alt Hacker NewsLong-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?
In business, there's this saying that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". I guess LLMs also make that true for hobby projects that used to make up a good portion of HN. We'd celebrate a project like that not because it's useful, but because it's a triumph of human ingenuity and a celebration of a personal achievement for the author. But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?
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>Why bring it to life?
Why not? The author wanted it, and had wanted it for about four decades since trying and failing as a child due to the difficulty of the task. If you’re in a certain frame of mind, then “why bring it to life?” can be directed at any kind of cultural work to negate it out of existence.
> I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use.
My best theory would be it's something that was built as like a novelty/proof of concept, that a current state of the art LLM can do tedious tasks like assembly on a ridiculously old/low resource platform and turn out something that actually looks coherent. I don't personally know a lot of people who enjoy building large things in assembly but LLMs aren't bothered by doing tedious tasks. Due to the tiny size of the thing it can probably very rapidly iterate on "this doesn't work, change a thing, run it again" thousands of times.
For the fun of it. Why not. And otoh, isn't it impressive that llm's can do it.
AI assisted or not, you have no idea how much of his personal effort went into the project.
> If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?
Why not?
What if the person just wanted to see if it could be done and how it would look like, but wasn’t interested in the nitty-gritty bits in between?
There’s so much elitism and “you can’t sit with us” energy here that I feel like I just lost 4 decades of my life just reading this—and not in a good way.
Yeah, there certainly is AI slop. But there’s also very good uses of AI. So how about we stop shaming people for just building things they wanted to build using the tools at their disposal?
> But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?
Why isn’t it? Don’t “having an idea and acting on it” count anymore? You guys seem so utterly insecure it’s depressing.
If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?
Likes. Clicks. Vanity. Being able to list GitHub on a resume.
The usual stuff we get from anything adjacent to A.I.
We went to the moon with slide rules. Now we boil the oceans for "likes."
> why bring it to life?
I think all AI projects should die, but if your question is aimed as to "why to publish it on github", then why not? Others could look at the code and learn from it (perhaps); and it is easier to distribute it that way too, in many cases. So I don't fully agree with the assumption that it would be automatically useless. Personally I won't use AI slop projects. It already annoys me to no ends that AI skynet successfully took over ruby development. I don't feel like even giving any feedback, as a few ruby devs such as Hiroshi Shibata, only interact with other beings via AI slop spam via claude; suddenly newly gained "perfect english language skills". It is all so fake now when AI infiltrates projects.
> then why bring it to life?
Like many things in life, the answer is just "because I want to" and "because I can". Not everything has to be a linear progression or a level-up mechanic like a mmorpg.
Sometimes you want to create something out of creativity and you like seeing it done. The same way a painter wants to create something, not to show off skills, not to linearly progress onto something, but because they like making something out of nothing.