Comment by hombre_fatal
4 days ago
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
Why exactly is it the saddest?
every comment mentioning "ai psychosis" is an amazing caricature. people whining about original thoughts repeating the same resident tropes over and over again. basically just throwing out insults. try that for sad.
same people usually who'd be livid about misusing mental health status labels, and torturing language in general. but it's okay, as it is for a noble purpose: insulting people whose opinion you currently feel sufficiently uppity and righteous about. that will raise the bar!
the "last bastions of human values" demonstrating the absolute bottom of the barrel human behavior and intellect. good bit worse than sad, really.
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
But what does it mean in this context?
I'll try: It's dangerous to broadcast your AI use to competitors, users and the public for fear of being attacked.
Attacked by who?
It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
> admitting you're using AI is socially risky.
Not anymore[0]. The Linux kernel has created a permission structure around using AI.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhHHeohgxhw
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Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an AI model.
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mxp...
>I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
>One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
>And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars
> If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Our humans suddenly became 37% smarter, for no discernible reason. No, don't ask why.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI...
I don't see why not. They clearly know what they are doing at Valve, and for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use.
I know a few very serious and well compensated programmers with decades of experience. These people work on prominent open source projects, climate modelling, linear programming, large org enginneering. Every single one of them uses LLMs heavily and swears by the increased productivity of using them.
And for every such person there's another person of similar experience that doesn't use an LLM nor wants to.
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I find the opposite. A good engineer would tell the agent the "know what they know they're doing" part. Let the AI take that direction and context, let it implement/test it 100x faster than a human can by hand, the engineer come back and confirm AI did the job about the same way as they would have wanted it to be done themselves.
> for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use
LLMs are very good at code analysis, and finding both security issues and optimization opportunities. Yes, even in code written by highly experienced human engineers. Failing to have an LLM look for places where your code could be optimized is, IMHO, indefensible. It's like shipping your binaries compiled at -O0 - deliberately choosing to waste your users' time and hardware resources because you couldn't be bothered to properly configure and run a tool.
If they knew what they are doing, it wouldn't take them >5000ms to draw a rectangle in win32
LLMs are more than a second brain for some folks here, without it they would literally be useless
Whew. The delusions on this site are getting out of hand.
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AI sycophants are tiring.
You might not like hearing it, but it is true.
Code has never been the bottleneck for a skilled engineer, and if you value high quality then you need to spend a lot of time reading over the slop LLMs produce to turn it into something hardened and reliable. So, for a skilled engineer, LLMs have a very marginal benefit in terms of delivery speed.
This is backed up by LLM productivity studies.
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> They clearly know what they are doing at Valve
Yeah, at promoting child gambling. Not sure about games
They literally just shipped a massive update for a game they've been developing for several years (Deadlock) and are releasing more content for it this Friday
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If a child has unsupervised internet and bank account access then its a parenting issue.
Every Valve game utilizing this is rated M. Control your children better instead of blaming others for being a bad parent. If you children have money to gamble and you let them play mature-rated games then you are doing it wrong.