Comment by dataviz1000
1 day ago
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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Sure, but that’s fine. I don’t have any allegiance to other software engineers.
Aren't the true traitors still the ones paying the SE to do that work? The managerial slave-master class?
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> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Would they? I'd love to get in touch
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That nightmarish scenario is what T.S. Eliot was describing in "The Wasteland" which "portrays deep, existential ennui and boredom as defining symptoms of modern life following World War I."
Later this boredom was described by the Stones, "And though she’s not really ill / There’s a little yellow pill / She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper".
It is a nightmare. Mostly what I'm thinking about while the agents are running is how bored I'm going to be. That is the joke, my deep thought on T.S. Eliot are about the wasteland this thing is going to create.
So sitting at a desk is nicer than a walk outside for you? Why would relaxation be a nightmare?
Checking one’s phone every 5 to 10 minutes is nothing but relaxation. One needs to have the mind at ease to relax.
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.
There is no proof, just a self-congratulatory word salad with dubious authenticity.
It’s insane how insufferable this place is now.
Here is a description of the iteration loop. [0] I'm working on another draft that will be much more polished and have better explanations of the iteration loop.
> There is no proof, just a self-congratulatory word salad with dubious authenticity.
I worked 8 days straight on that and have been working non-stop on the second draft that is much cleaner and safer. I'm a human being. Please don't be mean. If humanity does come to end, it won't be because of AI, it will be because we can't stop being assholes to each other.
[0] https://github.com/adam-s/intercept/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-...
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.
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.
> 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.
Just Claude code a push notification feature then
How is this better?
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.
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.
That's fucking insane. Thank you for sharing.
I had a bad feeling we were basically already there.