5 ms·

I got Claude to self reference and update its own instructions to solve making a typed proxy API of any website. After a week, scores of iterations, it can reve

I got Claude to self reference and update its own instructions to solve making a typed proxy API of any website. After a week, scores of iterations, it can reverse engineer any website. The first few days I had to be deeply involved with each iteration loop. Domain knowledge is helpful. Each time I saw a problem I would ask Claude to update its instructions so it doesn't happen again. Then less and less. Eventually it got to the point it was updating and improving the metrics every iteration unsupervised. Edit: This is going to have huge ramifications for the tech security industry as these systems will be able to break security systems as easily it solved the proof. The sooner the good guys, if there are any left, understand this the better it will be for everybody. > Super interesting but what does this mean for us mere mortals? I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes to make sure it doesn't need human help. I went to the coffeeshop and drank very good coffee listening to music. Then at night I sat and had a beer thinking about T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', the effect of industrialization in England at that time and his views of how ennui affected the aristocracy.

DrewADesign 7mo ago
> I went to the coffeeshop and drank very good coffee listening to music. Then at night I sat and had a beer thinking about T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', the effect of industrialization in England at that time and his views of how ennui affected the aristocracy. Well, for those among us that are not aristocracy already, except for the vanishingly small number of people required to oversee such processes, we’re probably the closest we’re going to get to it. If they don’t need people to do the tech labor, we’ve got way more people than we need, so that’s a huge oversupply of tech skills, which means tech skills are rapidly becoming worthless. Glad to see how fast we’re moving in our very own race to the bottom!
- drfloyd51 7mo ago
  I kind of feel like software engineers working on improving AI are traitors working against other SE’s trying to make a living. However… I have to acknowledge my craft of SE has been putting people out of work for decades. I myself came up with business process improvement that directly let the company release about 20 people. I did this twice. So… fair play.
  - mannanj 7mo ago
    Aren't the true traitors still the ones paying the SE to do that work? The managerial slave-master class?
    - drfloyd51 7mo ago
      You always have a choice to make. You make it everyday. Get up. Go to a legitimate job. Work. You probably choose not to steal, rob, impersonate someone else, or generally make money illegally. It can be traitors all the way down.
  - marsten 7mo ago
    In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      >It frees up people to do more interesting things Like beg on the corners and starve in the street? Trying to figure out how the basics of capitalism where labor is exchanged for money is not going to work well when the only jobs left are side gigs. Something will have to change and a lot of People will fight said change.
      - DowsingSpoon 7mo ago
        I’ve thought about this myself. Couple of points: 1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too. 2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else. For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer. If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.
- psychoslave 7mo ago
  Lol,a race to the bottom where too many tech savvy people are left unemployed while a few "privileged" get a decreasing buying power to maintain security of the digital tools that keep the whole digital dependent civilizations afloat? Sounds like a great starting plot for an interesting story.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
frizlab 7mo ago
> I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes to make sure it doesn't need human help. That is a nightmarish scenario tbh
- falcor84 7mo ago
  Nightmarish?! In comparison to the average person's actual job? I'm pretty sure that many people out there would sign up for a battle royale for a chance at such a job.
  - siva7 7mo ago
    Would they? I'd love to get in touch
    - falcor84 7mo ago
      My clients have been burned before. Once you set up the battle royale with a trusted third party validating that there'll be an assured good job at the end, I promise I'll have enough candidates for you to fill up the first 10 competitions.
  - eproxus 7mo ago
    I you think you’ll be paid 3 hours of salary for every 5 minutes of work, I have bad news for you. Most likely your 3 hours will be filled with managing 36 different AI sessions at a time and it will slowly break your brain. At least if we keep doing capitalism the way we are.
    - DrewADesign 7mo ago
      Tech industry folks have been so coddled for decades that many think their astonishing intellect has earned them a cushy life rather than being in a field with high labor demand. It’s one reason tech workers are often considered arrogant and out of touch… and that’s why people think they can get paid to lightly orchestrate agents to do their jobs. Oof. If efficiency gains create an oversupply of tech labor, even the bestie BFF bosses will notice the hoards of more qualified people who will kill for any job that pays more than CVS or Uber— so a lot less than most developers make now. The tech world regularly, shamelessly cuts higher-earning higher-skill workers for cheaper “good enough” replacements. Best of luck. Even many of the folks that see the writing on the wall have fanciful visions of using their astonishingly capable genius developer brain to maintain or quickly re-achieve some of their high status in the trades. As a union tradesman, I’d find that misconception hilarious if I didn’t feel so bad for them. A lot of folks are going to have a lot of bitter medicine to swallow.
troupo 7mo ago
> I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes 2-3 hours "walking" while having to check in every 5-10 minutes? If I have to check in every 5-10 minutes, I won't taste coffee or hear that there's good music playing.
- xvector 7mo ago
  Just Claude code a push notification feature then
  - troupo 7mo ago
    How is this better?
virtue3 7mo ago
That's fucking insane. Thank you for sharing. I had a bad feeling we were basically already there.
colechristensen 7mo ago
I have similar amounts of success (pretty good!) standing in line at a coffee shop talking to people who work for me through some action that needs to be taken and doing the same with AI. However I do not trust AI anywhere near as much as I trust the humans. The AI is super capable but also occasionally a psychopath toddler. I sat in amused astonishment when faced with job 2 not running because job 1 was failing Claude went in to the database, changed the failure record to success, triggered job 2 which produced harmful garbage, and then claimed victory. Only the most troubled person would even think of doing that, but Claude thought it was the best solution.
- silentkat 7mo ago
  My work has required us all to be "AI Native". I am AI skeptical but am the type of person to try to do what is asked to the best of my ability. I can be wrong, after all. There is some real power in AI, for sure. But as I have been working with it, one thing is very clear. Either AI is not even close to a real intelligence (my take), or it is an alien intelligence. As I develop a system where it iterates on its own contexts, it definitely becomes probabilistically more likely to do the right thing, but the mistakes it makes become even more logic-defying. It's the coding equivalent of a hand with extra fingers. I'm only a few weeks into really diving in. Work has given me infinite tokens to play with. Building my own orchestrator system that's purely programmatic, which will spawn agents to do work. Treat them as functions. Defined inputs and defined outputs. Don't give an agent more than one goal, I find that giving it a goal of building a system often leads it to assert that it works when it does not, so the verifier is a different agent. I know this is not new thinking, as I said I am new. For me the most useful way to think about it has been considering LLMs to be a probabilistic programming language. It won't really error out, it'll just try to make it work. This attitude has made it fun for me again. Love learning new languages and also love making dirty scripts that make various tasks easier.
dunder_cat 7mo ago
> Edit: This is going to have huge ramifications for the tech security industry as these systems will be able to break security systems as easily it solved the proof. The sooner the good guys, if there are any left, understand this the better it will be for everybody. What can the good guys do? Fire up Claude to improve their systems? Unless you have it working fully autonomously to counter-act abuse, I don't see how you can beat the "bad guys". There may be some industries where this is a solved problem (e.g. you can do all the validation server-sided, religiously follow best practices to prevent and mitigate abuse), but a lot of stuff like multiplayer video games will be doomed unless they move to a "you must use a locked down system we control" model. I honestly don't consider it liberating as someone that has various hobby projects, that now in addition to plain old DDoS I'll also have people spin up layer 7 attacks with just their credit card. It almost makes me want to give up instead of pushing forward in a world where the worst of the worst has access to the best of the best.
- Kalabasa 7mo ago
  Nothing as heavy as the above but here's my small anecdote: I was putting off security updates on my npm dependencies in my personal project because it's a pain to migrate if the upgrade isn't trivial. It's not a critical website, but I run npm scripts locally, and dependabot is telling me things. I told Claude Code to make a migration plan to upgrade my deps. It updated code for breaking changes (there were API changes, not all fixes are minor version upgrades) and replaced abandoned unmaintained packages with newer ones or built-in Node APIs. It was all done in an hour. I even got unit tests out of it to test for regressions. In this case, I was able to skip the boring task of maintaining code and applying routine updates and focus on the fun feature stuff.
ale 7mo ago
This type of slop comment is somehow worse than spam. >After a week, scores of iterations, it can reverse engineer any website Cool, let’s see the proof.
- dataviz1000 7mo ago
  I posted a link but don't want to spam HN more than I have. It is proof-of-concept. Seriously burns some tokens (~80k - ~200k) but doesn't require AI after to scrape and automate a website so if all the people at Browser Use, Browser Base, and every one pounding every website used it, I think, the net benefit would be in the billions. I would recommend using it in isolation. Nonetheless, it works very very well on my machine. > This type of slop comment is somehow worse than spam. Please don't be mean.
  - Eufrat 7mo ago
    It sounds like this is along the lines of Firecrawl is trying to do? Or what Plaid has done for banking? > I think, the net benefit would be in the billions. I think, you must forgive people if they are somewhat hostile, if not sick and tired of these claims. It’s quite frustrating seeing individuals constantly saying things like this. Meanwhile I don’t think a lot of people are seeing the structural shifts that these claims imply. This is not an original idea. The disruption claim has been made for the past several years in various fields and the goalposts keep getting moved. AI will absolutely change and render some jobs moot even in its current state if Claude/GPT are able to make a profitable business model. If it turns out that Claude is really being subsidized by investors and it turns out that $200/month subscription is really a $5,000/month when Claude has to stand on its on, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. It’s clear you’ve gotten some good, if expensive use out of AI, but I’m not sure that experience scales or if it will exist in 5 years.
- emp17344 7mo ago
  There is no proof, just a self-congratulatory word salad with dubious authenticity. It’s insane how insufferable this place is now.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

DrewADesign 7mo ago

> I went to the coffeeshop and drank very good coffee listening to music. Then at night I sat and had a beer thinking about T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', the effect of industrialization in England at that time and his views of how ennui affected the aristocracy. Well, for those among us that are not aristocracy already, except for the vanishingly small number of people required to oversee such processes, we’re probably the closest we’re going to get to it. If they don’t need people to do the tech labor, we’ve got way more people than we need, so that’s a huge oversupply of tech skills, which means tech skills are rapidly becoming worthless. Glad to see how fast we’re moving in our very own race to the bottom!

drfloyd51 7mo ago
I kind of feel like software engineers working on improving AI are traitors working against other SE’s trying to make a living. However… I have to acknowledge my craft of SE has been putting people out of work for decades. I myself came up with business process improvement that directly let the company release about 20 people. I did this twice. So… fair play.
- mannanj 7mo ago
  Aren't the true traitors still the ones paying the SE to do that work? The managerial slave-master class?
  - drfloyd51 7mo ago
    You always have a choice to make. You make it everyday. Get up. Go to a legitimate job. Work. You probably choose not to steal, rob, impersonate someone else, or generally make money illegally. It can be traitors all the way down.
- marsten 7mo ago
  In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >It frees up people to do more interesting things Like beg on the corners and starve in the street? Trying to figure out how the basics of capitalism where labor is exchanged for money is not going to work well when the only jobs left are side gigs. Something will have to change and a lot of People will fight said change.
    - DowsingSpoon 7mo ago
      I’ve thought about this myself. Couple of points: 1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too. 2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else. For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer. If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.
psychoslave 7mo ago
Lol,a race to the bottom where too many tech savvy people are left unemployed while a few "privileged" get a decreasing buying power to maintain security of the digital tools that keep the whole digital dependent civilizations afloat? Sounds like a great starting plot for an interesting story.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

frizlab 7mo ago

> I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes to make sure it doesn't need human help. That is a nightmarish scenario tbh

falcor84 7mo ago
Nightmarish?! In comparison to the average person's actual job? I'm pretty sure that many people out there would sign up for a battle royale for a chance at such a job.
- siva7 7mo ago
  Would they? I'd love to get in touch
  - falcor84 7mo ago
    My clients have been burned before. Once you set up the battle royale with a trusted third party validating that there'll be an assured good job at the end, I promise I'll have enough candidates for you to fill up the first 10 competitions.
- eproxus 7mo ago
  I you think you’ll be paid 3 hours of salary for every 5 minutes of work, I have bad news for you. Most likely your 3 hours will be filled with managing 36 different AI sessions at a time and it will slowly break your brain. At least if we keep doing capitalism the way we are.
  - DrewADesign 7mo ago
    Tech industry folks have been so coddled for decades that many think their astonishing intellect has earned them a cushy life rather than being in a field with high labor demand. It’s one reason tech workers are often considered arrogant and out of touch… and that’s why people think they can get paid to lightly orchestrate agents to do their jobs. Oof. If efficiency gains create an oversupply of tech labor, even the bestie BFF bosses will notice the hoards of more qualified people who will kill for any job that pays more than CVS or Uber— so a lot less than most developers make now. The tech world regularly, shamelessly cuts higher-earning higher-skill workers for cheaper “good enough” replacements. Best of luck. Even many of the folks that see the writing on the wall have fanciful visions of using their astonishingly capable genius developer brain to maintain or quickly re-achieve some of their high status in the trades. As a union tradesman, I’d find that misconception hilarious if I didn’t feel so bad for them. A lot of folks are going to have a lot of bitter medicine to swallow.

troupo 7mo ago

> I would go for a 2 or 3 hour walk with my phone using the remote control feature looking every 5 - 10 minutes 2-3 hours "walking" while having to check in every 5-10 minutes? If I have to check in every 5-10 minutes, I won't taste coffee or hear that there's good music playing.

xvector 7mo ago
Just Claude code a push notification feature then
- troupo 7mo ago
  How is this better?

virtue3 7mo ago

That's fucking insane. Thank you for sharing. I had a bad feeling we were basically already there.

colechristensen 7mo ago

I have similar amounts of success (pretty good!) standing in line at a coffee shop talking to people who work for me through some action that needs to be taken and doing the same with AI. However I do not trust AI anywhere near as much as I trust the humans. The AI is super capable but also occasionally a psychopath toddler. I sat in amused astonishment when faced with job 2 not running because job 1 was failing Claude went in to the database, changed the failure record to success, triggered job 2 which produced harmful garbage, and then claimed victory. Only the most troubled person would even think of doing that, but Claude thought it was the best solution.

silentkat 7mo ago
My work has required us all to be "AI Native". I am AI skeptical but am the type of person to try to do what is asked to the best of my ability. I can be wrong, after all. There is some real power in AI, for sure. But as I have been working with it, one thing is very clear. Either AI is not even close to a real intelligence (my take), or it is an alien intelligence. As I develop a system where it iterates on its own contexts, it definitely becomes probabilistically more likely to do the right thing, but the mistakes it makes become even more logic-defying. It's the coding equivalent of a hand with extra fingers. I'm only a few weeks into really diving in. Work has given me infinite tokens to play with. Building my own orchestrator system that's purely programmatic, which will spawn agents to do work. Treat them as functions. Defined inputs and defined outputs. Don't give an agent more than one goal, I find that giving it a goal of building a system often leads it to assert that it works when it does not, so the verifier is a different agent. I know this is not new thinking, as I said I am new. For me the most useful way to think about it has been considering LLMs to be a probabilistic programming language. It won't really error out, it'll just try to make it work. This attitude has made it fun for me again. Love learning new languages and also love making dirty scripts that make various tasks easier.

dunder_cat 7mo ago

> Edit: This is going to have huge ramifications for the tech security industry as these systems will be able to break security systems as easily it solved the proof. The sooner the good guys, if there are any left, understand this the better it will be for everybody. What can the good guys do? Fire up Claude to improve their systems? Unless you have it working fully autonomously to counter-act abuse, I don't see how you can beat the "bad guys". There may be some industries where this is a solved problem (e.g. you can do all the validation server-sided, religiously follow best practices to prevent and mitigate abuse), but a lot of stuff like multiplayer video games will be doomed unless they move to a "you must use a locked down system we control" model. I honestly don't consider it liberating as someone that has various hobby projects, that now in addition to plain old DDoS I'll also have people spin up layer 7 attacks with just their credit card. It almost makes me want to give up instead of pushing forward in a world where the worst of the worst has access to the best of the best.

Kalabasa 7mo ago
Nothing as heavy as the above but here's my small anecdote: I was putting off security updates on my npm dependencies in my personal project because it's a pain to migrate if the upgrade isn't trivial. It's not a critical website, but I run npm scripts locally, and dependabot is telling me things. I told Claude Code to make a migration plan to upgrade my deps. It updated code for breaking changes (there were API changes, not all fixes are minor version upgrades) and replaced abandoned unmaintained packages with newer ones or built-in Node APIs. It was all done in an hour. I even got unit tests out of it to test for regressions. In this case, I was able to skip the boring task of maintaining code and applying routine updates and focus on the fun feature stuff.

ale 7mo ago

This type of slop comment is somehow worse than spam. >After a week, scores of iterations, it can reverse engineer any website Cool, let’s see the proof.

dataviz1000 7mo ago
I posted a link but don't want to spam HN more than I have. It is proof-of-concept. Seriously burns some tokens (~80k - ~200k) but doesn't require AI after to scrape and automate a website so if all the people at Browser Use, Browser Base, and every one pounding every website used it, I think, the net benefit would be in the billions. I would recommend using it in isolation. Nonetheless, it works very very well on my machine. > This type of slop comment is somehow worse than spam. Please don't be mean.
- Eufrat 7mo ago
  It sounds like this is along the lines of Firecrawl is trying to do? Or what Plaid has done for banking? > I think, the net benefit would be in the billions. I think, you must forgive people if they are somewhat hostile, if not sick and tired of these claims. It’s quite frustrating seeing individuals constantly saying things like this. Meanwhile I don’t think a lot of people are seeing the structural shifts that these claims imply. This is not an original idea. The disruption claim has been made for the past several years in various fields and the goalposts keep getting moved. AI will absolutely change and render some jobs moot even in its current state if Claude/GPT are able to make a profitable business model. If it turns out that Claude is really being subsidized by investors and it turns out that $200/month subscription is really a $5,000/month when Claude has to stand on its on, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. It’s clear you’ve gotten some good, if expensive use out of AI, but I’m not sure that experience scales or if it will exist in 5 years.
emp17344 7mo ago
There is no proof, just a self-congratulatory word salad with dubious authenticity. It’s insane how insufferable this place is now.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]