MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by walmsles | 2026-02-05 21:45:59+00:00
I built a library that uses an LLM as an orchestrator to coordinate multiple agents at runtime. You define what each agent does in markdown files using RFC 2119 constraints (MUST, SHOULD, MAY), and the orchestrator figures out who to call and when based on the user's request.

This builds on AWS Strands Agent SOPs (markdown format for agent workflows released in November). The difference: instead of manually chaining agents or defining explicit flows, the orchestrator reads available agent capabilities and decides the execution path dynamically.

Add a new agent by dropping in a markdown file. No code changes to coordination logic.

The bet: LLMs are better at runtime orchestration than developers are at predicting workflows upfront, especially when requirements change. Natural language is more maintainable when both producers (agent authors) and consumers (orchestrator) are LLMs.

Built on AWS Strands SDK and Bedrock with Claude models. Using this in a technical bootcamp next week to teach students complex agent workflows without coordination code.

GitHub: https://github.com/serverless-dna/sop-agents
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@serverless-dna/sop-agents
AWS Strands blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/introducing-strands-...
by philipportner | 2026-02-05 21:46:51+00:00
This seems related, it may not be a codebase but they are able to extract "near" verbatim books out of Claude Sonnet.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671

> For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
by jeffrallen | 2026-02-05 21:48:05+00:00
> babysitting my kind of stupid and yet mysteriously productive robot friend

LOL, been there, done that. It is much less frustrating and demoralizing than babysitting your kind of stupid colleague though. (Thankfully, I don't have any of those anymore. But at previous big companies? Oh man, if only their commits were ONLY as bad as a bad AI commit.)
by danfritz | 2026-02-05 21:48:25+00:00
Ha yes classic showcase of:

1) obvious green field project
2) well defined spec which will definitely be in the training data
3) an end result which lands you 90% from the finish

Now comes the hard part, the last 10%. Still not impressed here. Since fixing issues in the end was impossible without introducing bugs I have doubts about quality

I'm glad they do call it out in the end. That's fair
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-02-05 21:48:38+00:00
I think you are right, the secret is that there is no secret. The projects I have been involved with thats been most successful was using these techniques. I also think experience helps because you develop a sense that very quickly knows if the model wants to go in a wonky direction and how a good spec looks like.

With where the models are right now you still need a human in the loop to make sure you end up with code you (and your organisation) actually understands. The bottle neck has gone from writing code to reading code.
by jonathanstrange | 2026-02-05 21:48:48+00:00
There are so many stories about how people use agentic AI but they rarely post how much they spend. Before I can even consider it, I need to know how it will cost me per month. I'm currently using one pro subscription and it's already quite expensive for me. What are people doing, burning hundreds of dollars per month? Do they also evaluate how much value they get out of it?
by timpera | 2026-02-05 21:49:04+00:00
In my experience, OpenAI gives you unreasonable amounts of compute for €20/month. I am subscribed to both and Claude's limits are so tiny compared to ChatGPT's that it often feels like a rip-off.

Claude also doesn't let you use a worse model after you reach your usage limits, which is a bit hard to swallow when you're paying for the service.
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-05 21:49:06+00:00
This is an interesting, valuable article. It should definitely be shared widely, especially with parents and teachers. I would love to see ISPs (including cell carriers) sell content control mechanisms to customers so parents and teachers can control at the internet service level how much social media their children and students use. I am also interested in open source/independent/small time developers who would seem highly motivated to make blocking tools and plugins for home routers and the like. There's a broad world of possibilities here.

That said, I am deeply disturbed by the authoritarians in these comments. Government enforced internet age verification is a really really bad idea. I don't want the internet put in a straitjacket. I am eager to hear if someone can explain how these numerously proposed legislations can be done without seriously diminishing the freedom to be anonymous and private on the internet.
by philipportner | 2026-02-05 21:49:22+00:00
Granted, these are some of the most widely spread texts, but just fyi:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671

> For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
by ben_w | 2026-02-05 21:49:29+00:00
Why's that the issue?

"This AI can do 99.99%* of all human endeavours, but without that last 0.01% we'd still be in the trees", doesn't stop that 99.99% getting made redundant by the AI.

* vary as desired for your preference of argument, regarding how competent the AI actually is vs. how few people really show "true intelligence".
by MengerSponge | 2026-02-05 21:49:47+00:00
Selected Shorts had an episode where Kathleen Chalfant read this!

https://www.symphonyspace.org/selected-shorts/episodes/uncan...

I can't find the episode after a quick search... I wish there were an archive of their past episodes, but I imagine someone would have to pay extra to the performers for that right.
by benjiro | 2026-02-05 21:50:14+00:00
Hot take:

If you try to reimplement something in a clean room, its a step by step process, using your own accumulated knowledge as the basis. That knowledge that you hold in your brain, all too often is code that may have copyrights on it, from the companies you worked on.

Is it any different for a LLM?

The fact that the LLM is trained on more data, does not change that when you work for a company, leave it, take that accumulated knowledge to a different company, you are by definition taking that knowledge (that may be copyrighted) and implementing it somewhere else. It only a issue if you copy the code directly, or do the implementation as a 1:1 copy. LLMs do not make 1:1 copies of the original.

At what point is trained on copyrighted data, any different then a human trained on copyrighted data, that get reimplemented in a transformative way. The big difference is that the LLM can hold more data over more fields, vs a human, true... But if we look at specializations, this can come back to the same, no?
by pkolaczk | 2026-02-05 21:50:14+00:00
What do you mean it would destroy the valuable part of the signal?

If the signal has a carrier (like in AM or FM) or some other regular pattern (e.g. digital signal) then the typical the way to recover it from under the noise floor is to use a narrow-band PLL.

I’m experimenting with it right now and just found that a quartz/ceramic oscillator pulled by a varicap controlled by a PLL gives pretty good results - low phase noise, good noise rejection and ability to recover the carrier from a very noisy signal. But for that to work, the signal has to be shifted to a constant frequency through heterodyning first.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-05 21:50:14+00:00
I think you're referring to this piece: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...

Yes, I don't love that he puts out hits like that on solar and wind in his effort to promote nuclear as a sole solution, but I still find his larger arguments around the dynamics of environmentalism as a movement persuasive.
by legerdemain | 2026-02-05 21:50:56+00:00
From deep within the essay, another restatement of praise for East Asian street food culture.

> That is because there is an abundance of inexpensive and delightful street food/casual dining establishments (carts, izakayas, takeaways, food courts, night markets, etc.), that make it a rational, and healthy, choice.

I can easily imagine that a world of unregulated food stalls can deliver food that is cheaper, more ubiquitous, and more convenient. I grew up in a version of such a world!

Is street food ever healthy, by any reasonable definition? What does a steady diet of street food do to a body?
by mrandish | 2026-02-05 21:51:12+00:00
> the note I see the most from Claude users is running out of usage.

I suspect that tells us less about model capability/efficiency and more about each company's current need to paint a specific picture for investors re: revenue, operating costs, capital requirements, cash on hand, growth rate, retention, margins etc. And those needs can change at any moment.

Use whatever works best for your particular needs today, but expect the relative performance and value between leaders to shift frequently.
by bwfan123 | 2026-02-05 21:51:33+00:00
> I can already feel the contracts coming to fix LLM slop

First, the agents will attempt to fix issues on their own. Most easy problems will be fixed or worked-around in this manner. The hard problems will require a deeper causal model of how things work. For these, the agents will give up. But, the code-base is evolved to a point where no-one understands whats going on including the agents and its human handlers. Expect your phone to ring at that point, and prepare to ask for a ransom.
by lambertsimnel | 2026-02-05 21:51:38+00:00
Maybe some can be found in the Wayback Machine. This page says "view 71 photos" under "photos of France":

https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...

Clicking the link seems to show 114 photos:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...

I didn't see a way to get high-resolution versions.

Edit: This photo from Afghanistan is called "AF_006_large.jpg", but it's only 600x450:

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/static/e926b79682b14c...
by 8note | 2026-02-05 21:51:44+00:00
this is still forcing flock on everyone.

they could instead be limiting flock to private places.

> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking
by zamadatix | 2026-02-05 21:51:45+00:00
To be fair, I don't think "Slugulus Eructo" (the name) is actually in the books. This is what's in my copy:

> The smug look on Malfoy’s face flickered.

> “No one asked your opinion, you filthy little Mudblood,” he spat.

> Harry knew at once that Malfoy had said something really bad because
there was an instant uproar at his words. Flint had to dive in front of Malfoy
to stop Fred and George jumping on him, Alicia shrieked, “How dare you!”,
and Ron plunged his hand into his robes, pulled out his wand, yelling, “You’ll
pay for that one, Malfoy!” and pointed it furiously under Flint’s arm at
Malfoy’s face.

> A loud bang echoed around the stadium and a jet of green light shot out of
the wrong end of Ron’s wand, hitting him in the stomach and sending him
reeling backward onto the grass.

> “Ron! Ron! Are you all right?” squealed Hermione.

> Ron opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Instead he gave an
almighty belch and several slugs dribbled out of his mouth onto his lap.
by ifwinterco | 2026-02-05 21:51:56+00:00
This is mostly Python/TS for me... what Jonathan Blow would probably call not "real programming" but it pays the bills

They can both write fairly good idiomatic code but in my experience opus 4.5 is better at understanding overall project structure etc. without prompting. It just does things correctly first time more often than codex. I still don't trust it obviously but out of all LLMs it's the closest to actually starting to earn my trust
by avaer | 2026-02-05 21:52:06+00:00
I wish I could agree with you, but as a game dev, shader author, and occasional asm hacker, I still think AIs have demonstrated being perfectly capable of copying "those effects". It's been trained on them, of course.

You're not gonna one-shot RD2, but neither will a human. You can one-shot particles and shader passes though.
by iamacyborg | 2026-02-05 21:52:17+00:00
> On the other extreme you can tell an agent "make me an app that's Facebook for dogs" and it'll make so many assumptions about the architecture, code and product that there's no chance it produces anything useful beyond a cool prototype to show mom and dad.

Amusingly, this was my experience in giving Lovable a shot. The onboarding process was literally just setting me up for failure by asking me to describe the detailed app I was attempting to build.

Taking it piece by piece in Claude Code has been significantly more successful.
by apercu | 2026-02-05 21:52:45+00:00
I actually enjoy writing specifications. So much so that I made it a large part of my consulting work for a huge part of my career. SO it makes sense that working with Gen-AI that way is enjoyable for me.

The more detailed I am in breaking down chunks, the easier it is for me to verify and the more likely I am going to get output that isn't 30% wrong.
by g8oz | 2026-02-05 21:52:54+00:00
It's more nuanced for sure than my pithy comment suggests. I've done both self-managed and managed and felt it was a good use of my time to self-manage given the size of the organizations, the profile of the workloads and the cost differential. There is a whole universe of technology businesses that do not earn SV/FAANG levels of ROI - for them, self-managed is a reasonable allocation of effort.

One point to keep in mind is that the effort is not constant. Once you reach a certain level of competency and stability in your setup, there is not much difference in time spent.
I also felt that self-managed gave us more flexibility in terms of tuning.

My final point is that any investment in databases whether as a developer or as an ops person is long-lived and will pay dividends for a longer time than almost all other technologies.
by fencepost | 2026-02-05 21:53:00+00:00
Sounds like when I was asked to give minimum hardware requirements for something doing backend processing (receive text submitted as print jobs, massage, send to printers).

The requirements as they went out were much higher than they needed to be, because I decided telling them that we weren't stressing anything on the obsolete NT desktop repurposed as the test system might not please everyone.
by hmaxwell | 2026-02-05 21:54:03+00:00
I just tested both codex 5.3 and opus 4.6 and both returned pretty good output, but opus 4.6's limits are way too strict. I am probably going to cancel my Claude subscription for that reason:

What do you want to do?

1. Stop and wait for limit to reset
2. Switch to extra usage
3. Upgrade your plan

Enter to confirm · Esc to cancel

How come they don't have "Cancel your subscription and uninstall Claude Code"? Codex lasts for way longer without shaking me down for more money off the base $xx/month subscription.
by tomhow | 2026-02-05 21:54:28+00:00
Previously...

Isaac Asimov's Review of “1984” (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390752 - March 2021 (6 comments)

Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164679 - Oct 2018 (8 comments)
by indubioprorubik | 2026-02-05 21:54:31+00:00
Eh, orwell got his fare share of socialisation with socialism in spain and became a ardent anti-communist (more anti-totalitarian after seeing what this "experiment was all about" when it betrayed the anarchists).

Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist experiment and the societies it would form. The history rewritting was actually a typical socialist society pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70 years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from taiwan!

Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the moscow controlled part of the international defending facists as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the anarchists in the back in spain.
by chillingeffect | 2026-02-05 21:54:37+00:00
When someone can’t manage first-order thermodynamics or basic human boundaries, it’s reasonable to downgrade their credibility across domains.

re: thermodynamics....you can not feasibly dissipate GPU/LLM/Data center-level heat in space. You'd need radiators the size of football fields and you'd be highly susceptible to cosmic debris.

Also:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk...
by hn_acc1 | 2026-02-05 21:55:21+00:00
The point is - for a NEW project, no one has an extensive test suite. And if an extensive test suite exists, it's probably because the product that uses it also exists, already.

If it could translate the C++ standard INTO an extensive test suite that actually captures most corner cases, and doesn't generate false positives - again, without internet access and without using gcc as an oracle, etc?
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-05 21:55:27+00:00
And how long will it take before an open model recreates this. The "vibe" consensus before "thinking" models really took off was that open was ~6mo behind SotA. With the massive RL improvements, over the past 6 months I've thought the gap was actually increasing. This will be a nice little verifiable test going forward.
by apercu | 2026-02-05 21:55:51+00:00
I find it interesting that this thread is full of pragmatic posts that seem to honestly reflect the real limits of current Gen-Ai.

Versus other threads (here on HN, and especially on places like LinkedIn) where it's "I set up a pipeline and some agents and now I type two sentences and amazing technology comes out in 5 minutes that would have taken 3 devs 6 months to do".
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-05 21:56:49+00:00
> We've been hearing this for 3 years now

Not from me you haven't!

> And especially 25 was full

I don't know what this is a reference to, what is 25?

> "they've hit a wall, no more data, running out of data, plateau this, saturated that"

Everyone thought Moore's Law was infallible too, right until they hit that bend. What hubris to think these AI models are different!

But you've probably been hearing that for 3 years too (though not from me).
by gorbypark | 2026-02-05 21:56:52+00:00
I’m going to buck the trend and say it’s really not that complex. AFAIK they are using Ink, which is React with a TUI renderer.

Cue I could build it in a weekend vibes, I built my own agent TUI using the OpenAI agent SDK and Ink. Of course it’s not as fleshed out as Claude, but it supports git work trees for multi agent, slash commands, human in the loop prompts and etc. If I point it at the Anthropic models it more or less produces results as m good as the real Claude TUI.

I actually “decompiled” the Claude tools and prompts and recreated them. As of 6 months ago Claude was 15 tools, mostly pretty basic (list for, read file, wrote file, bash, etc) with some very clever prompts, especially the task tool it uses to do the quasi planning mode task bullets (even when not in planning mode).

Honestly the idea of bringing this all together with an affordable monthly service and obviously some seriously creative “prompt engineers” is the magic/hard part (and making the model itself, obviously).
Show HN: Linear MCP Fast – 10x faster Linear MCP reads from local cache
by liabilityuk0 | 2026-02-05 21:57:19+00:00
The official Linear MCP works great for writes, but reads were killing my context window in Claude Code. Every query made API calls and returned verbose responses with full user objects and workflow states I didn't need.
So I built a read-only MCP server that reads directly from Linear.app's local IndexedDB cache on macOS. It decodes Y.js CRDT-encoded issue descriptions locally too. Zero API calls, smaller responses, no rate limits, works offline.
by HAL3000 | 2026-02-05 21:57:20+00:00
I honestly wonder how many of these are written by LLMs. Without code review, Opus would have introduced multiple zero day vulnerabilities into our codebases. The funniest one: it was meant to rate-limit brute-force attempts, but on a failed check it returned early and triggered a rollback. That rollback also undid the increment of the attempt counter so attackers effectively got unlimited attempts.
by david-gpu | 2026-02-05 21:57:45+00:00
Oh, no! Let me check! The stock market has reached values not seen since... [check's notes] two weeks ago (Jan 20th)?

Yeah, that's how it works. Not news worthy. Here's the big picture, if you want a quick reminder: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/VT:NYSEARCA?window=MAX
by kuboble | 2026-02-05 21:58:15+00:00
Claude code (opus) is very good in Polish.

I sometimes vibe code in polish and it's as good as with English for me. It speaks a natural, native level Polish.

I used opus to translate thousands of strings in my app into polish, Korean, and two Chinese dialects.
Polish one is great, and the other are also good according to my customers.
by rwmj | 2026-02-05 21:58:29+00:00
The interesting thing here is what's this code worth (in money terms)? I would say it's worth only the cost of recreation, apparently $20,000, and not very much more. Perhaps you can add a bit for the time taken to prompt it. Anyone who can afford that can use the same prompt to generate another C compiler, and another one and another one.

GCC and Clang are worth much much more because they are battle-tested compilers that we understand and know work, even in a multitude of corner cases, over decades.

So my conclusion is that in future there's going to be lots and lots of basically worthless code, generated and regenerated over and over again. What will distinguish code that provides value? It's going to be code - however it was created, could be AI or human - that has actually been used and maintained in production for a long time.
by scoofy | 2026-02-05 21:58:54+00:00
SaaS companies are effectively both "software maintainers" and "price gouging middlemen" at the same time. The difference between the bid and the ask for SaaS is part of a simple math problem for whether the company should try to create their own version of the software they need. It may be the right decision, it may be the wrong decision, but it will be the right decision for a non-trivial number of firms. And that means the SAAS business will both lose customers, and have downward pressure on their margins. That means valuations of B2B SaaS go down.
by polyrand | 2026-02-05 21:59:11+00:00
> a period of inefficiency

I think this is something people ignore, and is significant. The only way to get good at coding with LLMs is actually trying to do it. Even if it's inefficient or slower at first. It's just another skill to develop [0].

And it's not really about using all the plugins and features available. In fact, many plugins and features are counter-productive. Just learn how to prompt and steer the LLM better.

[0]: https://ricardoanderegg.com/posts/getting-better-coding-llms...
by cpursley | 2026-02-05 22:00:24+00:00
Good stuff, I turned my gist into an info site and referenced this article as well, which seems to pay homage to my gist :)

https://postgresisenough.dev

Contributions welcome!

Referenced gist: https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f...