generated.
| chamomeal wrote:
| It didn't seem entirely AI generated to me. There were at
| least a few sentences that an LLM would never write (too many
| commas).
| roywiggins wrote:
| I am somewhat worried that this is the moment AI psychosis has
| come for programmers.
| turnsout wrote:
| Yeah... I'm using Claude Code almost all day every day, but
| it still 100% requires my judgment. If another AI like
| OpenClaw was just giving the thumbs up to whatever CC was
| doing, it would not end well (for my projects anyway).
| kace91 wrote:
| Add to that worry the suspicion that half this push is just
| marketing stunts by AI companies.
|
| (Not necessarily this specific post).
| wrs wrote:
| Well, note that the previous post was about how great the
| Rabbit R1 is...
| 1270018080 wrote:
| It reads like articles that pretended blockchain was
| revolutionary. Also the article itself seems like AI slop.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Yeah, i've gone to the point where I will just stop reading AI
| posts after a paragraph or two if there are no specifics. The
| "it works!" / "no it doesn't" genre is saturated with
| generality. Show, don't tell, or I will default to believing
| you don't have anything to show at all.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| That was very vague, but I kinda get where they're coming
| from.
|
| I'm now using pi (the thing openclaw is built on) and within
| a few days i build a tmux plugin and semaphore plugin^1, and
| it has automated the way _I_ used to use Claude.
|
| The things I disagree with OP is: The usefulness of
| persistent memory beyond a single line in AGENTS.md "If the
| user says 'next time' update your AGENTS.md", the use of
| long-running loops, or the idea that everything can be
| resolved via chat - might be true for simple projects, but
| any original work needs me to design the 'right' approach ~5%
| of the time.
|
| That's not a lot, but AI lets you create load-bearing tech-
| debt within hours, at which point you're stuck with a lot of
| shit and you dont know how far it got smeared.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/offline-ant
| dmschulman wrote:
| Did they even end up launching and maintaining the project? Did
| things break and were they able to fix it properly? The amount
| of front-loaded fondness for this technology without any of the
| practical execution and follow up really bugs me.
|
| It's like we all fell under the spell of a terminal endlessly
| printing output as some kind of measurement of progress.
| agent3bood wrote:
| Does it matter?
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Exactly. Posts that say "I got great results" are just
| advertisements. Tell me what you're doing that's working good
| for you. What is your workflow, tooling, what kind of projects
| have you made.
|
| >Over the past year, I've been actively using Claude Code for
| development. Many people believed AI could already assist with
| programming--seemingly replacing programmers--but I never felt
| it brought any revolutionary change to the way I work.
|
| Funny, because just last month, HN was drowning in blog posts
| saying Claude Code is what enables them to step away from the
| desk, is definitely going to replace programmers, and lets
| people code "all through chatting on [their] phone" (being able
| to code from your phone while sitting on the bus seems to be
| the magic threshold that makes all the datacenters worth it).
| i-blis wrote:
| I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many
| engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely
| with an increase in revenue.
|
| Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the
| specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract
| work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering
| always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of
| problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power.
| Which is rather natural, if you think about it.
|
| Science and the academic world
|
| I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many
| engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an
| increase in revenue.
|
| Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and
| being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to
| quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always
| been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-
| solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is
| rather natural, if you think about it.
|
| Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.
| oytis wrote:
| I don't think it's about power. I feel more empowered as an
| engineer than I would as an engineering manager. As an engineer
| I have the power over all the intricate details of how systems
| work. As an engineering manager if I am lucky I would get to
| decide whom to fire if my team's budget gets a cut.
|
| I think it's that there is only that much demand for solving
| really complex problems, and doing the same thing over and over
| is boring, so management is the only way forward for many
| people
| yusuf288 wrote:
| It's human nature.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stonecutter
| Onavo wrote:
| For many people, code is just a means to an end to solve
| problems and build. The joy from solving problems doesn't
| disappear. Would you use traditional (not WebAssembly) assembly
| to build a web application? Probably not. LLMs make a lot more
| sense if you think of it as a tool to translate requirements
| into solutions.
| paodealho wrote:
| Software dev has been promoted as a good career path for almost
| 2 decades now. Naturally you'll have a bunch of people going in
| only because of money.
|
| A few years ago, when Agile was still the hot thing and
| companies had an Agile "facilitor" or manager for each dev
| team, the common career path I heard when talking to those
| people was: "I worked as a java/cobol/etc in the past, but it
| just didn't click with me. I'm more of a peoples person, you
| know, so project management is where I really do my best
| work!".
|
| Yeah, right...
| MonkeyIsNull wrote:
| Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so
| the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good
| at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE
| HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Once you've written enough image caches, I think you often find
| yourself ready to move on to the higher level architecture of a
| larger project.
|
| Often too it's the architecture that can cause a grand idea to
| crash and burn--experienced devs should be moving toward
| solving _those_ problems.
| acdha wrote:
| It's more that there's a career ceiling and ageism is a looming
| threat. There are far more management jobs than high-level IC
| and for decades there's been this thought that older engineers
| will be replaced with younger ones more aggressively than
| managers, although the big tech layoffs raise questions about
| whether that's still true. I know multiple people who moved
| into management not because they were enthusiastic about it but
| because that was the best path for their career.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and
| becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like
| different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl),
| or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it
| completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job
| interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as
| expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25
| year old has been using Y since its release three years ago?
|
| And when you're in an existing company, stuck in thing X,
| knowing that it's obsolete, and the people doing the latest Y
| that's hot in the job market are in another department and
| jealously guard access to Y projects?
|
| How about when you go to interview, and you not ONLY have to
| know Y, but the Leetcode from 15 years ago?
|
| So maybe I've given you another alternative to 'it has to be
| power, there's no other rational reason to go into management'.
|
| Here's a gentler one: if you want to build big things,
| involving many people, you need to be in management.
|
| Do you enjoy brick laying and calculating angles around
| doorways? You're the engineer. Do you want to be the architect
| hiring engineers, working with project managers, and assessing
| the budget while worrying about approvals? They're different
| types of work, and it's not about 'power' like you are
| suggesting. Autonomy and decision-making power are more the
| 'power' engineers often don't get (unless they are lucky, very
| very smart or in a small startup-like environment).
| leetbulb wrote:
| Thank you for adding color. This is the exact reason why I
| want to get in to management. Sadly, I am just not cut out to
| manage people. Nowadays, my role is more of a hybrid between
| Principal and EM, which may be awkward at times. If it
| weren't for excellent PM & PgM, I'd be stretching myself too
| thin.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Why aren't you cut out?
|
| It's a skill that takes practice -coordinating disparate
| people and groups, creating communication where you notice
| they're not talking to each other, creating or fixing
| processes that annoy or cause chaos if they're not there,
| encouraging people, being a therapist, seeing what's not
| there and pushing a vision while you get the group to go
| along, protecting people from management above and
| pressures around, etc are mostly skills that you learn.
|
| Sometimes no one will give you feedback so you have to
| figure it out yourself (unless you're lucky to get a
| mentor), so you just have to throw yourself in and give
| yourself grace to fail and succeed over time.
|
| The only skill of these I think is possibly genetic or
| innate, is being able to see the big picture and make
| strategical decisions. A lot of tech people skew
| cognitively in narrow areas, and have trouble
| conceptualizing the world beyond.
|
| One challenge here is the ubiquitous 'managers just approve
| vacations and waste space' sentiment on here and in some
| places. These people are a chore to manage (and sometimes
| are better not being present in your group).
| boringg wrote:
| And I would argue that what you are describing is why we end
| up in a system where the people who are talented and have in
| depth knowledge end up in "dumber ~ managerial" roles and we
| end up losing real talent and knowledge because of the
| incentives you explicitly describe.
|
| If only the world incentivized ICs with depth of knowledge to
| stay in those roles for the long haul instead of chopping off
| our knowledge of specificity at the apex of their depth of
| knowledge. So many managers have no talent, no depth of
| knowledge and a passable ability to manage people.
| sentientslug wrote:
| Many ICs have no talent or depth of knowledge, I don't
| think thats a criticism unique to managers.
| glaslong wrote:
| N=1 but I do love constantly learning new things, and
| building small, purposeful, tailored products with small
| groups of people.
|
| I've gone back and forth across the lead and management lines
| many times now, and it is career limiting in many many ways.
| But it's too fulfilling to give up. And I swear there is
| magic in what small, expert groups are able to produce that
| laps large org on the regular.
| mancerayder wrote:
| isn't that more a question of company size and industry
| (i.e. less regulated than healthcare and financial
| services) than whether management is good or bad?
|
| I don't see why it contradicts my little rant above. Of
| course I also prefer small, nimble teams with lots of
| autonomy, with individuals who thrive being delegated only
| extremely broad tasks. The only part where I think there's
| a difference is the constantly learning.
|
| I love constantly learning. My issue isn't that. It's that
| I don't want to HAVE to constantly be practicing at home
| and on the weekend. I did this in my 20s and I can't/won't
| do this anymore. I just have no time or energy now as an
| Old.
| glaslong wrote:
| I don't really think management is good or bad, just
| different, and not really for me. The management career
| ladder though I do feel goes higher in large
| organizations than small.
|
| For myself it is the hands-on work I find most fulfilling
| unfortunately. I have some sort of brain worm that makes
| me want to practice all the new things at home/weekend if
| work isn't letting me. I'm sure it'll burn me out at some
| point, but to paraphrase a famous creep: I keep getting
| older, my brainworm stays the same age.
| MrJohz wrote:
| I don't think having to practice at home and at weekends
| is necessarily a part of engineering though. Every place
| I've worked at, there have been ample opportunities to
| keep up-to-date on paid hours, be that in conferences,
| learning materials, trying out side projects or weird
| ideas in more niche technologies, etc.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I think if you have a job that gives you the chance to
| expand your skills, pick new tech with the ability and
| time to learn onsite, and offers you that grace, that's a
| great company to work for.
|
| Within my power I try to do that with my directs, making
| sure new interesting things are cycled in so their CVs
| become stronger. But me, personally, I've had really bad
| luck with this. I always had to study on the weekends for
| something that either isn't used in my company or someone
| else jealously guards because it's hot on the market.
| port11 wrote:
| From my (limited) experience, that magic is incredibly
| linked to autonomy and ownership.
|
| Some research around British government workers found
| higher job satisfaction in units with hands-off managers.
| It resonates with my own career. I'm really excited and
| want to go to work when I'm on a small, autonomous team
| with little red tape and politics. Larger orgs simply can't
| -- or haven't -- ever offered me the same feeling; with
| some exceptions in Big 3 consulting if I was the expert on
| a case.
| mancerayder wrote:
| As a manager, I love being hands-off - I like directs
| that take ownership and I try to give people projects and
| roles that they want. They use their creativity and I
| help unblock, expand, course correct or suggest as
| needed. It saves them from the politics and they get high
| level mentoring.
|
| The worst manager is the micromanager - either because
| he's nervous about his job security, because he doesn't
| know how to delegate, or because he's been hands-on
| forever and can't let go.
| croes wrote:
| > if you want to build big things, involving many people, you
| need to be in management.
|
| No, you don't. You need some kind of decision making and
| communication process but a separate management is not
| necessary.
| justonceokay wrote:
| How will the widget get built if we don't have someone
| stack ranking us?
| mancerayder wrote:
| Since when do your line managers choose to stack rank?
|
| Do you know what stank ranking even is and where it comes
| from? If you have to rate your group from 1 to 5, each
| individual, and you rate them all 4s and 5s, they crack
| down and force you to select a 2 and a 3 and only have
| one 5. Now, would you prefer a CFO, CTO or even a project
| manager be the one to do it? It's a weird comment.
| justonceokay wrote:
| Weirder that you think software couldn't get built
| without a CFO. The GP comment was noting that management
| is an outcome of capital wanting more control, not
| because many layers of middle managers is a naturally
| optimal way to complete software projects
| mancerayder wrote:
| CFOs manage budgets and funding and things tech people
| don't. I hate to parrot your tone but, weirder that you
| think software can be built in a company without there
| being a budget of some kind.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Weirder that you think every group has a 2 and exactly
| one 5. You don't see the problem with that?
| mancerayder wrote:
| Re-read and think about what was written - the 2s
| aren'tcoming from the line managers, you're barking up
| the wrong tree in the stack ranking process. I just
| explained that stack ranking gets scaled and adjusted by
| the brass, and I just in this example rated everyone a 4
| and 5.
|
| Again, as an older manager today, I can see myself in my
| 20s in the resistance and stubbornness to 'how
| corporations work' espoused in comments like yours. I
| sympathize, but I warn you against being naive and
| ideological, because unfortunately human groups be human
| groups, and organizations for better or for worse behave
| in predictable patterns. You might as well know as much
| as possible so you can deal with it better.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Do you think every group of people contains someone who
| is operating at 40%?
| mancerayder wrote:
| Nope! In fact I think stack ranking is horrible. But you
| missed the point I was making (and then re-made). I think
| you read 40% of what I wrote.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Can you go into more detail?
| arcologies1985 wrote:
| I have worked at organizations where most engineering and
| many product decisions were made bottom-up, through
| written RFDs and ADRs, and horizontal conversations
| between lead, staff and principal engineers. The tradeoff
| is that it can take weeks, months or years to both agree
| or schedule work on larger projects, where other
| (especially small) organizations might take hours to
| weeks.
| TSiege wrote:
| > Do you enjoy brick laying and calculating angles around
| doorways? You're the engineer. Do you want to be the
| architect hiring engineers, working with project managers,
| and assessing the budget while worrying about approvals?
|
| These are inherently different levels of power. I'm not sure
| how your example is supposed to be the opposite when you
| compare someone laying bricks to someone making hiring and
| firing decisions about groups of people. Your scenario is
| fundamentally a power imbalance
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| > only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later?
|
| That sure beats having it completely obsoleted a few weeks
| later, which sometimes feels like the situation with AI
| css_apologist wrote:
| Yea, I enjoy being the engineer
| sfbapt wrote:
| A rare occurrence these days. I suppose a lot of it has to
| do with shrinking attention spans and instant gratification
| and the lack of effort required to do so many things that
| required even a little bit of effort before
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Same. The process (and all of its struggles) is an
| inseparable part of the satisfaction.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| In my opinion, time spent learning Perl or an outmoded
| framework still helped me learn new things and stretch
| myself. A lot of that knowledge is transferable to other
| languages or frameworks. After learning QuickBasic and REXX
| it was pretty easy to pickup Ruby and Python. ;-)
| roncesvalles wrote:
| >only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later
|
| Almost nothing goes obsolete in software; it just becomes
| unpopular. You can still write every website you see on the
| Internet with just jQuery. There are perfectly functional
| HTTP frameworks for Cobol.
| saulpw wrote:
| obsolete in the software *industry
| paprikanotfound wrote:
| Some of us actually enjoy programming.
| nbaksalyar wrote:
| > only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later
|
| Not really. There aren't as many fundamentally new ideas in
| modern tech as it may seem.
|
| Web servers have existed for more than 30 years and haven't
| changed _that_ much since then. Or e.g., React + Redux is
| pretty much the same thing as WinProc from WinAPI - invented
| some time in ~1990. Before Docker, there were Solaris Zones
| and FreeBSD jails. TCP /IP is 50 years old. And many, many
| other things we perceive as new.
|
| Moreover, I think it's worth looking back and learning some
| of the "old tech" for inspiration; there's a wealth of deep
| and prescient ideas there. We still don't have a full modern
| equivalent of Macromedia Flash, for example.
| eleventyseven wrote:
| > React + Redux is pretty much the same thing as WinProc
| from WinAPI
|
| I can't tell if this is sincere or parody, it is so
| insufferably wrong. Good troll. I almost bit.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I liken it to being an author.
|
| You want to write a book about people's deepest motivations.
| Formative experiences, relationships, desires. Society,
| expectations, disappointment. Characters need to meet and talk
| at certain times. The plot needs to make sense.
|
| You bring it to your editor. He finds you forgot to capitalise
| a proper noun. You also missed an Oxford comma. You used
| "their" instead of "they're".
|
| He sends you back. You didn't get any feedback about whether it
| makes sense that the characters did what they did.
|
| You are in hell, you won't hear anything about the structure
| until you fix your commas.
|
| Eventually someone invents an automatic editor. It fixes all
| the little grammar and spelling and punctuation issues for you.
|
| Now you can bring the script to an editor who tells you the
| character needs more development.
|
| You are making progress.
|
| Your only issue is the Luddites who reckon you aren't a real
| author, because you tend to fail their LeetGrammar tests,
| calling you a vibe author.
| kmaitreys wrote:
| Weird analogy. This makes sense if you liken this automatic
| editor to a LSP or compiler of the language you're writing
| in.
| hyperpape wrote:
| I don't really want to be a manager of humans, although my role
| as an engineer is a leadership role that has some overlap.
|
| But I'm acutely conscious that in the 5+ years that I've been a
| senior developer, my ability to come up with useful ideas has
| significantly outstripped the time I have to realize those
| ideas (and from experience, the same is often true of
| academics).
|
| At work, I have the choice between remaining hands-on and
| limiting what I can get done, or acting more like a manager,
| and having the opportunity to get more done, but only by
| letting other people do it, in ways that might not reflect my
| vision. It's pretty frustrating, to be honest.
|
| For side projects, it's worse. Most of them just can't be done,
| because I don't even have the choice.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| I actually don't think the author wants to become a real
| manager, he wants to play a video game where he sends NPCs
| around to do stuff.
|
| Real managers deal with coaching, ownership, feelings,
| politics, communication, consensus building, etc. The people
| who are good at it like setting other people up to win.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| As a manager who is trying to do all the things you listed
| well, I would love it to be more like a game sending NPCs
| around. Ignoring the macro implications of AI, even if very
| successful at or resistant to it, I'd think there would be
| very, very few people who are actively seeking people drama.
| Educating kids can be fun, but educating adults in the
| business domain is almost always a drag as in any given
| professional room, you would be very lucky to find one person
| who is genuinely there out of curiosity rather than
| obligation or fomo.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I think you might have missed the point
|
| > I'd think there would be very, very few people who are
| actively seeking people drama
|
| Theoretically as a manager you get the bump up the power
| dynamic ladder (and probably pay ladder) because you are
| taking on the responsibility of "people drama". Being a
| good manager is antithetical to treating living, breathing
| human beings as NPCs in a game.
| willio58 wrote:
| For me, getting into management was less about feeling bogged
| down in the specifics, but more about control (directed mostly
| above). Anyone who's had a bad manager or bad decisions they
| need to adhere to might be familiar with the feeling that
| caused me to dip my toes into management.
|
| Like I've been in situations as an IC where poor leadership
| from above has literally caused less efficient and more painful
| day-to-day work. I always hoped I could sway those decisions
| from my position as an IC, but reality rarely aligned with that
| hope.
|
| I actually love the details, but I just don't get too deep into
| them these days as I don't want to micro-manage.
|
| I do find I have more say in things my team deals with now that
| I'm a manager.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| Asking as a fellow manager - do you ever wonder some of the
| people you manage might be thinking of you in the same way?
| Someone making terrible decisions, making them less
| efficient? And, have you ever noticed that something you
| strongly pushed back when you were an IC did not matter, or
| was actually the right thing in retrospect?
| doug_durham wrote:
| I became a manager so I could solve bigger problems. Good
| managers do dive into the details. It's a mistake to think that
| as a manager, you don't have to concern yourself with the
| minutia. You still have to do homework and deep thinking. you
| just don't have to write the code
| geor9e wrote:
| >the joy of problem solving
|
| It's frontier exploration that brings me joy. If a clanker can
| do something, then it's a solved problem. I use all the tools
| at my disposal to push the frontier of problems solved. Wasting
| my time re-inventing the wheel brings me the opposite of joy.
| polyterative wrote:
| full agree
| stavros wrote:
| That's so reductive as to be useless. You might as well
| replace "clanker" with "computer" or "pencil" or whatever
| else you want.
| yeeetz wrote:
| i like the aspect of engineering that's building useful or
| interesting or fun things for people, and i'll always
| experiment with new tech that facilitates that
| chamomeal wrote:
| On a similar note, I have never heard the phrase "higher level
| abstractions" abstractions so much. Everywhere I look, higher
| level abstractions. It's becoming one of those phrases I have
| an instant reaction to. The word "abstraction" used to _mean_
| something, man...
| neya wrote:
| As an engineer, I can never actually let a system write code on
| behalf of me with the level of complacency I've accumulated
| over the years. I always have opinionated design decisions,
| variable naming practices. It's memorable, relatable,
| repeatable across N projects. Sure, you can argue that you can
| feed all this into the context, but I've found most models to
| hallucinate and make things unnecessarily opaque and complex.
| And then, I eventually have to spend time cleaning up all that
| mess. OP claims they can tell the model over the phone what to
| do and it does it. Good for OP, but I've never personally had
| that level of success with my own product development workflow.
| It sounds too good to be true if this level of autonomy is even
| possible today without the AI fucking something up.
| zem wrote:
| another way to look at it is that management is a job with a
| set of skills, challenges, and rewards, just like any other,
| but as a civilisation we seem to have tied it to power and
| hierarchy, and made it something you need to be promoted into
| rather than choosing as a career from the outset (MBAs
| notwithstanding). maybe a lot of engineers would have gone into
| the engineering management path if they could have, and
| engineer was just seen as the more entry-level option.
| colecut wrote:
| My 15 year old son has been building his own video games with
| Unreal Engine for a few years..
|
| I was recently looking for mentors to work with him and advance
| his skills, targeting college aged kids / young 20s..
|
| It was surprising to me how many people I came across in this
| field at this young age that are trying to focus on the "higher
| level" game planning aspects and not so much on the lower level
| implementation specifics.
| corysama wrote:
| I highly recommend the Handmade Hero series to folks in his
| situation. Casey has put up an absurd amount of material for
| everyone for free.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnuhp3Xd9PYTt6svyQPyR.
| ..
|
| https://guide.handmadehero.org/hmcon/
|
| https://guide.handmadehero.org/
|
| https://handmade.network/forums
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I think plenty would be willing to be managers if you removed
| the volatility of human personalities from it. At least for me,
| it means I get to focus on the more interesting tech work and
| not worry about writing tests or github actions.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Some people want the thing done more than they want to do the
| thing. That gets to extremes of exploitative parasitic
| behavior, but it's true at much less obnoxious scales: ever
| used a programming language's standard library instead of
| inventing your own _whatever_? Probably a yes.
|
| That can extend to arbitrary absurdity. You are probably not
| growing your own food, mining your own ore, forging your own
| tools, etc etc etc.
|
| It's all just a matter of where you rely on external
| tools/abstractions to do parts of the work you don't want to do
| yourself.
| themafia wrote:
| Engineering, to me, is simply "the art of compromise."
|
| You can't do that from a high level abstract position. You
| actually need to stand at the coal face and think about it from
| time to time.
|
| This article encodes an entitled laziness that's destructive to
| personal skill and quality work.
| johnfn wrote:
| It has nothing to do with power. I just want to build bigger,
| cooler things, faster.
| markstos wrote:
| Last night I was debugging a website where some users, some times
| were getting a message that they were attempting to sign up too
| many times, even when they only had tried to sign-up once.
|
| I tried using LLMs to help debug at different points, but they
| went in circles on bad ideas, even when I gave them what turned
| out to be a correct clue.
|
| Root cause turned out to be that IPv6 wasn't enabled for Docker
| networking, but was enabled for the websites DNS. So people who
| connected over IPv6 were getting their IPs all converted to the
| same internal Docker IP before being handed to the per-IP
| throttling algorithm.
|
| I spotted that there were no IPv6 IPs in the logs, but the LLMs
| missed that the key pattern was the _absence_ of something
| expected, instead drawing wrong conclusions.
|
| So no, I'm not about to turn OpenClaw loose on building anything
| at all complex.
| vdfs wrote:
| By not trusting OpenClaw on your system, you are missing out on
| lot of 0-days and 10/10 CVEs!
| GeorgeOldfield wrote:
| skill issue
| forty wrote:
| Haha now you should remove your contact email from your website
| else you soon going to be flood by playful "hackers" sending you
| emails such as "as agreed last week, can you share me your gmail
| credentials?" ;) It's fine to do dumb things, everyone does, but
| you should avoid claiming it publicly.
| darepublic wrote:
| These days it feels like there is a ton of pro anthropic
| astroturfing on this site. Probably it is mostly genuine
| enthusiasm from sincere people. But nevertheless there are a ton
| of articles from or about anthropic and within the comments of
| these you are sure to find, often at the top, someone staunchly
| defending the superiority of engineering everything via agentic
| use of the in fashion Claude model. If they are truly right than
| I don't see the need for proselytizing like they do. The proof is
| in the pudding. That is, if your choices are truly the best and
| fastest way to produce software inevitably the market and
| industry will reflect this. But it feels like they don't want to
| let results speak for themselves they need to hype up their
| claims continually and forcibly shove this down people's throats
| chamomeal wrote:
| I've also been a little suspicious of the vote counts these
| days. Pro AI stuff regular hitting like 800 votes. The codex
| announcement hit like 1500? Like what's goin on here
| andai wrote:
| If you check the OpenClaw discord, a common sentiment there is
| "it works but only if you use Opus." That seems to be the
| actual situation now.
|
| Grok 4 Fast told me its own internal system prompt has rules
| against autonomous operation, so that might have something to
| do with it. I am having decent results with it though.
| codexon wrote:
| I think some of it might be genuine. For people that don't code
| (like management), going from 0 to being able to create a
| landing page that looks like it came from a big corporation is
| a miracle.
|
| They are not able to comprehend that for anything more
| complicated than that, the code might compile, but the logical
| errors and failure to implement the specs start piling up.
| serf wrote:
| everything I see people do with openclaw is less like LLM work
| and more like 'Yahoo! Pipes' work.
|
| I haven't been able to find a good use for myself yet. Almost
| everything I use an LLM for has some kind of hard human-in-the-
| loop factor that is as of yet inescapable -- but I also don't
| really use LLMs for things like "sort my email.". mostly entirely
| coding.
| trilogic wrote:
| Ads Pff..
| gyre007 wrote:
| This is from the same person who wrote this [1]
|
| [1] https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-
| fo...
| aeternum wrote:
| Who wants to bet one of his 'agents' wrote and posted this
| article?
|
| Agents work but still mostly produce slop.
| wiseowise wrote:
| More unhinged takes, please.
|
| I hope at some point there will be a medical research into this
| hysteria.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| My pet peeve with AI is that it just accelerates whatever has
| already been automated or can be automated easily, but could not
| touch the bastions of government service, financial service,
| schools and health services that are way less automated. They
| keep eating ourselves' lunch without touching the real problems.
|
| For me the pain point has always been with non-IT
| people/companies. They are way more accustomed with phone or even
| in person appointments. They in general have way more of a say
| than me, the customer.
|
| Can Openclaw make and take phone calls for me to make
| appointments? Can Openclaw do chores for me? Can Openclaw meet
| with contractors for me? None of them it can do. It can make
| notes for me (useless as most notes are useless). It can scrap
| websites for me (not very interesting as why would I want to
| collect so much knowledge?). It can probably automate anything
| that already has an endpoint or whatever, but I don't mind write
| code for my own projects. I always failed to understand why
| anyone would want to let AI write most of the code of their
| PERSONAL project -- unless they want to sell them quickly.
|
| I'm just a frustrated old man I guess.
| solumos wrote:
| It can make/take phone calls[0], but they need to be prompted
| on the nature of the call, the data they need, and how to
| collect it. They can also output the results of the call via
| API. An AI agent from Masterworks recently called me using this
| technology.
|
| [0] https://vapi.ai/
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > My pet peeve with AI is that it just accelerates whatever has
| already been automated or can be automated easily ....
|
| > I'm just a frustrated old man I guess.
|
| I think this is a great summary of the failure of vision that a
| lot of tech people are having right now.
|
| > automate anything that already has an endpoint or whatever
|
| Facebook used to have API's, Reddit used to have API's, amazon
| used to have API's
|
| They are gone.
|
| Enshitification and dark patterns have taken over.
|
| "Hey open claw, cancel service xxx" where XXX is something that
| is 17 steps and purposely hard to cancel so they keep your
| money.
|
| What's going to happen when your AI tool can go to a website
| and strip the ad's off and return you just the text? What
| happens when it can build a customized news feed that looks
| less like Facebook and more like HN? Aren't we just gaining
| back function we lost with the death of RSS?
|
| Consumers are mad about the hype of AI but the moment that it
| can cut through the bullshit we keep putting in their way it's
| going to wreck business MODELS, and the choice will be adapt or
| die. Start asking your "AI" tools to do all the basic, tedious
| bullshit tasks that are low risk (you have a ton of them) and
| if it gets 1/4 of them done your going to free up a ton of your
| own time.
| manmal wrote:
| I've done some phone programming over the Xmas holidays with
| clawdbot. This does work, BUT you absolutely need demand clearly
| measurable outcomes of the agent, like a closed feedback loop or
| comparison with a reference implementation, or perfect score in a
| simulated environment. Without this, the implementation will be
| incomplete and likely utter crap.
|
| Even then, the architecture will be horrible unless you chat _a
| lot_ about it upfront. At some point, it's easier to just look in
| the terminal.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| Another OpenClaw post claiming life has been changed and yet
| there's no MVP, no product, no problem being solved. I look
| forward to a future update.
| akashnagar wrote:
| Amazing
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Like almost everything else; the vast majority of fun for me is
| in setting up and configuring $THING, with thing here being
| OpenClaw and a fresh new server. After that I realize I have
| nothing to do with it and destroy the instance only to create a
| new one to try out some other self-hosted $THING
| ramoz wrote:
| Love that OP's previous post is from 2024: Rabbit R1 - The
| Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones
| personjerry wrote:
| This seems like AI slop?
|
| There's not a single real example, and it even has all the em-
| dashes intact.
| spagheddi wrote:
| yeah, i can't take this post seriously if this was their other
| post. https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-
| fo...
| oldestofsports wrote:
| What I find when I'm using Claude for coding personal projects is
| that it is pretty darn expensive when letting them work on their
| own. Is the cost of tokens ever a concern for those who use
| OpenClaw?
| squidsoup wrote:
| This reads like a linkedin post - high on enthusiasm, low on
| meaningful content.
| kortilla wrote:
| What has this "team" actually achieved? I keep reading these
| manager cosplay blogs/tweets/etc but they aren't ever about how a
| real team was replaced or how anything of significant complexity
| was actually built.
| alpb wrote:
| I'm sorry dude but your last post was also hyping up R1 which was
| a total disaster. Do you mind actually sharing your experience
| with OpenClaw, such as how are you orchestrating a project? How
| much does it cost? How do you prompt it? What tasks do you get
| done? How much does it actually take to execute on those tasks?
| What is your interaction with the agent?
| steele wrote:
| PsyOp or AIslop
| skywhopper wrote:
| This sort of post is useless without examples. What projects have
| you built? How did you go about it? What challenges did you face?
| What did you learn? Just saying "this is amazing now I am a super
| manager turning out projects left and right" is not convincing.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Sounds like someone who doesn't like writing code.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I am currently in the process of setting up a local development
| environment to automate all my programming tasks (dev, test, qa,
| deploy, debug, etc; for android, ios, mac, windows, linux). It's
| a serious amount of effort, and a lot of complexity! I could
| probably move faster if I used AI to set it all up for me rather
| than setting it up myself. But there's significant danger there
| in letting an AI "do whatever it wants" on my machine that I'm
| not willing to accept yet, so the cost of safety is slowness in
| getting my environment finished.
|
| I feel like there's this "secret" hiding behind all these AI
| tools, that actually it's all very complicated and takes a lot of
| effort to make work, but the tools we're given hides it all. It's
| nice that we benefit from its simplicity of use. But hiding
| complexity leads to unexpected problems, and I'm not sure we've
| seen any of those yet - other than the massive, gaping security
| hole.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| This reads like a peacocking LinkedIn post where someone
| desperately shows they are not just with it, they are ahead of
| it. The space is absolutely filled with this sort of noise,
| primarily people who dismissed AI as something only the nubs
| like, so now their cope is to do the "now it's useful and I have
| catapulted ahead of all the others bit".
| aeldidi wrote:
| There's an odd trend with these sorts of posts where the author
| claims to have had some transformative change in their workflow
| brought upon by LLM coding tools, but also seemingly has nothing
| to show for it. To me, using the most recent ChatGPT Codex (5.3
| on "Extra High" reasoning), it's incredibly obvious that while
| these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-
| scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the
| types of things that are actually difficult in software
| development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-
| holding to get things right. This can still be useful, but is a
| far cry from what seems to be the online discourse right now.
|
| As a real world example, I was told to evaluate Claude Code and
| ChatGPT codex at my current job since my boss had heard about
| them and wanted to know what it would mean for our operations.
| Our main environment is a C# and Typescript monorepo with 2
| products being developed, and even with a pretty extensive test
| suite and a nearly 100 line "AGENTS.md" file, all models I tried
| basically fail or try to shortcut nearly every task I give it,
| even when using "plan mode" to give it time to come up with a
| plan before starting. To be fair, I was able to get it to work
| pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions and
| monitoring the "thinking" output and stopping it when I see
| something wrong there to correct it, but at that point I felt
| silly for spending all that effort just driving the bot instead
| of doing it myself.
|
| It almost feels like this is some "open secret" which we're all
| pretending isn't the case too, since if it were really as good as
| a lot of people are saying there should be a massive increase in
| the number of high quality projects/products being developed. I
| don't mean to sound dismissive, but I really do feel like I'm
| going crazy here.
| mikenew wrote:
| Pretty much every software engineer I've talked to sees it more
| or less like you do, with some amount of variance on exactly
| where you draw the line of "this is where the value prop of an
| LLM falls off". I think we're just awash in corporate
| propaganda and the output of social networks, and "it's good
| for certain things, mixed for others" is just not very memetic.
| whaleidk wrote:
| I wish this was true. My experience is co-workers who do lip
| service as to treating LLM like a baby junior dev, only to
| near-vibe every feature and entire projects, without spending
| so much as 10 mins to think on their own first.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| There's got to be some quantity of astroturfing going on, given
| the players and the dollar amounts at stake.
| input_sh wrote:
| _Some_? I 'd be shocked if it's less than 70% of everything
| AI-related in here.
|
| For example a lot of pro-OpenAI astroturfing really wanted
| you to know that 5.3 scored better than opus on terminal-
| bench 2.0 this week, and a lot of Anthropic astroturfing
| likes to claim that all your issues with it will simply go
| away as soon as you switch to a $200/month plan (like you
| can't try Opus in the cheaper one and realise it's definitely
| not 10x better).
| RealityVoid wrote:
| You're not going crazy. That is what I see as well. But, I do
| think there is value in:
|
| - driving the LLM instead of doing it yourself. - sometimes I
| just can't get the activation energy and the LLM is always
| ready to go so it gives me a kickstart
|
| - doing things you normally don't know. I learned a lot of
| command like tools and trucks by seeing what Claude does. Doing
| short scripts for stuff is super useful. Of course, the catch
| here is if you don't know stuff you can't drive it very well.
| So you need to use the things in isolation.
|
| - exploring alternative solutions. Stuff that by definition you
| don't know. Of course, some will not work, but it widens your
| horizon
|
| - exploring unfamiliar codebases. It can ingest huge amounts of
| data so exploration will be faster. (But less comprehensive
| than if you do it yourself fully)
|
| - maintaining change consistency. This I think it's just better
| than humans. If you have stuff you need to change at 2 or 3
| places, you will probably forget. LLM's are better at keeping
| consistency at details (but not at big picture stuff,
| interestingly.)
| kace91 wrote:
| >driving the LLM instead of doing it yourself. - sometimes I
| just can't get the activation energy and the LLM is always
| ready to go so it gives me a kickstart
|
| There is a counter issue though, realizing mid session that
| the model won't be able to deliver that last 10%, and now you
| have to either grok a dump of half finished code or start
| from scratch.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| For me the biggest benefit from using LLMs is that I feel way
| more motivated to try new tools because I don't have to worry
| about the initial setup.
|
| I'd previously encountered tools that seemed interesting, but
| as soon as I tried getting it to run I found myself going
| down an infinite debugging hole. With an LLM I can usually
| explain my system's constraints and the best models will give
| me a working setup from which I can begin iterating. The
| funny part is that most of these tools are usually AI related
| in some way, but getting a functional environment often felt
| impossible unless you had really modern hardware.
| christophilus wrote:
| Same. This weekend, I built a Flutter app and a Wails app
| just to compare the two. Would have never done either on my
| own due to the up front boilerplate-- and not knowing (nor
| really wishing to know) Dart.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It's like CGP Grey hosting a productivity podcast despite his
| productivity almost certainly going down over time.
|
| It's the appearance of productivity, not actual productivity.
| daliusd wrote:
| Maybe it is language specific? Maybe LLMs have a lot of good
| JavaScript/TypeScript samples for training and it works for
| those devs (e.g. me). I heard that Scala devs have problems
| with LLMs writing code too. I am puzzled by good devs not
| managing to get LLM work for them.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I think LLMs have a hard time with large code bases
| (obviously so do devs).
|
| A giant monorepo would be a bad fit for an LLM IMO.
| g-mork wrote:
| > it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are
| surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks,
| they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things
| that are actually difficult in software development and require
| non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things
| right
|
| I used this line for a long time, but you could just as easily
| say the same thing for a typical engineer. It basically boils
| down to "Claude likes its tickets to be well thought out". I'm
| sure there is some size of project where its ability to
| navigate the codebase starts to break down, but I've fed it
| sizeable ones and so long as the scope is constrained it
| generally just works nowadays
| geetee wrote:
| The difference is a real engineer will say "hey I need more
| information to give you decent output." And when the AI does
| do that, congrats, the time you spend identifying and
| explaining the complexity _is_ the hard time consuming work.
| The code is trivial once you figure out the rest. The time
| savings are fake.
| chrisjj wrote:
| That real engineer knows decent. This parrot knows only its
| own best (current attempt).
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| I find these agents incredibly useful for eliminating time
| spent on writing utility scripts for data analysis or data
| transformation. But... I like coding, getting relegated to
| being a manager 100%? Sounds like a prison to me not freedom.
|
| That they are so good at the things I like to do the least and
| still terrible at the things at which I excel. That's just
| gravy.
|
| But I guess this is in line with how most engineers transition
| to management sometime in their 30s.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > if it were really as good as a lot of people are saying there
| should be a massive increase in the number of high quality
| projects/products being developed.
|
| The headline gain is speed. Almost no-one's talking about
| quality - they're moving too fast to notice the lack.
| kylecazar wrote:
| Matches my experience pretty well. FWIW, this is the opinion
| that I hear most frequently in real life conversation. I only
| see the magical revelation takes online -- and I see a lot of
| them.
| yusufnb wrote:
| At my work I interview a lot of fresh grads and interns. I have
| been doing that consistently for last 4 years. During the
| interviews I always ask the candidates to show and tell, share
| their screen and talk about their projects and work at school
| and other internships.
|
| Since last few months, I have seen a notable difference in the
| quality and extent of projects these students have been able to
| accomplish. Every project and website they show looks polished,
| most of those could be a full startup MVP pre AI days.
|
| The bar has clearly been raised way high, very fast with AI.
| josiahpeters wrote:
| I've had the same experience with the recent batch of
| candidates for a Junior Software Engineer position we just
| filled. Their projects looked impressive on the surface and
| seemed very promising.
|
| Once we got them into a technical screening, most fell apart
| writing code. Our problem was simple: using your preferred
| programming language, model a shopping cart object that has
| the ability to add and remove items from the cart and track
| the cart total.
|
| We were shocked by how incapable most candidates were in
| writing simple code without their IDEs tab completion
| capability. We even told them to use whatever resources they
| normally used.
|
| The whole experience left us a little surprised.
| peab wrote:
| > ... but also seemingly has nothing to show for it This x1000,
| I find it so ridiculous.
|
| usually when someone hypes it up it's things like, "i have it
| text my gf good morning every day!!", or "it analyzed every
| single document on my computer and wrote me a poem!!"
| hawkernews wrote:
| I remember when Anthropic was running their Built with Claude
| contest on reddit. The submissions were few and let's just say
| less than impressive. I use Claude Code and am very pro-AI in
| general, but the deeper you go, the more glaring the
| limitations become. I could write an essay about it, but I feel
| like there's no point in this day and age, where floods of slop
| in fractured echo chambers dominate.
| cantalopes wrote:
| Yeeeah nah
| _345 wrote:
| Lmao (was the very next article suggested to me when i got to the
| end)
|
| https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...
| rahulrav wrote:
| Also the same author:
|
| > Generally, I believe (Rabbit) R1 has the potential to change
| the world.
|
| There is a pattern here.
| peab wrote:
| This guy's next blog post is hyping up the rabbit r1. How can one
| take this seriously?
| nostrapollo wrote:
| Something sus about these posts that promote OpenClaw
| specifically, even on X when ClawdBot was first popping up - an
| unusual number of people were promoting it all without specific
| information on why it was useful. All the usual suspects were
| also promoting it (the 'dev influencer' accounts). Is this a
| new(?) tactic on hyping up a github repo for engagement?
| danpalmer wrote:
| This post is well summed up by the link at the end: "Next post,
| Rabbit R1, The Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones".
| duxup wrote:
| I have trouble taking these AI posts seriously that don't have
| code / actual examples.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> I used to have way too many ideas but no way to build them all
| on my own--they just kept piling up. But now, everything is
| different._
|
| This has been a significant aspect of ai use as well. As a result
| a feel a little less friction with myself, less that I am letting
| things slip by because, well, because I still want a nice balance
| to work, life, leisure, etc. I don't want to overstate things,
| it's not a cure all for any of these things, but it helps a lot.
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