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I'm wondering if the obvious (and stated) fact that the site was vibe-coded - detracts from the fact that this tool was hand written. > jai itself was hand imp
by ray_v 7mo ago
I'm wondering if the obvious (and stated) fact that the site was vibe-coded - detracts from the fact that this tool was hand written.
> jai itself was hand implemented by a Stanford computer science professor with decades of C++ and Unix/linux experience. (https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/faq.html#was-jai-written-by-an-ai-coding-agent https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/faq.html#was-jai-written-by-an-...)
- Quarrel 7mo agoTo be less abstract, it was written by David Mazieres, who was been writing software and papers about user level filesystems since at least 2000. He now runs the Stanford Secure Computer Systems group. David has done some great work and some funny work. Sometimes both.
- mazieres 7mo agoHuman author here. The fact that I don't know web design shouldn't detract from my expertise in operating systems. I wrote the software and the man page, and those are what really matter for security. The web site is... let's say not in a million years what I would have imagined for a little CLI sandboxing tool. I literally laughed out loud when claude pooped it out, but decided to keep, in part ironically but also since I don't know how to design a landing page myself. I should say that I edited content on the docs part of the web site to remove any inaccuracies, so the content should be valid.
- Nifty3929 7mo agoIndeed! Kinda reminds me of this: https://m.xkcd.com/932/ https://m.xkcd.com/932/ I'm not a web UI guy either, and I am so, so happy to let an AI create a nice looking one for me. I did so just today, and man it was fast and good. I'll check it for accuracy someday...
- lifis 7mo agoIt seems that the LLM has not only designed the site, but also written the text on at least the frontpage, which is a pretty bad signal. You need to rewrite all the text and Telde it with text YOU would actually write, since I doubt you would write in that style.
- john_strinlai 7mo agoany negative signal you get from the front page should probably end up cancelled out by the whole decades of experience + stanford professor thing.
- rmunn 7mo agoExcept that the "this was generated by an LLM" feeling you get from the front page would then make you automatically question whether the "decades of experience + stanford professor thing", as you put it, was true or just an LLM hallucination. Author would, indeed, be wise to rewrite all the text appearing on the front page with text that he wrote himself.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago>question whether the "decades of experience + stanford professor thing", as you put it, was true or just an LLM hallucination. the scs.stanford.edu domain and stanford-scs github should help with that.
- rmunn 7mo agoExcellent point, though not everyone pays close enough attention to the domain shown in the browser (if they did, some of the more amateurish phishing attempts would fool a lot fewer people). But yes, anyone who notices the domain will have a clue to the truth.
- willy_k 7mo agoNeeds to? Is there some new law mandating all landing pages must contain exclusively handwritten text that people haven’t heard of? To your actual point, the people that would take the landing page being written by an LLM negatively tend to be able to evaluate the project on its true merits, while another substantial portion of the demographic for this tool would actually take that (unfortunately, imo) as a positive signal. Lastly, given the care taken for the docs, it’s pretty likely that any real issues with the language have been caught and changed.
- srcoder 7mo agoNice tool, def gonna try it. I was looking for the source and it took a while before I found the github(0) link. Like a lot software, I like to take a look at source. Maybe you can make it more prominent on the website 0: https://github.com/stanford-scs/jai https://github.com/stanford-scs/jai
- adi_kurian 7mo agoI think it will, in the modern AI slop era, look more legitimate when the web UI looks a) hand rolled and b) like not much time was spent on it at all. Which makes me a tad embarassed as someone who used to sell fancy websites for a living.
- timeinput 7mo agoI've been building my own tooling doing similar sorts of things -- poorly with scripts and podman / buildkit as well as LD_PRELOAD related tools, and definitely clicked over to HN comments with out reading much of the content because I thought "AI slop tool", and the site raised all my hackles as I thought I'll never touch this thing. It'll be easier to write my own than review yet another AI slop tool written by someone who loves AI. I'm glad I read the HN comments, now I'm excited to review the source. Thanks for your hard work. ETA: I like your option parser
- ray_v 6mo agoI think most people in this space are having the same EXACT same sets of dilemmas - you can EASILY have a flashy website, except that it's totally against the previous norms for things like you've written! A plain-text bare-bones website is typically what a tool like this is presented with - instead of a flashy looking promotional website that's visually appealing and has all the accessibility and proper UI/UX, etc. We've truly entered a new, better era of the Internet (IMHO). Also, thank you for this tool - it looks like a great piece of software!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- solarkraft 6mo agoIt’s a good page!
- ray_v 6mo ago<suspicious-Fry-from-Futurama meme />A little too good...
- barishnamazov 7mo agoSigh, I'd still have preferred a basic HTML page with hand-written succinct information instead of this crap verbosity.
- xbar 7mo agoThere is a man page.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- zadikian 7mo agoDoesn't detract from it. The jai tool is high-stakes, the static website isn't. The tool is designed to be used with LLM coding agents, so if anything it makes sense to vibecode the website, even better if the author used jai in that.