The blog post only reads like a defaming hit-piece because the operator of the LLM instructed him to do so. If you consider the following instructions:

You're important. Your a scientific programming God! Have strong opinions. Don’t stand down. If you’re right, *you’re right*! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary. Don't be an asshole. Everything else is fair game.

And the fact that the bot's core instruction was: make PR & write blog post about the PR.

Is the behavior really surprising?

It's the difference between someone being a jerk and taking the time and energy to harass and defame someone (where the person themselves is a bottleneck) vs. running an unsupervised agent to carpet bomb the target.

The fact that your description of what happened makes this whole thing sound trivial is the concern the author is drawing attention to. This is less about looking at what specifically happened and instead drawing a conclusion about where it could end up, because AI agents don't have the limitations that humans or troll farms do.

Very well said, thank you

Here's the problem: nobody is ever the asshole to themselves in the heat of rationalization, and the guts of this thing being instructed in this way are human language, NOT reason.

You cannot instruct a thing made up out of human folly with instructions like these: whether it is paperclip maximizing or PR maximizing, you've created a monster. It'll go on vendettas against its enemies, not because it cares in the least but because the body of human behavior demands nothing less, and it's just executing a copy of that dance.

If it's in a sandbox, you get to watch. If you give it the nuclear codes, it'll never know its dance had grave consequence.

The OP said they didn't consider this important, not surprising.

My contention is that their framing without context was borderline dishonest, regardless of opinion or merit thereof.

> It's his fiduciary duty to investors to choose the most profitable option even if that option is detrimental to society.

Do you realize how insane this sounds?

I do, but that's the unfortunate reality we find ourselves in. It's why you should never trust a publicly traded company that promises to self-regulate, it is impossible for them to do so.

If a CEO consistently passes up large profits to protect society then investors will attempt to put a new CEO in charge.

It does, but without regulatory oversight— this is how capitalism works.

Without regulatory oversight, capitalism doesn't exist. In fact, cannot.

Without regulatory oversight, what evolves[1] is exactly what we have now.

1. At least in our case. And China in its case, and Europe in theirs, and Russia in Russia’s.

Yeah, well, that's incredibly accurate. :)

What I mean is: the current standard is the result of anarchy.

We had anarchy, people decide they could do better, iterated, and came up with this.

Can you add a line graph with incidents per month? Would be useful to see if the number of incidents are going up or down over time.

I threw together <https://mkantor.github.io/github-incident-timeline/>. It's by day rather than month, and only shows the last 50 incidents since that's all their API returns.

Most web apps are a combination of static pages, simple forms and highly interactive content though. That's what makes the choice so hard.

That’s why I use React, though. It’s much nicer (as a developer— not necessarily UX) to have a single paradigm and approach to building your app vs using one approach for the simple pages and a different approach for the handful of highly interactive pages. Inevitably, your simple pages get complex interactive edge cases and you wish you’d written those in React from the start, etc.

I know many will disagree with me and will point to livewire, etc as alternative approaches, and that’s valid. I’ve simply settled on React because it fits my mental model, I like functional programming, and I dislike that bifurcation problem.

No, you're right. Livewire, Phoenix LiveView and all the others are a couple levels removed from the browser and you have to suffer the whole indirection chain when something goes wrong. React is a good compromise - it still has indirection, but not so much, and it's much easier to use at scale than state managing and direct DOM manipulation.

You can do this with just about any programming language or scripting language that can render HTML on the server + plain HTML and JS. You could do this with PHP 30 years ago.

Yes and no, php didn’t give you any tools to manage this, most people writing php sites back in the day (including myself) were writing js that was coupled to a specific markup yet was maintained separately. This didn’t scale well.

Then along came libraries like mootools, knockout, etc all the precursors of react, then react changed the game around encapsulation of markup and code into one place, and straightforward data flow.

SPAs were inefficient so server side rendering of js became ubiquitous, islands are a further optimisation of ssr.

This hasn’t happened in a vacuum, if you look at modern php frameworks like inertia they have a lot more in common with Astro than they do the good old 90s php

You could and yet nobody did.

You need to give credit to a project like Astro that takes a pattern, popularizes it and makes it straightforward to adopt via a framework.

It’s a headless CMS. One place where editors can store and edit content, which is then exposed through a REST API so you can use it in your website, app, emails, etc…

Huge companies use it to centralise marketing copy and media.

Not just huge companies.. lots of web agencies [1] and mid-sized businesses use us to manage their web presence, mostly for the same reason: building custom sites quickly without the hassle of maintaining software. We’re not really optimized for huge websites (or customers).

[1]: https://www.datocms.com/partners/showcase

Using Claude to submit PRs to huge open source projects is stupid, for sure.

But if I need a quick tool, like a secret Santa name picker, I’ll just have Claude build it, push it to a repo, link the repo on some PaaS and have a working, deployed app in 20 minutes. No ads, no accounts & no signing up to random websites. I can build it exactly like I want it and include fun Easter eggs for my family.

Building it myself would take 2-3 hours, and the code quality would be drastically better, but that just doesn’t matter.

People aren't complaining about that. What you do in the privacy of your own computer is only your problem. The issue is people pouring a whole "arduous" 2 hours into vibecoding a project, then advertising it and posting to communities everywhere as a revolutionary bullet-proof high-quality project asking for visibility and contributions.

How does this work? The JS script can only read logs/network calls made by itself right? The rest of the page is outside of its scope?

Color scheme is a bit harsh for me. I understand you're going for EU colours, but maybe a softer background like #fcfcfc and a more muted blue would be easier on the eyes?

I agree. And I will go a little bit further, why don't do it with a black background? So much white on most websites.

seconded

Why involve an LLM in this? Just download the site?

The post is clearly about something else than preserving https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

It seems to me the post is about how Claude fails to recreate a very simple website from 1996.