I'm at the point as soon as I think "was this written with AI help?" is in doubt I immediately hit the back button.

Have been for a while, it's exhausting.

> The clock you can trust

*Bleh*

Long-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?

In business, there's this saying that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". I guess LLMs also make that true for hobby projects that used to make up a good portion of HN. We'd celebrate a project like that not because it's useful, but because it's a triumph of human ingenuity and a celebration of a personal achievement for the author. But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?

I wonder: was there a time when using a compiler was considered cheating? "Real men" code everything in ASM!

I do recall a whole era when using a GUI was considered cheating and denigrated as a "point and drool" interface (a play on "point and click").

Is using a combine cheating in farming? Is a nail gun or using prefab wall sections cheating in home construction? Is a 3D printer cheating in fabrication? If someone prints something with a 3D printer, do we say "you didn't make that, the printer did!"

I find it weird for people who like technology to be so averse to tools that automate labor since that is literally what all technology is, and a tool to automate intellectual labor is literally what a computer is. A machine is a thing whose purpose is to provide leverage to amplify human effort and more rapidly realize human intent in some domain.

Maybe it comes from a category error. AI is kind of a hand-wavey term, since most people think it means the thing is sentient. It's not. It has zero intent, zero motivation, zero ability to choose anything not already in its training data, and it will go precisely where its context window (and training data) guide it. It's a tool, a machine, and like any other machine it is set in motion by the user and guided by the user. The "choices" it makes are latent in its data or structure, or implied by its prompt. (Yes sometimes they can be surprising, but that's true of all complex machines.)

Actual sentient AI does not exist. It might someday but it does not today. I suspect it requires a very different kind of system with continuous learning, dynamical state, and feedback, and a goal function tied somehow to thermodynamics in the real physical world the way ours is, but that's pure hypothesis on my part. We don't even have rigorous definitions for such things.

Thinking of and expressing the functionality of the thing might be the labor of love for this person. Their definition of labor doesn't have to be yours.

Why do you say it's written by AI?