The individual task scores are all on public tasks, they still held out a hundred or so private tasks that presumably GPT-5.4 did well on to get its leaderboard position.
Of course. That’s because the labor market prefers cost over quality. The labour market will always prefer cheap and fast code that works at first glance. That is how capitalism works. That has nothing to do with my capabilities. It has nothing to do with the fact that I will always outperform a shitty statistical model. It has everything to do with the fact that most of you are too lazy to think. It has everything to do with most of you sucking and being too lazy to your job.
Perfectly calm mate. Maybe you should try to factually argue against my position? Probably not though. Your account was created 30 minutes ago and likely a bot.
My account was created 14 years ago. You need to calm down.
There is a reason discussions about agent use have been on Hacker News every other day, and it's not a grand conspiracy. Even in this submission, people have talked about how they have used Claude Code and its longer context window successfully as a tool for programming, even if they may be technically skilled to do it themselves. However, if you assume that every commenter is acting in bad faith, then there's no point in continuing.
I’m not going to defend the tone of the OP, and it is clearly wrong to assume that everyone who is pro AI is a shill or bot.
That being said, I’ve seen hard evidence that pro AI bots do exist on HN.
And at the very large tech company I work at there is a push for everyone to spend more on Claude Code regardless of output. The metric is literally how much you’re spending on Claude Code not how much you’re producing (and in my org we’ve seen no measurable increase in productivity). People are legitimately trying to figure out the easiest way to get it to blow through their allocated credits.
I use AI all the time, I find that Opus 4.6 is great for all kinds of tasks. I don’t think it’s all just hype, but there’s clearly some serious astroturfing going on here, and I understand the urge to be suspicious of everyone.
That's a better argument. That said, by definition, many distinct people with different affiliations and incentives can't astroturf, as what would be the point?
Bots from a single company can amplify (retweet, upvote, comment in support of) comments and stories from many different individuals to steer the conversation to some extent.
If you look at the timestamps you’ll see instances of it posting faster than a human could.
I know that there are numerous companies with hundreds of billions of valuation predicated on AI being better than just a useful addition to the programmers toolbox.
There are even more companies making millions off of the current hype.
People in these companies now have access to tools that can generate spam that’s nearly indistinguishable from ham. Of course some of them are using that capability.
Of course existence of astroturfing by itself doesn’t imply that that astroturfing is effective.
For that I’d point to other evidence. My personal experience with LLMs doesn’t match the hype. The experience of every single close programmer friend whose technical ability I trust, doesn’t match the hype. The output of my organization doesn’t match the hype. I can’t find any publicly verifiable numbers that match the hype. No new operating systems, no new browsers, no vibe coded hit games, the number of games released on Steam hasn’t gone up drastically, the number of apps on the Apple App Store has, but not if you filter out apps that are just wrappers for LLM APIs. Multiple studies show no impact on GDP, publicly traded software companies are showing large impacts to their bottom line etc…
Then you have things like my company pushing people to spend hundreds of thousands (per person) on Claude with zero productivity requirements. This is weird. I think the most likely explanation is an artificially inflated hype cycle.
Happy new year from SF. 2025 was about hanging on, balancing a heavy workload and a new baby, but in ways which I’m confident are the right decisions for our future. I did a lot of Becoming An Adult this year, learning to trust myself and my partner, and prioritizing what matters. 2026 will probably be more of the same..! But I am hopeful things should ease up over time.
Happy new year, this community has given me a lot and I’m grateful for you all.
Congrats on becoming a parent. This is one of the most rewarding and transforming paths in life. Kids are the greatest gift a man or woman can give to themselves, in a manner of speaking. They're beautiful and grow up very fast. Cherish it all!
The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.
Not easy, but I have a friend who did this by reaching back out to his old professors and colleagues, figuring out what they needed, and ended up doing a swe project in his old lab and built that into a consultancy which does tech partnering for science.
Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
> In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government
The army isn't a branch of government - and if you then wish for Defense to be accountable, there's the question of how to allocate money for secret things.
I don't know how other countries do this and if there are better ways to structure this.
We weren't the only nation using any of those technologies. The Germans, for their part, were trying all of that. It was neither obscure or secret. Technical acumen in using commonly shared technologies was the difference.
It's why people like to forget there were three distinct phases to that war. Russia was not always on our side. The outset was bleak, the middle was indeterminate, and the end, the part we like to remember, was when the tide really started going our way.
In any case, we weren't invested in any of those things _before_ the war, so even if you do believe your premise, there's no reason to suspect that we wouldn't be able to do the same in the next conflict. Trying to prognosticate what the next war will look like has led to some embarrassing military defeats throughout history. The military fails to be egalitarian.
Speaking of proximity fuses you should look into what it took to _actually_ get them used on the battlefield as I think it highlights this point. In concert with that I like to think about the "Millennium Challenge 2002." War is won by skilled soldiers not by lavish spending or deep secret technologies.
The secrecy definitely played a major role when it comes to cryptography. It was not known to the Axis how far Allied codebreaking technology had come, and how much of their communications was being regularly monitored.
The Manhattan project is a pretty obvious example. The past world wars were full of technological advances that world powers were trying to keep away from enemies.
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