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I love this article just for the spirit of fun and experimentation on display. Setting up a VPS where Claude is just asked to go nuts - to the point where you'r

I love this article just for the spirit of fun and experimentation on display. Setting up a VPS where Claude is just asked to go nuts - to the point where you're building a little script to keep Claude humming away - is a really fun idea. This sort of thing is a great demonstration of why I remain excited about AI in spite of all the hype and anti-hype. It's just fun to mess with these tools, to let them get friction out of your way. It's a revival of the feelings I had when I first started coding: "wow, I really can do anything if I can just figure out how." Great article, thanks for sharing!

pyrale 1y ago
On one hand, I agree with you that there is some fun in experimenting with silly stuff. On the other hand... > Claude was trying to promote the startup on Hackernews without my sign off. [...] Then I posted its stuff to Hacker News and Reddit. ...I have the feeling that this kind of fun experiments is just setting up an automated firehose of shit to spray places where fellow humans congregate. And I have the feeling that it has stopped being fun a while ago for the fellow humans being sprayed.
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go through a period where internet communications (like HN, Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable. Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a stable balance.
  - mettamage 1y ago
    I hope you're right. I don't think you will be, AI will be too good at impersonating humans.
    - lukan 1y ago
      "we will just be offline more" I think it will be quite some time into the future, before AI can impersonate humans in real life. Neither hardware, nor software is there, maybe something to fool humans for a first glance maybe, but nothing that would be convincing for a real interaction.
  - johnecheck 1y ago
    Indeed. I worry though. We need those defense systems ASAP. The misinformation and garbage engulfing the internet does real damage. We can't just tune it out and wait for it to get better.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    My theory (and hope) is the rise of a web of trust system. Implemented so that if a person in your web vouches for a specific url (“this is made by a human”) you can see it in your browser.
    - gowld 1y ago
      "Web of Trust" has been the proposed answer for, what, 30 years now? But everyone is too lazy to implement and abide by it.
      - vineyardmike 1y ago
        Don’t worry, it’s coming for real this time. The governments have been proposing a requirement that web companies connect accounts to government IDs. If that isn’t exciting enough, Sam Altman (yea the one who popularized this LLM slop) will gladly sell you his WorldCoin to store your biometric data on the blockchain!
    - Analemma_ 1y ago
      If your solution to this problem is the web of trust, to be blunt, you don't have a solution. I am techie whose social circle is mostly other techies, and I know precisely zero people who have ever used PGP keys or any other WoT-based system, despite 30 years of evangelism. It's just not a thing anybody wants.
      - theshrike79 1y ago
        It's 99.99% an UI issue. If Google wouldn't have let perfect be the enemy of good and had added PGP support to Gmail early on (even just the shittiest signatures that are automatically applied and verified), the world would be a completely different place. Scams just wouldn't exist at this scale when signing mails with a known key would be the standard. The tech is there, now we have Matrix and XMPP and PubSub and god knows how many protocols to share keys. Even Keybase.io still kind of exists. What is lacking is a browser ecosystem for people to use their known identities to vouch for a specific url (with smart hashing so that changing the content would invalidate the trust). We have the technology. Someone(tm) "just" needs to build it :)
- kbar13 1y ago
  it's annoying but it'll be corrected by proper moderation on these forums as an aside i've made it clear that just posting AI-written emoji slop PR review descriptions and letting claude code directly commit without self reviewing is unacceptable at work
- DrSiemer 1y ago
  I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way forward for online interaction is very strong identification on any place where you can post anything.
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    That can be automated away too. People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf".
    - pyrale 1y ago
      > People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf". I'm now imagining a future where actual people's identities are blacklisted just like some IP addresses are dead to email, and a market develops for people to sell their identity to spammers.
      - simonw 1y ago
        That's always been the biggest flaw in the Worldcoin idea in my opinion: if you have a billion+ humans get their eyeball scanned in exchange for some kind of cryptographic identity, you can guarantee that a VERY sizable portion of those billion people will happily sell that cryptographic identity (which they don't understand the value of) to anyone who offers them some money. As far as I can tell the owner of the original iris can later invalidate an ID that they've sold, but if you buy an ID from someone who isn't strongly technically literate you can probably extract a bunch of value from it anyway.
    - zoeysmithe 1y ago
      I mean, that's fine I guess as long as its respectable and respects the forum. "Claude write a summary of the word doc I wrote about x and post it as a reply comment," is fine. I dont see why it wouldnt be. Its a good faith effort to post. "Claude, post every 10 seconds to reddit to spam people to believe my politics is correct," isn't but that's not the case. Its not a good faith effort. The moderation rules for 'human slop' will apply to AI too. Try spamming a well moderated reddit and see how far you get, human or AI.
- bookofjoe 1y ago
  See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860174 (posted 12 hours ago)
- epiccoleman 1y ago
  I definitely understand the concern - I don't think I'd have hung out on HN for so long if LLM generated postings were common. I definitely recognize this is something you don't want to see happening at scale. But I still can't help but grin at the thought that the bot knows that the thing to do when you've got a startup is to go put it on HN. It's almost... cute? If you give AI a VPS, of course it will eventually want to post its work on HN. It's like when you catch your kid listening to Pink Floyd or something, and you have that little moment of triumph - "yes, he's learned something from me!"
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- sixhobbits 1y ago
  (author here) I did feel kinda bad about it as I've always been a 'good' HNer until that point but honestly it didn't feel that spammy to me compared to some human generated slop I see posted here, and as expected it wasn't high quality enough to get any attention so 99% of people would never have seen it. I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?
  - felixgallo 1y ago
    That kind of attitude is exactly why we're all about to get overwhelmed by the worst slop any of us could ever have imagined. The bar is not 'oh well, it's not as bad as some, and I think maybe it's fine.'
    - taude 1y ago
      well, he was arguing that it's not worse than 99% of the human slop that gets posted, so where do you draw the line? * well crafted, human only? * Well crafted, whether human or AI? * Poorly crafted, human * well crafted, AI only * Poorly crafted, AI only * Just junk? etc. I think people will intuitively get a feel for when content is only AI generated. If people spend time writing a prompt that doesn't make it so wordy, and has personality, and it OK, then fine. Also, big opportunity going to be out there for AI detected content, whether in forums, coming in inmail inboxes, on your corp file share, etc...
  - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    Did you? Spoiler: no he didn't. But the article is interesting... It really highlights to me the pickle we are in with AI: because we are at a historical maximum already of "worse is better" with Javascript, and the last two decades have put out a LOT of javascript, AI will work best with.... Javascript. Now MAYBE better AI models will be able to equivalently translate Javascript to "better" languages, and MAYBE AI coding will migrate "good" libraries in obscure languages to other "better" languages... But I don't think so. It's going to be soooo much Javascript slop for the next ten years. I HOPE that large language models, being language models, will figure out language translation/equivalency and enable porting and movement of good concepts between programming models... but that is clearly not what is being invested in. What's being invested in is slop generation, because the prototype sells the product.
- zoeysmithe 1y ago
  I mean I can spam HN right now with a script. Forums like HN, reddit, etc will need to do a better job detecting this stuff, moderator staffing will need to be upped, AI resistant captchas need to be developed, etc. Spam will always be here in some form, and its always an arms race. That doesnt really change anything. Its always been this way.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  The Internet is already 99% shit and always has been. This doesn't change anything.
  - zanellato19 1y ago
    It's gotten much worse. Before it was shit from people, now it's corporate shit. Corporate shit is so much worse.
georgeburdell 1y ago
For me, I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control. I enjoy the actual process of crafting code myself. For similar reasons, I could never be a manager. Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I’ll probably just find a new career
- starfallg 1y ago
  Pretty sure we can make LLM agents to transform declarative inputs to agentic action.
- fsloth 1y ago
  I strongly disagree agents are for extroverts. I do agree it’s definetly a tool category with a unique set of features and am not surprised it’s offputting to some. But it’s appeal is definetly clear to me as an introvert. For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language. I think I’m slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort. Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff! It’s a great time to be a software engineer!
  - pron 1y ago
    > For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language. I wish they were, but they're not that yet because LLMs aren't very good at logical reasonsing. So it's more like an attempt to program using natural language. Sometimes it does what you ask, sometimes not. I think "programming" implies that the machine will always do what you tell it, whatever the language, or reliably fail and say it can't be done because the "program" is contradictory, lacks sufficient detail, or doesn't have the necessary permissions/technical capabilities. If it only sometimes does what you ask, then it's not quite programming yet. > Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff! I wish that, too, were true, and maybe it will be someday soon. But if I need to manually review the agent's output, then it doesn't feel like offloading much aside from the typing. All the same concentration and thought are still required, even for the boring things. If I could at least trust the agent to tell me if it did a good job or is unsure that would have been helpful, but we're not even there yet. That's not to say the tools aren't useful, but they're not yet "programming in a natural language" and not yet able to "offload" stuff to.
indigodaddy 1y ago
Not sure if I'd want Claude doing whatever on a production vps/node, but I like the idea of a way to use Claude Code on the go/wherever you are. I'm going to setup KASM workspaces on my free OCI server and see how it works there. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm
- prashantsengar 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing this! I have been trying on and off to run RooCode on a VPS to use it on the go. I tried Code Server but it does not share "sessions". KASM seems interesting for this. Do share if you write a blog post on setting it up
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    It’s pretty straightforward through the Linuxserver docker image deployment. I have some notes here re: configuration and package persistence strategy via brew: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jgbrwn/28645fcf4ac5a4176f715a6f9b1702ab/raw/3a57d34d51e9704e971f28461b1e41a2da1986e7/kasm-brew https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jgbrwn/28645fcf4ac5a4176f...
Lerc 1y ago
This is the kind of thing people should be doing with AI. Weird and interesting stuff that has a "Let's find out!" Attitude. Often there's as much to be learned from why it doesn't work. I see the AI hype to be limited to a few domains. People choosing to spend lots of money on things speculatively hoping to get a slice of whatever is cooking, even if they don't really know if it's a pie or not. Forward looking imagining of what would change if these things get massively better. Hyperbolic media coverage of the above two. There are companies taking about adding AI for no other reason than they feel like that's what they should be doing, I think that counts as a weak driver of hype, but only because cumulatively, lots of companies are doing it. If anything I would consider this an outcome of hype. Of these the only one that really affects me is AI being shoehorned into places it shouldn't The media coverage stokes fires for and against, but I think it only changes the tone of annoyance I have to endure. They would do the same on another topic in the absence of AI. It used to be crypto, I'm ok with people spending money that is not mine on high risk, high potential reward. It's not for me to judge how they calculate the potential risk or potential reward. It's their opinion, let them have it. The weird thing I find is the complaints about AI hype dominating. I have read so many pieces where the main thrust of their argument is about the dominance of fringe viewpoints that I very rarely encounter. Frequently they take the stance that anyone imagining how the world might change from any particular form of AI as a claim that that form is inevitable and usually imminent. I don't see people making those claims. I see people talking about what they tried, what they can do, and what they can't do. Everything they can't do is then held up by others as if it were a trophy and proof of some catestrophic weakness. Just try stuff, have fun, if that doesn't interest you, go do something else. Tell us about what you are doing. You don't need to tell us that you aren't doing this particular thing, and why. If you find something interesting tell us about that, maybe we will too.
dizlexic 1y ago
every vibe coded thing I've built is trash, but it's amazingly fun to do. I've tried to explain it to other devs that it's like dumping out a 10000 piece jigsaw puzzle and trying to put it together again. it's just fun.
- throwaway31131 1y ago
  > it’s just fun For some definitions of fun… :)
- mmcconnell1618 1y ago
  There was a time when everyone hand-coded HTML. Then came Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage which promised a WYSIWYG experience. No one would ever need to "learn HTML and CSS" because the tool could write it for them. Those tools could crank out a website in minutes. When those tools created some awful, complex and slow output, only the people who knew HTML could understand why it wasn't working and fix things. Vibe coding is in a similar place. It demos really well. It can be powerful and allows for quick iteration on ideas. It works, most of the time. Vibe coding can produce some really terrible code that is not well architected and difficult to maintain. It can introduce basic logic errors that are not easily corrected through multiple prompts back to the system. I don't know if they will ever be capable of creating production quality systems on par with what senior engineers produce or if they will only get incrementally better and remain best for prototypes and testing ideas.
- cesarvarela 1y ago
  It is addicting
bkettle 1y ago
> “wow, I really can do _anything_ if I can just figure out how Except this time it’s “if I can just figure out how and pay for the Claude API usage”. This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up. Yes, they can still write code the manual way, but if the norm is to use AI I suspect that beginner’s guides, tutorials, etc. will become less common.
- mickael-kerjean 1y ago
  Yep, I used to spend a lot of time learning PHP on a web server which was part of my internet subscription. Without it being free, I would never have learn how to create websites and would have never got in programming, the trigger was that free web hosting with PHP that was part of the internet connection my parents were already paying for
  - alwillis 1y ago
    There are plenty of free models available; many that rival their paid counterparts. A kid interested in trying stuff can use Qwen Coder for free [1]. If the kid's school has Apple Silicon Macs (or iPads), this fall, each one of them will have Apple's 3 billion parameter Foundation Models available to them for free [2]. Swift Playground [3] is a free download; Apple has an entire curriculum for schools. I would expect an upgrade to incorporate access to the on-board LLM [1]: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-coder:free https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-coder:free [2]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286 [3]: https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/ https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/
    - yoz-y 1y ago
      I guess hardware being able to run a local model will eventually get cheap enough, but for a lot of people even buying an Apple device or something with a good enough GPU is prohibitive.
j45 1y ago
Maintaining scheduled playing with what's changed/new/different is mandatory with the tools one already uses, let alone any new ones.
joks 1y ago
> It's just fun to mess with these tools I think this is the main sentiment I can't wrap my head around. Using Claude Code or Cursor has been entirely a mind-numbingly tedious experience to me (even when it's been useful.) It's often faster, but 80% of the time is spent just sitting there waiting for it to finish working, and I'm not proud of the result because I didn't do anything except come up with the idea and figure out how to describe it well. It just ends up feeling like the coding equivalent of...like...copying down answers to cheat on a test. Not in the sense that it feels gross and wrong and immoral, but in the sense that it's unsatisfying and unfulfilling and I don't feel any pride in the work I've done. For things where I just want something that does something I need as quickly as possible, sure, I wasn't going to care either way, but personal projects are where I find myself least wanting to vibe code anything. It feels like hiring someone else to do my hobbies for me.

pyrale 1y ago

On one hand, I agree with you that there is some fun in experimenting with silly stuff. On the other hand... > Claude was trying to promote the startup on Hackernews without my sign off. [...] Then I posted its stuff to Hacker News and Reddit. ...I have the feeling that this kind of fun experiments is just setting up an automated firehose of shit to spray places where fellow humans congregate. And I have the feeling that it has stopped being fun a while ago for the fellow humans being sprayed.

the__alchemist 1y ago
This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go through a period where internet communications (like HN, Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable. Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a stable balance.
- mettamage 1y ago
  I hope you're right. I don't think you will be, AI will be too good at impersonating humans.
  - lukan 1y ago
    "we will just be offline more" I think it will be quite some time into the future, before AI can impersonate humans in real life. Neither hardware, nor software is there, maybe something to fool humans for a first glance maybe, but nothing that would be convincing for a real interaction.
- johnecheck 1y ago
  Indeed. I worry though. We need those defense systems ASAP. The misinformation and garbage engulfing the internet does real damage. We can't just tune it out and wait for it to get better.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  My theory (and hope) is the rise of a web of trust system. Implemented so that if a person in your web vouches for a specific url (“this is made by a human”) you can see it in your browser.
  - gowld 1y ago
    "Web of Trust" has been the proposed answer for, what, 30 years now? But everyone is too lazy to implement and abide by it.
    - vineyardmike 1y ago
      Don’t worry, it’s coming for real this time. The governments have been proposing a requirement that web companies connect accounts to government IDs. If that isn’t exciting enough, Sam Altman (yea the one who popularized this LLM slop) will gladly sell you his WorldCoin to store your biometric data on the blockchain!
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    If your solution to this problem is the web of trust, to be blunt, you don't have a solution. I am techie whose social circle is mostly other techies, and I know precisely zero people who have ever used PGP keys or any other WoT-based system, despite 30 years of evangelism. It's just not a thing anybody wants.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      It's 99.99% an UI issue. If Google wouldn't have let perfect be the enemy of good and had added PGP support to Gmail early on (even just the shittiest signatures that are automatically applied and verified), the world would be a completely different place. Scams just wouldn't exist at this scale when signing mails with a known key would be the standard. The tech is there, now we have Matrix and XMPP and PubSub and god knows how many protocols to share keys. Even Keybase.io still kind of exists. What is lacking is a browser ecosystem for people to use their known identities to vouch for a specific url (with smart hashing so that changing the content would invalidate the trust). We have the technology. Someone(tm) "just" needs to build it :)
kbar13 1y ago
it's annoying but it'll be corrected by proper moderation on these forums as an aside i've made it clear that just posting AI-written emoji slop PR review descriptions and letting claude code directly commit without self reviewing is unacceptable at work
DrSiemer 1y ago
I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way forward for online interaction is very strong identification on any place where you can post anything.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  That can be automated away too. People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf".
  - pyrale 1y ago
    > People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf". I'm now imagining a future where actual people's identities are blacklisted just like some IP addresses are dead to email, and a market develops for people to sell their identity to spammers.
    - simonw 1y ago
      That's always been the biggest flaw in the Worldcoin idea in my opinion: if you have a billion+ humans get their eyeball scanned in exchange for some kind of cryptographic identity, you can guarantee that a VERY sizable portion of those billion people will happily sell that cryptographic identity (which they don't understand the value of) to anyone who offers them some money. As far as I can tell the owner of the original iris can later invalidate an ID that they've sold, but if you buy an ID from someone who isn't strongly technically literate you can probably extract a bunch of value from it anyway.
  - zoeysmithe 1y ago
    I mean, that's fine I guess as long as its respectable and respects the forum. "Claude write a summary of the word doc I wrote about x and post it as a reply comment," is fine. I dont see why it wouldnt be. Its a good faith effort to post. "Claude, post every 10 seconds to reddit to spam people to believe my politics is correct," isn't but that's not the case. Its not a good faith effort. The moderation rules for 'human slop' will apply to AI too. Try spamming a well moderated reddit and see how far you get, human or AI.
bookofjoe 1y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860174 (posted 12 hours ago)
epiccoleman 1y ago
I definitely understand the concern - I don't think I'd have hung out on HN for so long if LLM generated postings were common. I definitely recognize this is something you don't want to see happening at scale. But I still can't help but grin at the thought that the bot knows that the thing to do when you've got a startup is to go put it on HN. It's almost... cute? If you give AI a VPS, of course it will eventually want to post its work on HN. It's like when you catch your kid listening to Pink Floyd or something, and you have that little moment of triumph - "yes, he's learned something from me!"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
sixhobbits 1y ago
(author here) I did feel kinda bad about it as I've always been a 'good' HNer until that point but honestly it didn't feel that spammy to me compared to some human generated slop I see posted here, and as expected it wasn't high quality enough to get any attention so 99% of people would never have seen it. I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?
- felixgallo 1y ago
  That kind of attitude is exactly why we're all about to get overwhelmed by the worst slop any of us could ever have imagined. The bar is not 'oh well, it's not as bad as some, and I think maybe it's fine.'
  - taude 1y ago
    well, he was arguing that it's not worse than 99% of the human slop that gets posted, so where do you draw the line? * well crafted, human only? * Well crafted, whether human or AI? * Poorly crafted, human * well crafted, AI only * Poorly crafted, AI only * Just junk? etc. I think people will intuitively get a feel for when content is only AI generated. If people spend time writing a prompt that doesn't make it so wordy, and has personality, and it OK, then fine. Also, big opportunity going to be out there for AI detected content, whether in forums, coming in inmail inboxes, on your corp file share, etc...
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Did you? Spoiler: no he didn't. But the article is interesting... It really highlights to me the pickle we are in with AI: because we are at a historical maximum already of "worse is better" with Javascript, and the last two decades have put out a LOT of javascript, AI will work best with.... Javascript. Now MAYBE better AI models will be able to equivalently translate Javascript to "better" languages, and MAYBE AI coding will migrate "good" libraries in obscure languages to other "better" languages... But I don't think so. It's going to be soooo much Javascript slop for the next ten years. I HOPE that large language models, being language models, will figure out language translation/equivalency and enable porting and movement of good concepts between programming models... but that is clearly not what is being invested in. What's being invested in is slop generation, because the prototype sells the product.
zoeysmithe 1y ago
I mean I can spam HN right now with a script. Forums like HN, reddit, etc will need to do a better job detecting this stuff, moderator staffing will need to be upped, AI resistant captchas need to be developed, etc. Spam will always be here in some form, and its always an arms race. That doesnt really change anything. Its always been this way.
bongodongobob 1y ago
The Internet is already 99% shit and always has been. This doesn't change anything.
- zanellato19 1y ago
  It's gotten much worse. Before it was shit from people, now it's corporate shit. Corporate shit is so much worse.

georgeburdell 1y ago

For me, I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control. I enjoy the actual process of crafting code myself. For similar reasons, I could never be a manager. Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I’ll probably just find a new career

starfallg 1y ago
Pretty sure we can make LLM agents to transform declarative inputs to agentic action.
fsloth 1y ago
I strongly disagree agents are for extroverts. I do agree it’s definetly a tool category with a unique set of features and am not surprised it’s offputting to some. But it’s appeal is definetly clear to me as an introvert. For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language. I think I’m slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort. Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff! It’s a great time to be a software engineer!
- pron 1y ago
  > For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language. I wish they were, but they're not that yet because LLMs aren't very good at logical reasonsing. So it's more like an attempt to program using natural language. Sometimes it does what you ask, sometimes not. I think "programming" implies that the machine will always do what you tell it, whatever the language, or reliably fail and say it can't be done because the "program" is contradictory, lacks sufficient detail, or doesn't have the necessary permissions/technical capabilities. If it only sometimes does what you ask, then it's not quite programming yet. > Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff! I wish that, too, were true, and maybe it will be someday soon. But if I need to manually review the agent's output, then it doesn't feel like offloading much aside from the typing. All the same concentration and thought are still required, even for the boring things. If I could at least trust the agent to tell me if it did a good job or is unsure that would have been helpful, but we're not even there yet. That's not to say the tools aren't useful, but they're not yet "programming in a natural language" and not yet able to "offload" stuff to.

indigodaddy 1y ago

Not sure if I'd want Claude doing whatever on a production vps/node, but I like the idea of a way to use Claude Code on the go/wherever you are. I'm going to setup KASM workspaces on my free OCI server and see how it works there. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm

prashantsengar 1y ago
Thanks for sharing this! I have been trying on and off to run RooCode on a VPS to use it on the go. I tried Code Server but it does not share "sessions". KASM seems interesting for this. Do share if you write a blog post on setting it up
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  It’s pretty straightforward through the Linuxserver docker image deployment. I have some notes here re: configuration and package persistence strategy via brew: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jgbrwn/28645fcf4ac5a4176f715a6f9b1702ab/raw/3a57d34d51e9704e971f28461b1e41a2da1986e7/kasm-brew https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jgbrwn/28645fcf4ac5a4176f...

Lerc 1y ago

This is the kind of thing people should be doing with AI. Weird and interesting stuff that has a "Let's find out!" Attitude. Often there's as much to be learned from why it doesn't work. I see the AI hype to be limited to a few domains. People choosing to spend lots of money on things speculatively hoping to get a slice of whatever is cooking, even if they don't really know if it's a pie or not. Forward looking imagining of what would change if these things get massively better. Hyperbolic media coverage of the above two. There are companies taking about adding AI for no other reason than they feel like that's what they should be doing, I think that counts as a weak driver of hype, but only because cumulatively, lots of companies are doing it. If anything I would consider this an outcome of hype. Of these the only one that really affects me is AI being shoehorned into places it shouldn't The media coverage stokes fires for and against, but I think it only changes the tone of annoyance I have to endure. They would do the same on another topic in the absence of AI. It used to be crypto, I'm ok with people spending money that is not mine on high risk, high potential reward. It's not for me to judge how they calculate the potential risk or potential reward. It's their opinion, let them have it. The weird thing I find is the complaints about AI hype dominating. I have read so many pieces where the main thrust of their argument is about the dominance of fringe viewpoints that I very rarely encounter. Frequently they take the stance that anyone imagining how the world might change from any particular form of AI as a claim that that form is inevitable and usually imminent. I don't see people making those claims. I see people talking about what they tried, what they can do, and what they can't do. Everything they can't do is then held up by others as if it were a trophy and proof of some catestrophic weakness. Just try stuff, have fun, if that doesn't interest you, go do something else. Tell us about what you are doing. You don't need to tell us that you aren't doing this particular thing, and why. If you find something interesting tell us about that, maybe we will too.

dizlexic 1y ago

every vibe coded thing I've built is trash, but it's amazingly fun to do. I've tried to explain it to other devs that it's like dumping out a 10000 piece jigsaw puzzle and trying to put it together again. it's just fun.

throwaway31131 1y ago
> it’s just fun For some definitions of fun… :)
mmcconnell1618 1y ago
There was a time when everyone hand-coded HTML. Then came Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage which promised a WYSIWYG experience. No one would ever need to "learn HTML and CSS" because the tool could write it for them. Those tools could crank out a website in minutes. When those tools created some awful, complex and slow output, only the people who knew HTML could understand why it wasn't working and fix things. Vibe coding is in a similar place. It demos really well. It can be powerful and allows for quick iteration on ideas. It works, most of the time. Vibe coding can produce some really terrible code that is not well architected and difficult to maintain. It can introduce basic logic errors that are not easily corrected through multiple prompts back to the system. I don't know if they will ever be capable of creating production quality systems on par with what senior engineers produce or if they will only get incrementally better and remain best for prototypes and testing ideas.
cesarvarela 1y ago
It is addicting

bkettle 1y ago

> “wow, I really can do _anything_ if I can just figure out how Except this time it’s “if I can just figure out how and pay for the Claude API usage”. This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up. Yes, they can still write code the manual way, but if the norm is to use AI I suspect that beginner’s guides, tutorials, etc. will become less common.

mickael-kerjean 1y ago
Yep, I used to spend a lot of time learning PHP on a web server which was part of my internet subscription. Without it being free, I would never have learn how to create websites and would have never got in programming, the trigger was that free web hosting with PHP that was part of the internet connection my parents were already paying for
- alwillis 1y ago
  There are plenty of free models available; many that rival their paid counterparts. A kid interested in trying stuff can use Qwen Coder for free [1]. If the kid's school has Apple Silicon Macs (or iPads), this fall, each one of them will have Apple's 3 billion parameter Foundation Models available to them for free [2]. Swift Playground [3] is a free download; Apple has an entire curriculum for schools. I would expect an upgrade to incorporate access to the on-board LLM [1]: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-coder:free https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-coder:free [2]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286 [3]: https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/ https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/
  - yoz-y 1y ago
    I guess hardware being able to run a local model will eventually get cheap enough, but for a lot of people even buying an Apple device or something with a good enough GPU is prohibitive.

j45 1y ago

Maintaining scheduled playing with what's changed/new/different is mandatory with the tools one already uses, let alone any new ones.

joks 1y ago

> It's just fun to mess with these tools I think this is the main sentiment I can't wrap my head around. Using Claude Code or Cursor has been entirely a mind-numbingly tedious experience to me (even when it's been useful.) It's often faster, but 80% of the time is spent just sitting there waiting for it to finish working, and I'm not proud of the result because I didn't do anything except come up with the idea and figure out how to describe it well. It just ends up feeling like the coding equivalent of...like...copying down answers to cheat on a test. Not in the sense that it feels gross and wrong and immoral, but in the sense that it's unsatisfying and unfulfilling and I don't feel any pride in the work I've done. For things where I just want something that does something I need as quickly as possible, sure, I wasn't going to care either way, but personal projects are where I find myself least wanting to vibe code anything. It feels like hiring someone else to do my hobbies for me.