Even before LLMs, there was a _lot_ of deception and cheating in university. I -- and I do not say this with pride -- used to write essays for my classmates for money. In my own defense, I needed the money. I also know that in addition to homework for money, many fraternities and sororities kept copies of prior exams and assignments, and getting access to these was one of the perks of membership. Knowing what kind of questions to expect (let alone the exact questions) can easily give someone a few extra IQ points for free.
Personally, I felt that the drive to automate the parts of the professors' workloads that mattered (i.e. teaching and grading and evaluation and research), only so that they can be given work that matters less the more they do it (i.e. publishing slightly different flavors of the same paper, to meet KPIs), was oddly perverse.
The multiple-choice test and the puzzle-solving test and really any standardized test can be exploited by any group that is sufficiently organized. This is also true in corporate interviewing where corporations think (or pretend) that they are interviewing an individual, whereas they are actually interviewing a _network_ of candidates who share details about the interviewers and the questions. I know people who got rejected in spite of getting all the interview questions correct (the theory is that nobody can do that well, so they must have had help from previously rejected/accepted candidates).
The word "trust" shares a root with the word "tree" and "truth" and "druid". Most exams and interviews are trying to speed-run trust-building (note that "verification" is from the latin word that means "true"). If trust and truth are analogous to "tree", then we are trying to speed-run the growth of a tree -- much like the orange tree, in the film, _The Illusionist_. And like the orange tree, it is a near-complete illusion, a ritual meant to keep the legal department and HR department happy.
The LLMs have simply made the corruption of academia accessible to _all_ students with an internet connection (EDIT: and instantaneous and cheap, unlike a human writer).
There has never been a shortcut to building trust. One cannot LLM their way into being a (metaphorical) druid.
I do not look forward to the Voight-Kampff tests that will come to dominate all aspects of online and asynchronous human interaction.
Note that, short of homework/classwork that _can't_ be gamed by an LLM (for some fundamental reason), even the high-quality honest students will be forced to cheat, so as to not be eclipsed by the actual low-quality cheating students[0].
I imagine that we may end up wrapping around to live in-person dialectics, as were standard in the time of Socrates and Parmenides[1]. If so, this should be fun.
[0]: If left unaddressed, we may see a bimodal distribution of great and terrible students graduating college, with those in between dropping out. If college is an attempt to categorize and rank a population, this would be a major fault in that mechanism.
[1]: Not to the exclusion of the other kinds of tests, writing is still important, critical even. But as a kind of verification-step, that should inform how much the academic community should trust the writing (I can imagine that all the writers here are experiencing stage-fright as they are reading these words).
1. This is a kind of fuzzer. In general it's just great to have many different fuzzers that work in different ways, to get more coverage.
2. I wouldn't say LLMs are "better" than other fuzzers. Someone would need to measure findings/cost for that. But many LLMs do work at a higher level than most fuzzers, as they can generate plausible-looking source code.
Fuzzers and LLMs attack different corners of the problem space, so asking which is 'qualitatively better' misses the point: fuzzers like AFL or libFuzzer with AddressSanitizer excel at coverage-driven, high-volume byte mutations and parsing-crash discovery, while an LLM can generate protocol-aware, stateful sequences, realistic JavaScript and HTTP payloads, and user-like misuse patterns that exercise logic and feature-interaction bugs a blind mutational fuzzer rarely reaches.
I think the practical move is to combine them: have an LLM produce multi-step flows or corpora and seed a fuzzer with them, or use the model to script Playwright or Puppeteer scenarios that reproduce deep state transitions and then let coverage-guided fuzzing mutate around those seeds. Expect tradeoffs though, LLM outputs hallucinate plausible but untriggerable exploit chains and generate a lot of noisy candidates so you still need sanitizers, deterministic replay, and manual validation, while fuzzers demand instrumentation and long runs to actually reach complex stateful behavior.
As someone on the SpiderMonkey team who had to evaluate some of Anthropic's bugs, I can definitely say that Anthropic's test cases were definitely far easier to assess than those generated by traditional fuzzers. Instead of extremely random and mostly superfluous gibberish, we received test cases that actually resembled a coherent program.
I didn't even read the piece but my bet is that fuzzers are typically limited to inputs whereas relying on LLMs is also about find text patterns, and a bit more loosely than before while still being statistically relevant, in the code base.
It's not really bad or not though. It's a more directed than the rest fuzzer. While being able to craft a payload that trigger flaw in deep flow path. It could also miss some obvious pattern that normal people don't think it will have problem (this is what most fuzzer currently tests)
Not all legal systems put the burden of proof on the accuser. In fact, many legal systems have indefinite detentions, in which the government effectively imprisons a suspect, sometimes for months at a time. To take it a step further, the plea-bargain system of the USA, is really just a method to skip the entire legal process. After all, proving guilt is expensive, so why not just strong-arm a suspect into confessing? It also has the benefit of holding someone responsible for an injustice, even if the actual perpetrator cannot be found. By my personal standards, this is a corrupt system, but by the standards of the legal stratum of society, those KPIs look _solid_.
By contrast, in Germany (IIRC), false confessions are _illegal_, meaning that objective evidence is required.
Many legal systems follow the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", but also have many "escape hatches" that let them side-step the actual process that is supposed to guarantee that ideal principle.
EDIT: And that is just modern society. Past societies have had trial by ordeal and trial by combat, neither of which has anything to do with proof and evidence. Many such archaic proof procedures survive in modern legal systems, in a modernized and bureaucratized way. In some sense, modern trials are a test of who has the more expensive attorney (as opposed to who has a more skilled champion or combatant).
There is no comment on whether LLMs/agents have been used. I feel like projects should explicitly say if they were _or_ were not used. There is no license file, and no copyright header either. This feels like "fauxpen-source": imagine getting LEX+YACC to generate a parser, and presenting the generated C code as "open-source".
This is just another way to throw binaries over the wire, but much worse. This has the _worst_ qualities of the GPL _and_ pseudo-free-software-licenses (i.e. the EULAs used by mongo and others). It has all the deceptive qualities of the latter (e.g. we are open but not really -- similar to Sun Microsystems [love this company btw, in spite of its blunders], trying to convince people that NeWS is "free" but that the cost of media [the CD-ROM] is $900), with the viral qualities of the former (e.g. the fruit of the poison tree problem -- if you use this in your code, then not only can you not copyright the code, but you might actually be liable for infringement of copyright and/or patents).
I would appreciate it if the contributor, mrconter11, would treat HN as an internet space filled with intelligent thinking people, and not a bunch of shallow and mindless rubes. (Please (1) explicitly disclose both the use and absence of use of LLMs -- people are more likely to use your software this way, and preserves the integrity of the open source ecosystem, and (2) share you prompts and session).
That is (slightly) reassuring (but the rest of his portfolio does not inspire confidence). Nevertheless, we should be required to disclose whether the code has been (legally) tainted or not. This will help people make informed decisions, and will also help people replace the code if legal consequences appear on the horizon, or if they are ready to move from prototype to production.
Your workplace has chosen to deprive you of the enjoyment that you got from the work. You have a few options: (1) ask for a raise proportional to the percentage of enjoyment that you lost, (2) find a workplace that does not do this, or (3) phone it in (they see you and your craft as something be milked for cash, so maybe stop letting yourself get milked, and milk them right back, by doing _exactly_ what is asked of you and _not_ more -- let these strategic geniuses strategize using their own brains).
If a commit's job is to capture state at a particular point in time, so that it can be reproduced and understood, then it _also_ needs to include the exact model used. This is only useful if you can ensure access to the previous versions of the model -- which is not something that providers are willing to do (in fact, they regularly "retire" old models). The only transparent way forward is to open source the models, along with their weights, and their training set (to verify that the weights match, and to retrain the model when new architectures and new hardware are released).
Not insisting upon this, would be similar to depending on a SaaS to compile and packages software, and being totally cool with it. Both LLMs and build systems, convert human-friendly notation into machine-friendly notation. We should hold the LLM companies to the same standards of transparency that we hold the people who make things like nix, clang, llvm, cmake, cargo, etc.
And also in Turkey. It (the word, if not the stew itself) arrived to the Balkans by way of the Ottomans. (And having just now clicked through to the link, it seems to have arrived to Turkey by way of the Persians).
I know what will blow your socks off: package managers. They are kind of like magical wizards that can make fully operational software appear on your machine. Want a scheme compiler? Just `nix-shell -p racket`. Want common lisp? `nix-shell -p sbcl`. It works like a charm every time.
Sure but I can now create a subset of those packages which fit 100% my use case.
Also I don't know what you're arguing for, I was just saying that spending most of the time making tools without doing anything with them is not the only way for a developer to feel satisfied.
I am just pointing out that `program that can make other well specified and understood programs appear on my machine` is not exactly novel. In fact, not only has the entire open source ecosystem been relying on such programs, but they in fact _inspired_ the various app-stores in the 2000s (package management was one of the killer features of linux for a long time).
Yet, people keep holding this up as a particularly novel aspect of LLMs, and it makes them sound like they have never seen or used a package manager, or a container, or a VM. For some bizarre reason, in spite of being augmented with a machine that knows everything about marketing, sales, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, etc, programmers are consistently failing to market their new favorite tool. This is embarrassing, and it does not inspire confidence in that class of people that control so much of the economy[0].
What they _should_ be excited about is: I/you/we can now use this "zooming"[1] package manager to make software appear on my machine (or inside my program), and I can now fearlessly[2] fork these "packages", without incurring as much technical debt, and without having to convince the maintainer to upstream my changes.
This is of course, for now, a bit of an exaggeration. But it is certainly true that the "software supply chain", is the _opposite_ of elegant (for example, making a webapp is needlessly difficult for a beginner), and LLMs can help you navigate and understand different parts of that supply chain more quickly.
[0]: Why is most LLM marketing based on fear and shame and exaggeration? You would think that we would use these pocket-geniuses to actually do _ethical_ marketing, because the cost of that should be going down as a result.
[1]: It works at all scales of abstraction.
[2]: You can even violate licenses and patents without any fear now. The _real_ killer feature of LLMs (not for me, but for the industry at large), is that they let the tech-oligarchy capture a larger share of the economic surplus, without breaking the law[3]. In fact, this is how the software industry has always operated. Remember, software's job is to eat the world (to paraphrase Andreesen). But even more so, this is how unregulated _markets_ have always operated! Everyone needs to always defend and grow the share of surplus that they control, in order to survive. This means that the "meta" of the unregulated-market-game is to make yourself into as much of a bottleneck as humanly possible. In graph-theory, this corresponds to maximizing your _betweenness centrality_. In economics and law, they call a 100% betweenness centrality, a monopoly. In fact, one SV oligarch (Thiel), has said: "the goal is monopoly"!
[3]: As usual, the wealthiest will be impossible to sue for infringement, whereas now, the entire open source ecosystem is tainted, unless you are using software that has not been updated since 2023. In some sense, patent trolling is back, it just has extra steps now. I will let you (plural) infer the implications of this.
There's an art to it. Most human attempts, and every LLM attempt I've ever seen, are awful, sometimes bordering on unreadable, but, as you say, there are a relatively small number of authors who do it well. That doesn't mean that most people should do it.
I'm a French speaker and florid and elaborate writing is something I've grown up with. It can be difficult if you don't know the word or are not used to the style, but it's not boring. AI writing is just repetitive.
Even the linkedin profile has a studio-ghibli-style avatar. People are going to assume that he is just an "analog interface" to an LLM. Which is sad, because he might be a good programmer. In fact, I tend to see a lot of english-as-second-language people embrace LLMs as a kind of "equalizer", not realizing that in 2026 it is the opposite (not saying that it's right either way, just pointing out that it is becoming a kind of anti-marketing, like showing up to a conference without any clothing, and getting banned from the conference permanently).
We should probably normalize publishing things in our native languages, and expecting the audience to run it through a translator. (I have been toying with the idea of writing everything in Esperanto (not my native language, but a favorite) and just posting links to auto-translated English versions where the translation is good enough).
EDIT: as someone with friends and family from Eastern Europe, I can tell you that the prevailing attitude is: "everything is bullshit anyway" (which, to be fair, has a lot of truth to it), and so it is no surprise that people would enthusiastically embrace a pocket-sized bullshit factory, hook it up to a fire-hose, and start spraying. We saw it with spam, and we see it now with slop. It won't stop unless the system stops rewarding it.
Personally, I felt that the drive to automate the parts of the professors' workloads that mattered (i.e. teaching and grading and evaluation and research), only so that they can be given work that matters less the more they do it (i.e. publishing slightly different flavors of the same paper, to meet KPIs), was oddly perverse.
The multiple-choice test and the puzzle-solving test and really any standardized test can be exploited by any group that is sufficiently organized. This is also true in corporate interviewing where corporations think (or pretend) that they are interviewing an individual, whereas they are actually interviewing a _network_ of candidates who share details about the interviewers and the questions. I know people who got rejected in spite of getting all the interview questions correct (the theory is that nobody can do that well, so they must have had help from previously rejected/accepted candidates).
The word "trust" shares a root with the word "tree" and "truth" and "druid". Most exams and interviews are trying to speed-run trust-building (note that "verification" is from the latin word that means "true"). If trust and truth are analogous to "tree", then we are trying to speed-run the growth of a tree -- much like the orange tree, in the film, _The Illusionist_. And like the orange tree, it is a near-complete illusion, a ritual meant to keep the legal department and HR department happy.
The LLMs have simply made the corruption of academia accessible to _all_ students with an internet connection (EDIT: and instantaneous and cheap, unlike a human writer).
There has never been a shortcut to building trust. One cannot LLM their way into being a (metaphorical) druid.
I do not look forward to the Voight-Kampff tests that will come to dominate all aspects of online and asynchronous human interaction.
Note that, short of homework/classwork that _can't_ be gamed by an LLM (for some fundamental reason), even the high-quality honest students will be forced to cheat, so as to not be eclipsed by the actual low-quality cheating students[0].
I imagine that we may end up wrapping around to live in-person dialectics, as were standard in the time of Socrates and Parmenides[1]. If so, this should be fun.
[0]: If left unaddressed, we may see a bimodal distribution of great and terrible students graduating college, with those in between dropping out. If college is an attempt to categorize and rank a population, this would be a major fault in that mechanism.
[1]: Not to the exclusion of the other kinds of tests, writing is still important, critical even. But as a kind of verification-step, that should inform how much the academic community should trust the writing (I can imagine that all the writers here are experiencing stage-fright as they are reading these words).
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