Summarizer

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.

> I’ve been wanting to develop a plastic -> silicone -> plaster -> clay mold making process for years, but it’s complex and mold making is both art and science. It would have been hundreds of hours before, with maybe 12 hours of Claude code I’m almost there (some nagging issues… maybe another hour). That’s so nebulous and likely just plain wrong. I have some experience with silicone molds and casting silicone and other materials. I have no idea how you’d accurately estimate it would take hundreds of hours. But the mostly likely reason you’ve had results is that you just did it. This sounds very very much like confirmation bias. “I started drinking pine needle tea and then 5 days later my cold got better!” I use AI, it’s useful for lots of things, but this kind of anecdote is terrible evidence.

> ... 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!!"

“Emperor wore no clothes” moment. Given time AI will lead to incredible productivity. In the meantime, use as appropriate.

I like to call it Canadian girlfriend coding.

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.

The crazy pills you are taking is that thinking people have anything to prove to you. The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software. The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the "I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad" sense. There's fundcli and nitpick on my GitHub that I created using Claude. fundcli looks at your shell history and suggests places to donate to, to support open source software you actually use. Nitpick is a TUI HN client. I've shipped others. The obvious retort is that those two things aren't "real" software; they're not complex, they're not making me any money. In fact, fundcli is costing me piles of money! As much as I can give it! I don't need anyone to tell me that or shit on the stuff I'm building. The "open secret" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! So there's another filtering effect. The crazy pills are thinking that HN is in any way representative of anything about what's going on in our broader society. Those projects are out there, why do you assume you'll be told about it? That someone's going to write an exposé/blog post on themselves about how they had AI build a thing and now they're raking in the dollars and oh, buy my course on learning how to vibecode? The people selling those courses aren't the ones shipping software!

> The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software. I don't doubt that an LLM would theoretically be capable of doing these sorts of things, nor did I intend to give off that sentiment, rather I was more evaluating if it was as practical as some people seem to be making the case for. For example, a C compiler is very impressive, but its clear from the blog post[0] that this required a massive amount of effort setting things up and constant monitoring and working around limitations of Claude Code and whatnot, not to mention $20,000. That doesn't seem at all practical, and I wonder if Nicholas Carlini (the author of the Anthropic post) would have had more success using Claude Code alongside his own abilities for significantly cheaper. While it might seem like moving the goalpost, I don't think it's the same thing to compare what I was saying with the fact that a multi billion dollar corporation whose entire business model relies on it can vibe code a C compiler with $20,000 worth of tokens. > The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the "I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad" sense. Yes, this is actually a good point. I do feel like there's a self report bias at play here when it comes to this too. For example, someone might feel like they're more productive, but their output is roughly the same as what it was pre-LLM tooling. This is kind of where I'm at right now with this whole thing. > The "open secret" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! So there's another filtering effect. My hand is definitely up here, shipping is very hard! I would also agree that it's an "open secret", especially given that "buying a domain name for a side project that never goes anywhere" is such a universal experience. I think both things can be true though. It can be true that these tools are definitely a step up from traditional IDE-style tooling, while also being true that they are not nearly as good as some would have you believe. I appreciate the insight, thanks for replying. [0]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

If people make extraordinary claims, I expect extraordinary proofs… Also, there is nothing complex in a C compiler. As students we built these things as toy projects at uni, without any knowledge of software development practices. Yet, to bring an example for something that's more than a toy project: 1 person coded this video editor with AI help: https://github.com/Sportinger/MasterSelects

> 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.

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%.

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.

To be fair, AI probably wrote the blog post from a short prompt, which would explain the lack of detail.

Specifics on the setup. Specifics on the projects. SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

exactly. so much text with so little actionable or notable content... actually 0

>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.

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.

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.

They're not coming from anywhere. It's an LLM-written article, and given how non-specific it is, I imagine the prompt wasn't much more than "write an article about how OpenClaw is changing my life". And the fact this post has 300+ comments, just like countless LLM-generated articles we get here pretty much daily... I guess proves the point in a way?

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).

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.

What evidence are you expecting exactly? It's vacuous AI slop that spends 1000 words just making vague assertions about how incredible OpenClaw is without a single actual example. There's nothing here, it's not real. You are going to struggle going forward if you can't detect AI slop this obvious.

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.

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.

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?

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?

Nothing, that is why it change his life ;-)

This reads like a linkedin post - high on enthusiasm, low on meaningful content.

Not a lot of proof in this post. A lot of admiration, but not a lot of clear examples.

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.

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.

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.

Once again I am asking for you to please show us what you have built. Bring receipts.

In 2024 we should not be taking companies claims of what products do at face value. We should judge the thing that ships. The most charitable thing you can say about this is they're naive, ignorant of the history of vapourware 'demoed' at trade shows.

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?

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.

Where's the code and what did you build? Everything else is just platitudes

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.

I have trouble taking these AI posts seriously that don’t have code / actual examples.

This seems like AI slop? There's not a single real example, and it even has all the em-dashes intact.

Yeah i do not know, still waiting to see actual openclaw practical application usage in real world

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.

Press [X] to doubt Press [Space] to skip

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

this feels like the only thing you've probably done with open claw

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"