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Keep in mind investing in cartoon foxes was a "business strategy" a lot of (otherwise serious) people bought into in 2020-2021.

And those cartoon foxes didn't even do anything! I guess these ones do?

Don't put it past the masses. These are crazy times.

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I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:

> the thing must be in the place where it should be

With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?

> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.

Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.

So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.

I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).

So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.

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Which ISO certification matters, but the key thing people should be aware of is that the primary value of the certification to customers is that your processes are documented and that deviations are tracked, so that customers can check whether the processes makes sense before signing a contract. It's important not to expect the certification itself to guarantee quality.
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> The important audit at my company is conducted by [Trump's second term] FDA.

Could work

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Not yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?
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Same institution I’d send Steve today.

The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind.

Dominique, nique, nique…

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we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?
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Beads, his glorified CLI based work tracker, was over several hundred thousand lines of code, last I checked in January.

Where do I even begin to mock that except at the source? That’s just absolute insanity.

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If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find the most stupid stuff that you can then manually verify as being wtf.

My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.

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> If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find stupid stuff.

What does that even mean? Am I supposed to point Claude at garbage code bases? All it will find is garbage.

> My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.

He is the source. He wrote this stuff under his own volition.

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We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.
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> We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.

The entire thing is nothing but conjecture. No real software has been produced by the concept to date, except more garbage software that takes hundreds of thousands of lines where a few thousand would do.

And to be clear, Beads and Gastown are unbecoming of our “culture” and any self respecting engineer would recoil in horror at the concept.

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How is it conjecture when you just admitted you're aware of a repo with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Your argument belies a lazyness or skill issue. You abandon the possibility of proof to sling mud.

People have made a shit ton of economic value with shit code over the course of history of software and now that's accelerating with this sort of shite. I appreciate its ugly but i will not follow you by fashioning a duvet out of arrogance and throwing rocks people investigating the ugly.

What they're doing it at least an interesting spectacle and ill wait for the show to end before writing my review.

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What it means is that it is easy to shit on other people's work. Much harder to give constructive criticism - especially on what looks like a throwaway account.
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It’s not “other people’s work” because Steve didn’t do any work. He vibe coded hundreds of thousands of lines that don’t do what they’re supposed to with many thousands of lines of documentation that are inaccurate at best and aspirational at worst. He wrote some blog posts and got them picked up by vapid outlets that had nothing else to add to boost his exposure.

Case in point: no one talks about beads or gastown on HN because it’s crap that no one uses. Even *claw and that dumb fad get more mileage. meanwhile, CC vs Codex is an ever ongoing battle and Anthropic employees announce policy changes in “Tell HN” posts which stay on the front page for days.

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"every 5th article is about no-code-solutions that sometimes work" might be unexpected but it's hardly the stuff of institutionalization.
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Among the general population, no. Among a population of coders, it should be the stuff of institutionalization.
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