alt Hacker NewsWarranty Void If Regenerated
As an experiment I started asking Claude to explain things to me with a fiction story and it ended up being really good, so I started seeing how far I could take it and what it would take to polish it enough to share publicly.
Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.
Comments
excellent story, it was both interesting and mildly terrifying. to think that one day software could be malleable seems so wrong to me - you would think having deterministic results is important for programming - and yet with "vibe coding" that really seems to be where it's going.
this is such a beautiful essay. thank you op for posting. made my day :)
I was going to say the author should try writing fiction because it’s quite engaging, then I realised it’s just AI slop.
It explains why it kind of lost its way towards the end. Another thousand hours of everyone’s time wasted by a slop poster.
this was a ridiculously pointless story, I stopped after the second paragraph and came here to ask politely what was the point of it
what was my surprise when I read it was AI-generated
A few months ago, I asked Grok for a piece of fiction set in the cyberpunk 2077 universe. A cremated incredible story about a braindance that was actually stealthily programming the watcher through a back door in the watchers own implants to transmit a AI from beyond the black wall, allowing the AI to escape into the physical universe through the braindance’s audience. Excellent.
There are always bugs in software. The question is do you have enough eyes on the data to spot them or do they linger for years.
I stopped to read because I had the feel that the writer has no plan about what he was writing. It's completely bullshit. Software regenerating, changing Requirements in a product thats delivered and comes without source. Completely bullshit. When I now read here that it's AI, I'm happy to see that AI is still not capable of writing senseful texts.
Who can know what the world will look like as we "transition"? I sure don't, but I'm thankful the author here has taken a stab at it. I feel like this is one of the first stories I've seen to try to imagine this post-transition world in a way that isn't so gonzo as to be unrelatable. It was so relatable (the human-ness shining all the brighter in a machine-driven world) that I cried as I finished reading. I've felt very anxious about my own future, and to see one possible future painted so vividly, with such human and emotionally focused themes, triggered quite an emotional reaction. I think the feeling was:
> If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.
with the speed of llm/ai improvement, this too maybe steamrolled
It’s a neat piece of writing, but not nearly dystopic enough for my taste. There will only be one farm and whoever is fixing it will be on the other side of the world.
it's crap. you all need to go outside
I'm disappointed, as the Google result showed "warranty void if regenerated" in the description and I thought HN had started serving witicisms for the desciption
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ai photos and em dashes/directional inverted commas (so probably AI writing), sorry to be rude but i dont see the point of reading this when i could prompt an AI to generate the story myself if you shared the prompts? im not trying to be crass here, if someone could share why they think this is worth reading id be all ears. after being warned across the net to not be snarky about AI i really must iterate that snarkiness is not my intention here, im genuinely curious.
edit: since im being downvoted, i clarify my interest to be in the human artistic input behind this mathematical model output
I don't oppose reading AI generated content in principle, but because it's free to generate, I always am less likely to read super long prose that is AI generated. So the question is whether someone has taken the time to keep it as long as necessary but not longer. Or if there are ways to make it easier for me to commit to the experience, with a sort of TLDR