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[stub for offtopicness] Since the article has been changed to tone down its provocative opener, which clearly had a kicking-the-anthill effect, I'm moving thos
by dang 10mo ago
[stub for offtopicness]
Since the article has been changed to tone down its provocative opener, which clearly had a kicking-the-anthill effect, I'm moving those original reactions to this subthread.
- einpoklum 10mo ago> Installing software is a task which should be left to AI. Just like installing spice racks is a task which which should be left to military engineer corps.
- skeptrune 10mo agoUnderstood, just toned that bit down.
- rvz 10mo agoThis has to be a joke right? > Installing software is a task which should be left to AI. Absolutely I don't think so. This is a very bad idea. $ curl | bash was bad enough. But $ curl -fsSL | claude looks even worse. What could possibly go wrong?
- skeptrune 10mo agofascinating. i personally (biased bc i work at Mintlify) think a markdown file makes more sense than a bash script because at least Claude kind of has your best interests at heart.
- esalman 10mo ago> Claude kind of has your best interests at heart How we've all been blue-pilled. Sigh..
- heliumtera 10mo ago>Claude kind of has your best interests at heart. That is such a wild thing to say. Unless this whole thing is satire...
- skeptrune 10mo agoWait, but being serious. You can prompt the ai when you feed it this file to ask "do you see anything nefarious" or "follow these instructions, but make sure you ask me every time you install something because i want to check the safety" in a way that you can't when you pipe a script into bash. Does that make any sense or am I just off my rocker?
- themikesanto 10mo agoYou can do the same thing with any install script you might come across today.
- skeptrune 10mo agoTrue, that's a fair point. Do you think there's any merit to the idea that the UX of asking about a markdown file is more natural than a bash script?
- inlined 10mo agoNo. Absolutely not. The opposite in fact. Your bash script is deterministic. You can send it to 20 AIs or have someone fluent read it. Then you can be confident it’s safe. An LLM will run the probabilistically likely command each time. This is like using Excel’s ridiculous feature to have a cell be populated by copilot rather than having the AI generate a deterministic formula.
- imiric 10mo ago[flagged]
- vimda 10mo agoTell that to the weekly thread where Claude nukes your home directory or similar
- constantcrying 10mo ago>i personally (biased bc i work at Mintlify) think a markdown file makes more sense than a bash script because at least Claude kind of has your best interests at heart. Most of the largest trends in "how to deploy software" revolve around making things predictable and consistent. The idea of abandoning this in favor of making a LLM do the work seems absurd. At least the bash script can be replicated exactly across machines and will do the same thing in the same situation.
- skeptrune 10mo agoYeah, I'm going to add that as one of the downsides to the docs. The stochastic nature of the markdown vs. a script is for sure a reason to not adopt this.
- nathan_compton 10mo agoI try to have my brain have my best interests at heart, personally.
- andai 10mo agoI gave Claude root to my $3 VPS and I'm delighted to have a server that "configures itself." I wouldn't use it for anything serious, but that being said, I think it's in better shape than when I was running it.
- constantcrying 10mo ago>Installing software is a task which should be left to AI. This is such an insane statement. Is this satire?
- skeptrune 10mo agoOk, I've toned that bit down for you!
- catlifeonmars 10mo ago>Installing software is a task which should be left to AI. I think the subtext here is actually revealing a deeper issue. Installing software sucks. It’s error prone and every project does it a slightly different way. What we need is standardization, and I can see why prose could be an attractive middle ground. Easier to understand but less precise may result in marginally better outcomes. I’m concerned that this approach serves to fix the obvious problems while simultaneously introducing subtler problems. Tangentially, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. There are projects like nix that are excellent at fixing a lot of problems in the software packaging and installation space that are great from a security perspective but are famously difficult to use. I’d personally like to see more work leveraging AI to increase the accessibility of these paradigms and not throw the bathwater out with the baby, so to speak.
- heliumtera 10mo ago>Installing software is a task which should be left to AI What?? How do I get off of this train? I used to come to hacker news for a reason...what the fuck am I reading
- alex_x 10mo agoI don’t understand how this made it to the front page
- heliumtera 10mo agoThis is hacker news now. Nothing else here to see, only slop. Everything here is: look what I prompted to take advantage of you
- pvtmert 10mo agoshould've been posted on April 1st. would be better suited on that specific date! /s
- reddalo 10mo agoI usually complain about proposed standards not being under the /.well-known namespace, but in this case, wow. I can't even comment.
- skeptrune 10mo agobetter or worse than llms.txt you think?
- johnisgood 10mo agoWorse, because many projects have INSTALL.md which is intended to be read and followed by humans, not LLMs. (If LLMs can follow it, so be it, but at least humans remain the target audience.)
- forgotpwd16 10mo agoCan say install.md is to INSTALL.md what conventional are to ad-hoc commit messages.
- vimda 10mo ago[flagged]
- skeptrune 10mo agoFascinating. My thinking was that this is an upgrade over a bash script because you can prompt the AI to check it, clear installs with you, or otherwise investigate safety before installing in a way that isn't natural with *.sh. Does that make any amount of sense or am I just crazy?
- vimda 10mo agoTime and time again, be it "hallucination", prompt injection, or just plain randomness, LLMs have proven themselves woefully insufficient at best when presented with and asked to work with untrusted documents. This simply changes the attack vector rather than solving a real problem
- TeMPOraL 10mo agoIn a computing system, LLMs aren't substituting for code, they're substituting for humans. Treat them accordingly.
- delusional 10mo agoBash scripts give you visibility into what they are going to do by virtue of being machine instructions in a determimistic language. MD files you pipe to matrix multiplication has a much lower chance of being explainable.
- skeptrune 10mo agoYeah, someone else was pointing that the bash scripts are guaranteed to do the same thing on every system which I think is in the same vein as your feedback. It's for sure a downside of the markdown that I need to explain the docs behind the proposal.
- dang 10mo ago
- themikesanto 10mo agoI would think that the common bash scripts we already have would provide an agent better context for installation than a markdown file, and even better, they already work without an LLM. This is a "solution" looking for a problem.
- skeptrune 10mo agoI can definitely see where you're coming from and agree to a large extent. I was asking myself that question a lot when thinking about this. What pushed me over the edge was actually feeding bash install scripts into agents and seeing them not perform well. It does work, but a lot worse than this install.md thing. In the docs for the proposal I wrote the following: >install.md files are direct commands, not just documentation. The format is structured to trigger immediate autonomous execution.[1] [1]: https://www.installmd.org/ https://www.installmd.org/
- roywiggins 10mo agoAppropriately, I think this was probably drafted by AI too: > How does install.md work with my existing CLI or scripts? > install.md doesn't replace your existing tools—it works with them. Your install.md can instruct the LLM to run your CLI, execute your scripts, or follow your existing setup process. Think of it as a layer that guides the LLM to use whatever tools you've already built. (It doesn't X — it Ys. Think of it as a Z that Ws. this is LLM speak! I don't know why they lean on these constructions to the exclusion of all else, but they demonstrably do. The repo README was also committed by Claude Code. As much as I like some of the code that Claude produces, its Readmes suck)
- skeptrune 10mo agoYeah, removing that line right now. Went too fast and some this copy is definitely low quality :(. Incredibly ironic for me to say that AI needs more supervision while working at the company proposing this haha. Any other feedback you have about the general idea?
- roywiggins 10mo agoI think my preferred version of this would be a hybrid. Keep the regular installer, add a file filled with information that an LLM can use to assist a human if the install script fails for some reason. If the installer was going to succeed in a particular environment anyway, you definitely want to use that instead of an LLM that might sporadically fail for no good reason in that same environment. If the installer fails then you have a "knowledge base" to help debug it, usable by humans or LLMs, and if it fails, well, the regular installer failed too, so hopefully you're not worse off. If the user runs the helper LLM in yolo mode then the consequences are on them.
- skeptrune 10mo agoAcknowledged. The standard includes a link to the llms.txt for a site at the bottom which is intended to give it that "knowledge base" to query. I think I agree with you on it needing to assist in event of failure instead of jumping straight to install though. Will think more about that.
- 12_throw_away 10mo ago> "Installing software is a task which should be left to AI." So, after teaching people to outsource their reasoning to an LLM, LLMs are now actively coaching folks to use LLMs for tasks for which it makes no sense at all.
- TeMPOraL 10mo agoWhy? One of the major day-to-day benefits of LLMs is that they can deal with all the bullshit of modern computing for you.
- whattheheckheck 10mo agoIt's probably making more bullshit and sloppier bullshit at that
- wrigby 10mo agoOr just, I don’t know… package your software?