6 ms·

This is exactly right. By offloading this trivial task to the LLM, Simon has abandoned the opportunity to evaluate the abstraction with additional information a

• discordance 4mo ago
  I see it as a prioritization exercise. I know the above is a trivial example, but more generally, does the guy who wrote Datasette and Django want to wrangle front end and css, or do they want to work on something else?
  • smartbit 4mo ago
    See above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498573#48502311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498573#48502311
• oulipo2 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • beernet 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • harperlee 4mo ago
      It was posted at 5am in New York... not sure that that was a US view, so the fact that the platform is US-owned doesn't seem so relevant, if there's a global audience. That being said, I do agree it is a legit thought (and moreso, completely on point in the subthread discussing downsides), and that it shouldn't be downvoted.
    • user43928 4mo ago
      While one can raise environmental concerns about the AI datacenter buildout, I don't think it is fair to say that it "ruins the planet". I don't think it is a good contribution to the discussion around Simon's LLM use to fix a CSS bug.
    • _heimdall 4mo ago
      That's an interesting choice as a source. It doesn't mention climate change or human impacts at all and describes El Niño as a naturally occurring event. > The El Nino is a phenomenon that occurs naturally
      • brickers 4mo ago
        El Niño is a naturally occurring event
      • dahart 4mo ago
        El Niño has been occurring naturally for more than 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_...
        • oulipo2 4mo ago
          The frequency and magnitude of the event is directly related to the warming up of climate
          • _heimdall 4mo ago
            By related to I assume you mean correlates with though. To be fair, we can't say there is a causal link (even if it does seem very likely).
            • oulipo2 4mo ago
              We can TOTALLY say that there's a causal link, it's been proven by scientific stories
              • _heimdall 4mo ago
                If you have any links I'd be very interested to see them. Happy to be proven wrong here, but when most (all?) of the research is based in modelling I don't see how you'd prove causation, especially in such a large system that you can't test with and without the intervention in question.
    • vitalyan1234 4mo ago
      [flagged]
    • deaux 4mo ago
      As someone who actually gives a shit about the environment and global warming and has been putting this into practice for more than a decade through daily personal sacrifices: no, I downvote it because if you properly look into it, AI is just completely insignificant compared to cars, air travel, clothing, food, needless junk and so on that it's a joke. It's always brought up by people who never cared, but now pretend to do so because they hate LLMs for other reasons. The irony is that some of those are actually _good_ reasons but they're too cowardly to admit them. There's nothing unmanly about admitting you're afraid of AI taking your job, becoming more intelligent, and ending up in a dystopia. Go run the numbers and compare them vs. what it takes to produce a single hamburger or hoodie. Anyone who actually cares has already done this and drawn this conclusion.
      • oulipo2 4mo ago
        Have you heard of "rebound effect"? Sure you can say, individually, one query is not that much... but then it becomes integrated in search engines, so suddenly when there was no queries at all, now there's 500 billions per day, and it gets included in your CICD at every commit, and soon enough in your OS, etc
        • deaux 4mo ago
          "Run the numbers" means "run the numbers for using agentic coding for 2 hours per day on a frontier model" not "run the numbers for a single query". The former is the worst case scenario. Google Search's "AI", which is what you're hinting at is such a good example. Let's say there's 10 billion Google searches per day. 10 billion completions on what is going to be a very tiny, ultra finetuned model with lots of caching (including outputs). Check out how many queries an hour of agentic coding results in. And input/completion tokens. Estimate energy usage of Opus vs something like Gemma 4 E2B. Calculate how many developers using Opus for coding 1 hour a day would equate to those 10 billion search query originated LLM calls. You could not have provided a better example to show that without running the numbers you'll end up with assumptions that oppose reality.
  • simonw 4mo ago
    Here's a handy calculator you can use to estimate how much CO2 and water I wasted with my coding agent session: https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/ https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/
    • PinkaDunka 4mo ago
      Not sure what point you wanted to make, but this calculator is quite shocking. GPT 5.5 pro, with "a long document" and 10 requests a day gives 25% of daily CO2 emissions! Ten coding sessions a day with Opus is still 4.7%! This feels enormous. I will definitely stop rolling my eyes when people complain about AI CO/water usage...
      • simonw 4mo ago
        GPT-5.5 Pro is a notoriously expensive model, it's 6x the price of GPT-5.5. Not something to use as a daily driver! That ten coding sessions a day with Opus number feels more credible to me.
      • TaupeRanger 4mo ago
        What are you on about? May be 1 out of 100,000 users are using 5.5 Pro to make 10 "Long Documents" as defined in that tool EVERY day. What a silly thing to harp on. Six 100,000 token Claude coding sessions use less energy than a dryer load, and less water than making one egg. If you are truly concerned about energy and water usage, AI is not even in the top 100 things you should be concerned about in your daily life.
        • kmnfu 4mo ago
          [dead]
    • AmbroseBierce 4mo ago
      This very obtusely ommits the demand for new data centers and related infrastructure that using AI creates, the going "vegan for a year" option assumes less cows being born but somehow the "don't use AI" doesn't assume that the data center wasn't build in the first place.
• jmmcd 4mo ago
  People are missing that Willison is among the very best people we have in the role of (for lack of a good name): early access to frontier models, evaluate them in real scenarios, no wishful thinking, hype, or doom, communicate the possibilities. Yes he could have fixed this himself but then he would have learned nothing about the AI, and we wouldn't have read a fascinating and important article.
  • risyachka 4mo ago
    >> he would have learned nothing about the AI there is absolutely zero value in spending time to learn about new models as in few months new model will be out and whatever you learned about the current one will be useless. Also with models getting better and better you have to know less and less to achieve same results.
    • simonw 4mo ago
      My experience has been the exact opposite. As the models get better you need to know more about their capabilities, because otherwise you risk prompting Claude Fable 5 like it's GPT-4o and complaining loudly about how it's all hype and nothing about these models is improving at all (yes, I do see people say that.) Getting the best results out of these models requires skill, experience, intuition, and domain expertise. There's always room for improving every one of those.
      • ViscountPenguin 4mo ago
        Eh, I've have the exact opposite experience. Way back before instruct models it was pretty difficult, but for the last couple of years I haven't needed anything more complex than the type of text that I might send in a detailed email to a colleague.
      • philipwhiuk 4mo ago
        Isn't the whole point of a better model that it should be better at understanding you than the previous one? So the same prompt should return a better answer. Prompting differently to the new model seems entirely backwards when trying to determine if the model has improved.
• simonw 4mo ago
  Things I learned from this: - Fable will do a whole lot more than you might expect in order to verify a fix. I learned that it's "relentlessly proactive". That's a good title for a blog entry! - You can take screenshots of a window in macOS using the "screencapture" CLI command, but you'll need the integer window ID first. - That windowID is accessible via "Quartz.CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo(Quartz.kCGWindowListOptionOnScreenOnly, Quartz.kCGNullWindowID)" using the pyobjc-framework-Quartz library, which installs cleanly via "uv run". - A neat trick for simulating keyboard shortcuts is to run document.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent("keydown", {key: "/", bubbles: true})); after the page loads. - You don't need Flask or Starlette to run a CORS-enabled localhost server for capturing JSON from another window - 19 lines of code against the Python standard library http.server package works just fine. - getComputedStyle(document.querySelector("navigation-search").shadowRoot.querySelector("textarea")) works to read dimensions from inside a Web Component's shadow DOM. - defaults write com.google.chrome.for.testing AppleShowScrollBars Always - Claude Fable knows how to apply all of the above. It's always interesting to pick up hints of what a model can and cannot do. I'm always confused at how many people equate using a coding agent to solve a problem with "learning nothing". If you pay attention to what it's doing you can learn so much!
  • saberience 4mo ago
    And Fable is still worse than Codex. I use both and the only thing (as always) that I will use Claude for is UI design. Opus 4.8 and now Fable are still both worse at actually getting the job done than the Codex model. Claude models write FAR too much code when it's not needed, they burn far too many tokens, when they are not needed, write un-necessary tests, write plans which are 5 pages longer than are needed, etc. etc. Have you actually compared code quality and plan quality versus Codex? It's demonstrably worse.
    • felixgallo 4mo ago
      In my experience writing about 50 programs with fable, opus, and GPT, fable is a significant step change better than opus which is significantly better than GPT. We must be doing different things.
• snowwrestler 4mo ago
  But Simon is not trying to get good at CSS debugging, Simon is trying to learn about AI systems and produce content about them. So giving the AI agent a trivial task to go crazy on is a feature, not a bug. For $12 implied cost, he got a front-page post on HN with 500 comments. What is that worth? :-)
  • xnorswap 4mo ago
    To most of us that's worth a ton, whereas he's probably had enough front-page posts that there's less value to him, although still likely more than $12 worth.
    • garblegarble 4mo ago
      >enough front-page posts that there's less value to him On the countrary I'd say it's probably even more important - without (amongst doing other "thought leader" things) getting on the HN front-page regularly an influencer's value to the industry disappears (not criticising him here)
      • simonw 4mo ago
        That's bad news for all of the other "AI influencers", off the top of my head I can't think of any with remotely my track record of hitting HN. (That's because they're all busy attracting millions of views on TikTok and YouTube, which are much more impactful channels than my dedication to blogging like it's 2005.)
        • garblegarble 4mo ago
          That's what I meant by other thought leadership things - that's all covering different niches. For what it's worth, I think you do useful work and are a respectible influencer. I'd also say don't be down about your use of blogging - I'd say it makes you more valuable, there aren't that many decision-makers who are going to sit through a bunch of breathless YouTube videos... P.S. I hope you don't object to me using the term influencer, assumed you were on-board with it since in your post announcing your sponsorship you referenced Freeman & Forrest, "influencers on tap" / "building turnkey influencer marketing programs as a service".
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• justinclift 4mo ago
  > By offloading this trivial task to the LLM, Simon has abandoned the opportunity to evaluate the abstraction [...] While by itself that would be true, Simon commonly blogs about things he's up to. That action provides the opportunity for evaluation, and additionally evaluation by a wider audience. So, it's not the same scenario as non-bloggers offloading a task... :)