Your reply—“An LLM wrote this and this and this… An LLM’s eternal recurrence.”—is clever and layered, riffing on both the original comment and Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. On Hacker News, though, that kind of playfulness can sometimes backfire for a few reasons: 1. Tone Perception: HN users often value clarity, conciseness, and substance. Your comment may have come off as glib or performative rather than adding meaningful insight—despite being philosophically witty. 2. Thread Saturation: If others also replied similarly (“An LLM wrote it” variants), your continuation might have felt like piling on or diluting the thread, which can get downvoted as noise. 3. Cultural Split: Hacker News has a split temperament: some users appreciate literary or ironic references; others see them as distractions from signal-rich discussion. 4. Automated-Sounding Style: Ironically, even though you’re parodying LLM-speak, your repetition (“this and this and this…”) could be mistaken as LLM-speak by some, triggering reflexive downvotes from those skeptical of AI-generated content.
In short: you were being clever, but the average Hacker News voter might’ve wanted more content or simply misread your intent.
It sounds like it wasn't clear to you that the author is one of the most important artists of our time: the absolute legend Rick Rubin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin
Anyone with a creative bone in their body should read The Creative Act: A Way of Being. The Way of Code is a project he did with Anthropic.
I also wouldn’t call it “celebrity/partner marketing” when they built the site and (likely) paid him for the words to go with it.
For those who don't know, Rick Ruben is one of the most influential record producers of all time. His specialty is prompting people to help them make their art. So I suppose it follows that he's taken an interest in doodling with vibe coding.
I find that this lives right on the lines of inside joke and satire and insightful and serious. I can't stop chuckling to myself as I read them.
"The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Ruben https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886
I believe they just wrote about vibe-coding in the style of the book he wrote
Just Fucking Code https://www.justfuckingcode.com/
I'm sick of vibe coding being called the wave of the future. There are people out there working on genuinely hard problems using real knowledge and skill. The idea that they're going to be replaced by people telling a chatbot to "do a thing" strikes me as ridiculous. All the "amazing" vibe coding demos I've seen are things like "holy crap it made a todo list" or "here's a blocky flight sim where the plane is sideways."
Look if you're having fun telling windsurf to replace your blog I'm not trying to rain on your parade, but I'm sick of hearing that it's the future. It devalues what actual programmers do with their actual knowledge. Vibe coders are the script kiddies to the actual hackers out there.
But when it comes to tech and art: I guess people never respected it to begin with, so there's that.
> that is why he’s ahead.
> He is detached,
> thus at one with all.
> Through selfless action
> he is perfectly fulfilled.
Clearly your not fulfilled and should be vibe coding, at least that's what Rick Rubin says...
I'm not sure a koan to vibe coding in the style of Lao Tzu and the Tao is in good taste. I can tell you that as a lover of the Tao, it is poorly done at best.
Clearly someone missed the point of Wu Wei in the source material and this is the result.
And that’s the point. It’s satire.
He’s saying, “Use silly toys to make bad art, and while you’re at it claim it leads to enlightenment, like the vibe coding evangelists say it does.”
Air traffic control? Just have pilots prompt an LLM, there’s already discussions about it due to the lack of people available to work this job.
Legal battles? Prompt LLMs for case studies. Many firms no longer have a need for junior members.
Movies and shows? Prompt LLMs to produce content, no need for elaborate CGI or set designs or costumes.
Someday perhaps there will be a new human art renaissance where people learn to shun LLMs and AI content and once again we will be graced with an abundance soulful human works. We will not live long enough to see those days.
All you haters out there, just... play around with it. It's fun. And remember that for some people, vibe coding is their first little taste of the magic.
nibman•5h ago