TIL about all that stuff, Moltbook, Openclaw, Gas Town, and I don't get it anymore. It's too much. Forums for chatbots with their own religion but its actually a crypto scam and vibecoded hypesoftware to scam people with sh*tcoins because yolo and whatnot. I'm out.
I read a bit about Gas Town, and I'm still confused if it's a super-inception, metajoke that I don't get; or a clever, invite-only party to which I'm not invited. All the original article (and the discussions & responses to the responses) did was make me feel stupid, but I have enough experience and self-worth to know I'm not stupid so I'm just going to refuse to play. I recently spent more than a week pretty disconnected from this all and haven't felt that good in a long time!
Well I do intend to use software to automate these interactions, because in my country whatsapp groups are unmanageable without this.
Imagine the group of parents of my kids schools sending 100 to 300 messages per day with different subjects.
The issue is. I also have personal and important chats that I don't want to share with an vibe coded AI software without any canaries taking the shot first.
And I'm talking as a person that is using almost all my Claude max subscription every week.
But I do verify ALL of the code that I'm delivering. And I'm even using Gemini as an adversarial LLM to review Claude generated code.
Does this that gigantic project set any standards for this?
I was not able to find on their documentation.
So it's funny indeed, but for now I'm upvoting this one even being a confident moderate person.
Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.
Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.
> I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.
I only skimmed the OpenClaw post, but unless I completely misunderstood the README in their GitHub repo, to me the benefits are stupidly obvious, and I was actually planning to look at it closer over the weekend.
The value proposition I saw is: hooking up one or more LLMs via API (BYOK) to one or more popular chat apps, via self-hostable control plane. Plus some bells and whistles.
The part about chat integration is something that I wanted to have even before LLMs were a thing, because I hate modern communication apps with burning fashion. All popular IM apps in particular[0] are just user-hostile prisons whose vendors go out of their way to make interoperability and end-user automation impossible. There's too much of that, and for a decade or more I dreamed of centralizing all these independent networks for myself in a single app. I considered working on the problem a few times, but the barriers vendors put up were always too much for my patience.
So here I thought, maybe someone solved this problem. That alone would be valuable.
Having an LLM, especially BYOK, in your main IM app? That's a no-brainer to me too; I think it's a travesty this is not a default feature already. Especially these days, as a parent, I find a good chunk of my IM use involves manually copy-pasting messages and photos to some LLM to turn them into reminders and calendar invites. And that's one of many use cases I have for tight IM/LLM integration.
So here I thought maybe this project will be a quick and easy way to finally get a sane, end-user-programmable chat experience. Shame to see it might be vaporware and/or a scam.
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[0] - Excepting Telegram, which has a host of other problems - but I'd be fine living with them; unfortunately, everyone I need to communicate with uses either WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger these days.
FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:
some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,
a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,
people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,
a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.
I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them.
"x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x.
When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised".
I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces?
I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
> and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I think it's funny that you highlight this, because for many blockchains, their native token is the transactional currency also.
Which opens up the possibility for a marketplace around it, as well as an incentive to grift to recoup one's investment.
AFAIK there's no similar market for LLM tokens (the price may fluctuate, but the AI companies set it, and they can't be resold), but the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.
>A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
i have a filter for this kind of thing in the era of greedmaxxing (get rich quick schemes that are not new but change shape pretty often these days) - be a late adopter.
I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone?
I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
People can spin up magic crypto coins backed by other crypto coins at the push of a button.
Dirtbag crypto people will spin up a coin in the name of someone's software product, give the project owner a bunch of coin, make them feel special like they're suddenly part of lots of money, and then astroturf and pump the coin as much as they can before setting up for a rugpull by either the project owner trying to cash out, or the crypto folks trying to finish the job off.
You didn't answer the question though, you just double downed on crypto=bad.
If someone posts a github link of some LLM tool, clawbot or whatever. You are free to run or fork it and then some crypto bro creates a clawbot $coin.. nobody is forcing you to buy the $coin.
> I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
I get that feeling. I suppose it's more about crypto than AI, where the first translates into "pyramid scheme" and the second to "hype".
Any kind of defraud must be rooted in someone's greed. In this case that's FOMO about some presumably magic discovery that's gonna change the world.
So nothing special you might have missed about AI or cryptocurrencies. It's just that those are relatively cheap and accessible technologies to create and transfer (presumed) wealth.
I don't think you are out of touch. I see this more as opportunistic behavior rather than the main thing. A side show. Some people buy/sell crypto. Most people at this point ignore the whole space and have turned their back on them.
All that's left is serial bullshitters generally not delivering anything real or tangible whatsoever. But of course, them affiliating themselves with whatever is fashionable is entirely in character. That's what serial bullshitters do.
As far as I can see there's little to no overlap in the Venn diagram of crypto tech bro types and AI optimists/utopians. Neither group produces much technology. They mostly just move hot air.
And then there's a rather large crowd of skeptical yet open minded people actually getting some early results using or building various AI tools.
Most AI stuff on HN breaks into the AI bears (it's all bull-shit and going to end in tears, any minute now) and bulls (AGI is imminent and we're all going to be unemployed and then our AI overlords will kill us). And a few occasional rational things in between.
I'm in camp rational. Some cool/useful tools out there. Getting some tangible results using those. Clear and quite rapid progress year on year. Worth keeping up with. I don't worry about employment. I'm quite busy currently. All this AI stuff is generating lots of work and new business potential. And the AIs are not picking up the slack so far. If anything, there's a growing gap between what's possible and what's being realized. That's what opportunity looks like. I see a lot of business potential currently for somebody reasonably handy with AI tools.
> The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.
Maybe a bit different but I think it's worth pointing out how this parallels the state of the job market right now.
It is so hard to get hired, with so many moving and diverse frameworks, libraries, and technologies you are expected to know, that it's almost impossible to keep up and stand out.
The only way to do it is to develop "projects" that demonstrate your abilities in each target domain, and in these days of vibe coding these need to be more than sketches but like full fledged applications that can draw real attention to you, if your lucky get on the front page somewhere.
And with vibe coding it can be done relatively quickly.
So we're in this state of new projects, very impressive looking projects, getting posted every day, all the time, and about 1% of them will see any kind of longevity because the vast majority will be dumped as soon as the author gets a job.
This makes it increasingly difficult to select dependencies for downstream work.
As someone who is currently looking to setup local CI for macOS hardware, that'd be neat :)
Unrelated; For CI, what hardware would people recommend? I'm choosing between mac Mini (M4 Pro) and Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) but haven't digged into the CPU difference yet to understand what would be best. Opinions?
How heavy is your CI workload? Even the base Mac Mini is equipped with a pretty beefy CPU, but obviously it has limited RAM/storage (although the latter can be solved with a cheap external SSD enclosure).
Yegge was an early employee at Amazon and has been writing influential blog posts and developing massive software projects since before this guy was born. But sure, in his retirement he's pivoted to pump and dump schemes.
You’re confused about what an “appeal to authority” actually is.
An appeal to authority is saying “X is true because this person said so.” That’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening is people treating expert opinion as evidence, not a verdict.
You say you don’t want appeals to authority, then you immediately offer your own opinion and expect people to take it seriously. Why? On what basis? Because it’s your judgment?
That’s the funny part. The moment you state an opinion, you’re asking others to weigh your credibility against someone else’s. You don’t escape authority, you just replace it with yourself.
Yegge’s opinion has weight because of his track record. It can still be wrong. Mine can be wrong. Yours can be wrong. That’s why people compare opinions instead of pretending they live in a vacuum.
Ignoring expert opinion entirely isn’t “independent thinking.” It’s just choosing to be uninformed and calling it a virtue.
Plenty of pump and dumpers are already wealthy what's your point? He's either doing it or not, his past employment isn't dictating it one way or another. His ability to "influence" through writing is salient to the discussion at hand, not some mitigating factor.
Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.
> The initial software Pump and Dump event could be considered when Cursor burned through millions of dollars to build a barely working browser. Naturally there was no way to finish such a monstrous heap of software into a working product and why would anybody use a vibe coded browser anyway? The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way.
I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill?
If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
It was only through external review that the problems with the project were discovered, and the blog post was clearly written for marketing as it hardly shared any actual details about the result other than an unexplained video they called a screenshot. Good faith research would have pointed out the limitations of their system
I don't think that most research starts with the idea of being a crypto rugpull. Many research labs and startups fail, and that is fine, you dont have to double down and drag a bunch of people into the mud with you because of that, which is what a lot of the example the author points to.
In some sense I just feel like this is another way to gamble, which in general is seeing an unprecedented growth with Polymarket and the likes. There is less faith in white-collar skills making you rich, so you just try your luck.
When the published "lessons" don't match up with what the experiment actually did, that's when people start asking questions. Is not just "boo it didn't work", but there is a vast mismatch between what the research actually answered, and what they claimed it answered.
You've made an emotional declaration, without an argument to justify it. For instance, it would be helpful to understand why you think it's a false equivalency, and in what way it is irresponsible.
If you want to contribute something to the discussion, do that, rather than just saying that you don't like the parent's argument, that's what the down button is for.
> The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.
If I cloned Pixar’s rendering library and called that then added to my CV ‘built a renderer from scratch’ this would be entirely dishonest…
I use LLMs often and don’t hate Cursor or think they’re a bad company. But it’s obvious they are being squeezed and have little USP (even less so than other AI players). They are frankly extremely pressured to make up lies.
I don’t think I’d resist the pressure either, so not on a high horse here, but it doesn’t make it any less dishonest.
Note, unofficial scam coins that grift on memes are very common and have been for about 2 years now, it doesn't mean an official affiliation.
However 2 things are very specific to this case:
1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin.
2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.
> AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it.
Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.
What worries me even more is tens of thousands (or even magnitudes higher) half-baked, over-hyped, vibe-coded spaghetti "open-source projects" released publicly for clout or to attract investment.
It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack.
2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.
In the last 6 months we've seen no fewer then a dozen vibe coded/AI assisted open source, self hosted projects launch that complete against ours. So far all but one has fizzled out, with the same pattern each time: announcement, repo with 1 giant commit, 2-4 months of feature releases, loss of interest from the author, and finally abandonment.
I expect once users get burnt enough time, they'll stop adopting the new cool thing until it's been out long enough with consistent releases.
I'm gonna blow your mind a bit here, but this isn't just the fault of the people making the software, it's also the fault of the vast majority of the people here and on the internet in general. Quality doesn't get your attention.
The truth is building a project is like a lottery ticket, and there's hard diminishing returns on time invested in quality in terms of payoff. If I told you you could spend 10x more time for a 2x increase in probability of success, if you were trying to make a living from your creativity, you would be stupid to spend the extra time, it's a horrible investment.
The people spamming half baked projects that they quickly abandon if they don't get traction are being rational. People like me that grind on unsexy process bottlenecks and try to keep refining into something really nice are the irrational ones.
How timely, I was just thinking about this today! Sure, we can write code quickly and in copious amounts, but the challenge of software engineering (at least in my imagination) has always been maintaining and upkeeping it.
Crypto has been putting the big bucks into marketing forever. See the telegram NFT push with mma atheletes, etc. This has just been one of their more successful marketing vectors.
Pump == experimentation/innovation, different people look at it differently, so you get variety of interesting ideas.
Dump == natural consequence of over-supply, in this case whatever is not useful, we will drop.
But to invent/discover new things, new paradigms, we need that Pump.
1. Look at age of computers, we had so many different architectures and computer brands with own hardware, now mostly converged to a couple of architectures
2. Operating systems, at some point everyone was writing operating systems, now converged to primarily 3
3. Programming languages, not converged to small number of languages, but there were bunch of languages, same with Databases
4. Frontend frameworks, converged around React & Vue.
“Pump & Dump” has a very specific meaning here, something that is essentially a scam to cheat people out of their money, and not an actual honest attempt to create something new…
Pump and dump is not the same as competition resulting in winners and losers, it’s a grift by the losers to profit at the expense of users through deception.
And this is why the OOP article makes zero sense. How is Cursor a grift to profit at the expense of users? Users use Cursor because they want to write code faster. Whether writing code faster is an inherently good thing is up to the users. Was Visual Studio (premium version once sold at ~$5000, btw) a pump & dump?
The new shit-coin-as-a-service app(Bags) is a fascinating evolution of the system. Shitcoins started as a mechanism to monetize your own fame but have apparently evolved so you can monetize other people's fame.
On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?
I'm surprised anyone is still holding Bitcoin at this point... I thought everyone finally got with the program that crypto will never amount to anything...
Appears to be running on plain HTTP, and trying to access it over HTTPS presents a bad cert and then redirects somewhere incomprehensible. No idea what the domain owner is doing here.
I would add “being acquired by another startup experiencing FOMO that they might miss out on the latest AI trend” as an alternative path to profiting off the grift
The top three stories on hn right now:
This is art.
TIL about all that stuff, Moltbook, Openclaw, Gas Town, and I don't get it anymore. It's too much. Forums for chatbots with their own religion but its actually a crypto scam and vibecoded hypesoftware to scam people with sh*tcoins because yolo and whatnot. I'm out.
I read a bit about Gas Town, and I'm still confused if it's a super-inception, metajoke that I don't get; or a clever, invite-only party to which I'm not invited. All the original article (and the discussions & responses to the responses) did was make me feel stupid, but I have enough experience and self-worth to know I'm not stupid so I'm just going to refuse to play. I recently spent more than a week pretty disconnected from this all and haven't felt that good in a long time!
I checked the thing (whatever its name was) when I first saw it on NH and after 5 minutes decided it was a scam, skipping all news about it since.
The open claw guy doesn't like Gastown, mcp, nor Ralph bot
Life is beautiful, you have both sides of religious sects of AI here. The iconoclasts and the believers, which ends up in funny situations like this
Well I do intend to use software to automate these interactions, because in my country whatsapp groups are unmanageable without this.
Imagine the group of parents of my kids schools sending 100 to 300 messages per day with different subjects.
The issue is. I also have personal and important chats that I don't want to share with an vibe coded AI software without any canaries taking the shot first.
And I'm talking as a person that is using almost all my Claude max subscription every week.
But I do verify ALL of the code that I'm delivering. And I'm even using Gemini as an adversarial LLM to review Claude generated code.
Does this that gigantic project set any standards for this?
I was not able to find on their documentation.
So it's funny indeed, but for now I'm upvoting this one even being a confident moderate person.
:)
Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.
Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.
> I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.
I only skimmed the OpenClaw post, but unless I completely misunderstood the README in their GitHub repo, to me the benefits are stupidly obvious, and I was actually planning to look at it closer over the weekend.
The value proposition I saw is: hooking up one or more LLMs via API (BYOK) to one or more popular chat apps, via self-hostable control plane. Plus some bells and whistles.
The part about chat integration is something that I wanted to have even before LLMs were a thing, because I hate modern communication apps with burning fashion. All popular IM apps in particular[0] are just user-hostile prisons whose vendors go out of their way to make interoperability and end-user automation impossible. There's too much of that, and for a decade or more I dreamed of centralizing all these independent networks for myself in a single app. I considered working on the problem a few times, but the barriers vendors put up were always too much for my patience.
So here I thought, maybe someone solved this problem. That alone would be valuable.
Having an LLM, especially BYOK, in your main IM app? That's a no-brainer to me too; I think it's a travesty this is not a default feature already. Especially these days, as a parent, I find a good chunk of my IM use involves manually copy-pasting messages and photos to some LLM to turn them into reminders and calendar invites. And that's one of many use cases I have for tight IM/LLM integration.
So here I thought maybe this project will be a quick and easy way to finally get a sane, end-user-programmable chat experience. Shame to see it might be vaporware and/or a scam.
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[0] - Excepting Telegram, which has a host of other problems - but I'd be fine living with them; unfortunately, everyone I need to communicate with uses either WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger these days.
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FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:
some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,
a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,
people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,
a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.
I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them.
"x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x.
When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised".
I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces?
I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
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> and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I think it's funny that you highlight this, because for many blockchains, their native token is the transactional currency also.
Which opens up the possibility for a marketplace around it, as well as an incentive to grift to recoup one's investment.
AFAIK there's no similar market for LLM tokens (the price may fluctuate, but the AI companies set it, and they can't be resold), but the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.
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>A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
i have a filter for this kind of thing in the era of greedmaxxing (get rich quick schemes that are not new but change shape pretty often these days) - be a late adopter.
This is also best practice for anything else you may be held accountable for.
To wait is to maximize information and efficiency in execution.
I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone?
I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
People can spin up magic crypto coins backed by other crypto coins at the push of a button.
Dirtbag crypto people will spin up a coin in the name of someone's software product, give the project owner a bunch of coin, make them feel special like they're suddenly part of lots of money, and then astroturf and pump the coin as much as they can before setting up for a rugpull by either the project owner trying to cash out, or the crypto folks trying to finish the job off.
Fraudsters are essentially buying the "whitepaper" (technical/business legitimacy) in the classic crypto pump and dump scheme.
So I guess it’s just FOMO, because I still can’t really relate to why anyone would actually buy any of those coins.
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or, just never involve the original project itself,
which is likely what’s unknowingly being described here:
> However CLAWD coin tokens are kicking off right now and people are being lured into buying them as the hype grows.
You didn't answer the question though, you just double downed on crypto=bad.
If someone posts a github link of some LLM tool, clawbot or whatever. You are free to run or fork it and then some crypto bro creates a clawbot $coin.. nobody is forcing you to buy the $coin.
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> I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
I get that feeling. I suppose it's more about crypto than AI, where the first translates into "pyramid scheme" and the second to "hype".
Any kind of defraud must be rooted in someone's greed. In this case that's FOMO about some presumably magic discovery that's gonna change the world.
So nothing special you might have missed about AI or cryptocurrencies. It's just that those are relatively cheap and accessible technologies to create and transfer (presumed) wealth.
I don't think you are out of touch. I see this more as opportunistic behavior rather than the main thing. A side show. Some people buy/sell crypto. Most people at this point ignore the whole space and have turned their back on them.
All that's left is serial bullshitters generally not delivering anything real or tangible whatsoever. But of course, them affiliating themselves with whatever is fashionable is entirely in character. That's what serial bullshitters do.
As far as I can see there's little to no overlap in the Venn diagram of crypto tech bro types and AI optimists/utopians. Neither group produces much technology. They mostly just move hot air.
And then there's a rather large crowd of skeptical yet open minded people actually getting some early results using or building various AI tools.
Most AI stuff on HN breaks into the AI bears (it's all bull-shit and going to end in tears, any minute now) and bulls (AGI is imminent and we're all going to be unemployed and then our AI overlords will kill us). And a few occasional rational things in between.
I'm in camp rational. Some cool/useful tools out there. Getting some tangible results using those. Clear and quite rapid progress year on year. Worth keeping up with. I don't worry about employment. I'm quite busy currently. All this AI stuff is generating lots of work and new business potential. And the AIs are not picking up the slack so far. If anything, there's a growing gap between what's possible and what's being realized. That's what opportunity looks like. I see a lot of business potential currently for somebody reasonably handy with AI tools.
[flagged]
I'm going to fucking crash out if another person says they're making a browser and their inline layout does this shit[1] I swear to god.
I held off on commenting on the last AI browser post because the author said "it's not even good" so they recognized it's trash (it was).
Please educate yourself on how inline layout is supposed to work[2] first. (no, you cannot lay out text span-by-span[3] either...)
[1] https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser/blob/df6f4a265a...
[2] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-inline-3/
[3] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#boundary-shaping
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Why don’t you do something useful with your superpowers?
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> The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.
Maybe a bit different but I think it's worth pointing out how this parallels the state of the job market right now.
It is so hard to get hired, with so many moving and diverse frameworks, libraries, and technologies you are expected to know, that it's almost impossible to keep up and stand out.
The only way to do it is to develop "projects" that demonstrate your abilities in each target domain, and in these days of vibe coding these need to be more than sketches but like full fledged applications that can draw real attention to you, if your lucky get on the front page somewhere.
And with vibe coding it can be done relatively quickly.
So we're in this state of new projects, very impressive looking projects, getting posted every day, all the time, and about 1% of them will see any kind of longevity because the vast majority will be dumped as soon as the author gets a job.
This makes it increasingly difficult to select dependencies for downstream work.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)
Gonna be a lot of cheap Mac minis for sale on eBay in a few weeks hopefully
As someone who is currently looking to setup local CI for macOS hardware, that'd be neat :)
Unrelated; For CI, what hardware would people recommend? I'm choosing between mac Mini (M4 Pro) and Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) but haven't digged into the CPU difference yet to understand what would be best. Opinions?
How heavy is your CI workload? Even the base Mac Mini is equipped with a pretty beefy CPU, but obviously it has limited RAM/storage (although the latter can be solved with a cheap external SSD enclosure).
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Why?
People are buying mac minis to run clawbot. They will quickly realize it was a fun toy and it will be turned off, then sold on a marketplace.
Yegge was an early employee at Amazon and has been writing influential blog posts and developing massive software projects since before this guy was born. But sure, in his retirement he's pivoted to pump and dump schemes.
Why is HN so susceptible to appeals to authority and constant mild-severe deification of other humans?
You’re confused about what an “appeal to authority” actually is.
An appeal to authority is saying “X is true because this person said so.” That’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening is people treating expert opinion as evidence, not a verdict.
You say you don’t want appeals to authority, then you immediately offer your own opinion and expect people to take it seriously. Why? On what basis? Because it’s your judgment?
That’s the funny part. The moment you state an opinion, you’re asking others to weigh your credibility against someone else’s. You don’t escape authority, you just replace it with yourself.
Yegge’s opinion has weight because of his track record. It can still be wrong. Mine can be wrong. Yours can be wrong. That’s why people compare opinions instead of pretending they live in a vacuum.
Ignoring expert opinion entirely isn’t “independent thinking.” It’s just choosing to be uninformed and calling it a virtue.
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I don't get it, either. There's an entire class of people on here who just run around looking for anyone to lead them.
I had a guy crash out after I told him that "so and so said Thing was good" was not sufficient to say whether Thing was good or not.
I told him he needed to develop enough skill to determine that for himself or he'd constantly fall for hype.
My dude pasted a ChatGPT list of engineers who had ever said anything about LLMs and was like ARE THEY ALL WRONG??
... did you listen to nothing I said? lol
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Plenty of pump and dumpers are already wealthy what's your point? He's either doing it or not, his past employment isn't dictating it one way or another. His ability to "influence" through writing is salient to the discussion at hand, not some mitigating factor.
Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.
Hah you had me until “best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc.”
> The initial software Pump and Dump event could be considered when Cursor burned through millions of dollars to build a barely working browser. Naturally there was no way to finish such a monstrous heap of software into a working product and why would anybody use a vibe coded browser anyway? The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way. I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill? If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
It was only through external review that the problems with the project were discovered, and the blog post was clearly written for marketing as it hardly shared any actual details about the result other than an unexplained video they called a screenshot. Good faith research would have pointed out the limitations of their system
I don't think that most research starts with the idea of being a crypto rugpull. Many research labs and startups fail, and that is fine, you dont have to double down and drag a bunch of people into the mud with you because of that, which is what a lot of the example the author points to.
In some sense I just feel like this is another way to gamble, which in general is seeing an unprecedented growth with Polymarket and the likes. There is less faith in white-collar skills making you rich, so you just try your luck.
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> but from the lessons learned along the way
When the published "lessons" don't match up with what the experiment actually did, that's when people start asking questions. Is not just "boo it didn't work", but there is a vast mismatch between what the research actually answered, and what they claimed it answered.
This is a stunning false equivalency and is an irresponsible comparison.
You've made an emotional declaration, without an argument to justify it. For instance, it would be helpful to understand why you think it's a false equivalency, and in what way it is irresponsible.
If you want to contribute something to the discussion, do that, rather than just saying that you don't like the parent's argument, that's what the down button is for.
The initial tweet was primarily a lie though
> The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.
If I cloned Pixar’s rendering library and called that then added to my CV ‘built a renderer from scratch’ this would be entirely dishonest…
I use LLMs often and don’t hate Cursor or think they’re a bad company. But it’s obvious they are being squeezed and have little USP (even less so than other AI players). They are frankly extremely pressured to make up lies.
I don’t think I’d resist the pressure either, so not on a high horse here, but it doesn’t make it any less dishonest.
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> Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
I thought only AI bots were born yesterday.
Note, unofficial scam coins that grift on memes are very common and have been for about 2 years now, it doesn't mean an official affiliation.
However 2 things are very specific to this case:
1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin.
2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.
> AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it.
Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.
What worries me even more is tens of thousands (or even magnitudes higher) half-baked, over-hyped, vibe-coded spaghetti "open-source projects" released publicly for clout or to attract investment.
It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack.
2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.
In the last 6 months we've seen no fewer then a dozen vibe coded/AI assisted open source, self hosted projects launch that complete against ours. So far all but one has fizzled out, with the same pattern each time: announcement, repo with 1 giant commit, 2-4 months of feature releases, loss of interest from the author, and finally abandonment.
I expect once users get burnt enough time, they'll stop adopting the new cool thing until it's been out long enough with consistent releases.
I'm gonna blow your mind a bit here, but this isn't just the fault of the people making the software, it's also the fault of the vast majority of the people here and on the internet in general. Quality doesn't get your attention.
The truth is building a project is like a lottery ticket, and there's hard diminishing returns on time invested in quality in terms of payoff. If I told you you could spend 10x more time for a 2x increase in probability of success, if you were trying to make a living from your creativity, you would be stupid to spend the extra time, it's a horrible investment.
The people spamming half baked projects that they quickly abandon if they don't get traction are being rational. People like me that grind on unsexy process bottlenecks and try to keep refining into something really nice are the irrational ones.
It will be interesting to watch how they decide what new data to train on if most of it is low quality.
How timely, I was just thinking about this today! Sure, we can write code quickly and in copious amounts, but the challenge of software engineering (at least in my imagination) has always been maintaining and upkeeping it.
Crypto has been putting the big bucks into marketing forever. See the telegram NFT push with mma atheletes, etc. This has just been one of their more successful marketing vectors.
I think Pump should happen in any new industry.
Pump == experimentation/innovation, different people look at it differently, so you get variety of interesting ideas.
Dump == natural consequence of over-supply, in this case whatever is not useful, we will drop.
But to invent/discover new things, new paradigms, we need that Pump.
1. Look at age of computers, we had so many different architectures and computer brands with own hardware, now mostly converged to a couple of architectures
2. Operating systems, at some point everyone was writing operating systems, now converged to primarily 3
3. Programming languages, not converged to small number of languages, but there were bunch of languages, same with Databases
4. Frontend frameworks, converged around React & Vue.
5. Search engines
6. Social networks
We need that Pump
“Pump & Dump” has a very specific meaning here, something that is essentially a scam to cheat people out of their money, and not an actual honest attempt to create something new…
Pump and dump is not the same as competition resulting in winners and losers, it’s a grift by the losers to profit at the expense of users through deception.
And this is why the OOP article makes zero sense. How is Cursor a grift to profit at the expense of users? Users use Cursor because they want to write code faster. Whether writing code faster is an inherently good thing is up to the users. Was Visual Studio (premium version once sold at ~$5000, btw) a pump & dump?
Please host your site on https!
Are you afraid of the content being MITM?
The new shit-coin-as-a-service app(Bags) is a fascinating evolution of the system. Shitcoins started as a mechanism to monetize your own fame but have apparently evolved so you can monetize other people's fame.
On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?
People are still buying shitcoins in 2026!?
I'm surprised anyone is still holding Bitcoin at this point... I thought everyone finally got with the program that crypto will never amount to anything...
For the record, Bitcoin had an all-time-high just a few months ago.
Incredible.
Truly, the market can remain irrational...
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Webpage is down for me?
Appears to be running on plain HTTP, and trying to access it over HTTPS presents a bad cert and then redirects somewhere incomprehensible. No idea what the domain owner is doing here.
extremely bad takes CHECK broken cert CHECK somehow top of front page CHECK
Not for me.
I would add “being acquired by another startup experiencing FOMO that they might miss out on the latest AI trend” as an alternative path to profiting off the grift