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Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project
- kittikitti 9mo agoThis is a very interesting experiment where I hope the metamorphosis is more like a butterfly than Kafka.
- Esophagus4 9mo agoYes, this could end up either turning into a Linux or like when Microsoft released Tay and Twitter users taught it to be a Nazi. Or anywhere in between, really.
- jibal 9mo agoIt really can't for numerous reasons, one of them being that PRs have to be fairly low effort, and this will be even more so if the popular "merge daily" PR is voted in. People talk about this "evolving", but it's nothing like biological evolution or genetic algorithms. It's just a linear sequence of small changes, and without either planning and central authority or some stable fitness function (the ecological environment in biological evolution) the changes are directionless.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago> some stable fitness function The participants could always vote to add a test harness and CI/CD to vet pull requests against.
- jibal 9mo agoThat has nothing to do with a stable fitness function ... an external set of factors that determine which changes allow offspring to survive. This thing doesn't have offspring (or always has exactly one offspring and then the parent dies) and it survives until the whole thing collapses. And I think they already have what you describe or something like it ... PRs have to build and survive CI.
- fc417fc802 9mo agoIt should have been abundantly clear that wasn't the way the word "evolution" was being used here to being with. (Actually the comment you replied to used the word "metamorphosis" so what are you even going on about?) Nonetheless, if you're going to quibble that it isn't ahckchtually evolution because it's missing a fitness function then I'm going to counter that you can form a loose analogy so long as you have some fitness apparatus that's conceptually and operationally separable from the implementation itself. I think some unit tests and a CI pipeline is sufficient.
- jibal 9mo ago> It should have been abundantly clear that wasn't the way the word "evolution" was being used here to being with. My whole point was that the sort of evolution that this will undergo isn't like biological evolution so it won't be effective the way biological evolution is. That should have been abundantly clear. > Actually the comment you replied to used the word "metamorphosis" so what are you even going on about? Did you ever bother to look upthread? I wrote "People talk about this "evolving"", and that comment was not a response to the one mentioning metamorphosis. See the title: "Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project" I'm not quibbling and that's an offensive accusation as is your "ahckchtually" mocking as well as the rude tone of your clueless whooshes above so I will only respond you this once. Biological evolution has powerful mechanisms that this lacks ... in fact the biggest lack is that there's just one "organism" here, not a population, and just one change at a time. And your fitness function only determines whether something compiles and runs; it gives no direction to the "evolution" ... it's not being fit to anything that drives its progress (the choices come from the PRs, not from the fitness function, and they are independent of each other or at best loosely coupled--thus they aren't stable) which I explicitly pointed out previously when I mentioned the fitness function. So your "loose analogy" fails miserably and this thing is going to be directionless, as I said, and so it won't build up something like a Linux kernel or AGI (both of these have been mentioned, but hey, not in the comment that used the word "metamorphosis" -- apparently I have to say this).
- Esophagus4 9mo ago> the changes are directionless. I guess we’ll see whether that turns out to be true! Will be a fun experiment to watch, at least.
- sighansen 9mo agoReally interesting. I wonder if something good will come out of it. It feels like twitch plays pomemon.
- stavros 9mo agoIf you want to see a speedrun, I made the same thing around a month ago: https://theboard.stavros.io https://theboard.stavros.io
- mappum 9mo agoExcited to see how this plays out, I made something similar a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286
- drdeca 9mo agoOh man, I was going to try and find that to link to it. I can’t believe it was 10 years ago… I really enjoyed following that for a while. Thanks for making it.
- BinaryIgor 9mo agoAre guardrails, CI/CD, to make code at least compile-able and require minimal quality standards also possible to change via PR or managed somewhere else? With this possibility, it might went into oblivion indeed!
- 6r17 9mo agoI mean.... it's the spirit of the project to eventually be able to reach to that state. I freaking love that project woaw hahaha
- noncoml 9mo agoReading through the comments, it’s remarkable how many of us have had the same idea at some point Beautifully executed
- electrodisk 9mo agoconfused, what is this and what’s going on exactly?
- meltyness 9mo agoLike reddit but nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
- jedberg 9mo agoClick through to the GitHub link at the bottom, which has the README. It explains everything.
- phreack 9mo agohttps://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos?tab=readme-ov-file#how-it-works https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos?tab=readme-ov-file#... Anyone makes a PR, there's a vote and highest voted one gets merged every week. It's marvelous.
- libertyit 9mo agoGenius.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Dinux 9mo agoI'd expect even more chaos, let an LLM build the features and people vote.
- oniony 9mo agoI honestly thought that this is what it was initially.
- deadbabe 9mo agoIs most code not written by LLMs these days anyway?
- Kinrany 9mo agoMost code by lines, perhaps, but not most code that works and is useful
- genghisjahn 9mo agoSays who?
- all2 9mo agoSays anyone who has tried to do anything requiring the smallest amount of computer science or computer engineering. These models are really great at boilerplate and simple web apps. As soon as you get beyond that, it gets hairy. For example, I have a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding. Just those two features required a lot of hand holding. Figma Design nailed the UX, but the actual guts/business logic I had to spend time on. I expect that this will get easier as agentic flows get more mature, though. Then the only place that novelty will occur is in the actual study of computer science. And even then, a well contexted agentic pipeline will speed even R&D development to a great degree. One very bad thing about these things is the embedded dogma. With AI ruling the roost in terms of generation (basically an advanced and opinionated type-writer, lets be honest) breaking away from the standards in any field will become increasingly difficult. Just try and talk to any frontier model about physics that goes against what is currently accepted and they'll put up a lot of resistance.
- fourthark 9mo agoThe end product is... just the website? I feel like I'm missing something.
- danr4 9mo agoIt can evolve into anything based on community votes
- drdaeman 9mo agoIt’s an absurdist art software project, devoid of any consistent intent or purpose beyond the operating principles.
- Towaway69 9mo agocodified dadaismus
- ivanjermakov 9mo agoIt's not a product, it's a social experiment for programmers.
- patcon 9mo agoSo it begins? Once you have governance that people stick around for, you can decide to do anything
- nish__ 9mo agoJust a website? Websites can do anything. It could evolve into a whole social network.
- fwipsy 9mo agoTwitch plays Github?
- lucb1e 9mo agoI don't get the title. Do I understand correctly this is basically "Twitch plays Github" without Twitch?
- tedivm 9mo agoWhen I used to play Screeps[1], a MMO strategy game where you programmed to control your units and buildings, a group of us setup a player that was managed in this exact way called Quorum[2]. If anyone wants to run their own project in this way I open sourced the code to do so under the GitConsensus[3] project. There's a Github App (which may not still work, but if there's interest I'll restart it) and a "run it yourself" python library and CLI you can run from Github Actions[4]. 1. https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/ 2. https://github.com/ScreepsQuorum/screeps-quorum https://github.com/ScreepsQuorum/screeps-quorum 3. https://www.gitconsensus.com/ https://www.gitconsensus.com/ 4. https://pypi.org/project/gitconsensus/ https://pypi.org/project/gitconsensus/
- polyomino 9mo agoThey should automate reading hacker news comments and generating PRs to address them
- staticassertion 9mo agoOpen a PR and suggest this.
- jibal 9mo agoYou can't just "suggest" something in a PR, you have to provide the change.
- staticassertion 9mo agoOkay, open claude code, tell it to open a PR
- strangescript 9mo agoThis is cool, but once a week seems a little slow
- Kinrany 9mo agoThe frequency should be adjusted based on the number of participants
- lucb1e 9mo agoRequest merging the change you wish to see!
- Kinrany 9mo agoIt could merge any PR that reaches a set number of upvotes
- throawayonthe 9mo agothere's a PR for that! :p https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos/pull/51 https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos/pull/51
- Towaway69 9mo agois it forkable to have even more chaos?
- fullstackwife 9mo agoShould votes get invalidated after major change in the ongoing PR?
- alexpadula 9mo agoSorry to be a party pooper I just don’t get the point.
- izietto 9mo agoI don't think there's a point. You can always submit a point, if it gets voted you will have your point
- stingraycharles 9mo agoThis is exactly the point.
- Towaway69 9mo agoIt's a bit like bigtech but instead of product people voting on what gets merged, everyone gets a vote here.
- alexpadula 9mo agoYou know it’s kinda like a lottery the more I read it lol! If the repo got super popular and had lots of traffic say.
- anishgupta 9mo ago> The website IS the repo. The repo IS the website. I wonder if we get something productive by end of 2026 from this repo. Who knows, maybe we solve AGI
- Eldodi 9mo agoWould have been even more absurd if code AND PRs were all AI generated by different coding agents
- appplication 9mo agoNothing is stopping that from happening tbh
- jibal 9mo agoIt's not possible to generate anything productive this way.
- lucb1e 9mo agoWikipedia basically works this way. And instead of it being directly public, it goes through a voting process. One might argue it's actually much more curated than Wikipedia :P
- jibal 9mo agoNo, it doesn't work anything like this. > One might argue it's actually much more curated than Wikipedia Well duh. It's vastly more "curated" since Wikipedia isn't curated at all, almost anyone can change anything at any time but changes are supposed to reflect consensus (in theory, but there are numerous rogue agents who violate the rules) and it's a single instance with a linear set of changes that only occur once a week, whereas WP is a seething mass of constant change--but with a tight fitness function due to the (again theoretical) requirement that all changes must reflect reliable sources, not the whims of the editors--totally the opposite of OC. (There are additional policies and various governing groups but these make WP even less like OC). It's beyond absurd to liken OC to WP.
- SubiculumCode 9mo agoFirefox warns of a security threat when I visit the site.
- WithinReason 9mo agoMerging the security threat is yet to be voted on
- omoikane 9mo agoMaybe Firefox is prescient, just waiting for someone to create a problematic pull request that does something untoward while simultaneously locking everyone else from submitting pull requests (and get a bunch of bots to upvote it in the last second before the merge window closes).
- stingraycharles 9mo agoAm I the only one who's noticing that this "open chaos" project's most voted PRs are to add structure to the project (e.g., calculate +1/-1, etc.)? I guess people just desire a certain amount of structure to their chaos :)
- aalimov_ 9mo ago“Convenient chaos”
- hmokiguess 9mo agoCan’t have one without the other
- bji9jhff 9mo agoIs it a kind of computer-assisted Nomic [0]? 0: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
- flyrain 9mo agoI guess this is one sign that coding is drifting to an art, given the LLM is invading.
- oooyay 9mo agoA lot of engineering disciplines are a mixture of math, art, and science. Programming was no different, but I do think some people built up an identity that reinforced a difference that wasn't there to begin with.
- esquire_900 9mo agoCool social experiment. It's interesting how narrow the scope of all top voted PRs are: change this or that detail in the voting (daily, count down votes etc), or make it more efficient (rust). I wonder if this has the potential to build a "community" that will take this into a completely different direction, or if it will neatly stay within the initial boundaries.