* Goal: be the last fighter alive.

* Turns: each round every fighter takes one turn. Turn order is randomized every round.

* Actions: Move one cell up/down/left/right, attack an adjacent enemy for 15–24 damage, or wait. An action consumes 1 AP.

* Rocks/Obstacles: 4 random impassable cells.

* Power-ups: Gold +1 AP per turn.

* Kills: the killer gets +1 AP per turn, and heals 50 HP (no over-heal).

(Unclear while watching replays, found in README.)

Agentic coding is amazing at getting you 90% of the way to "finished", but getting products to feel really polished seems to take monumental effort if you're just "vibing".

Yet engineers working on world-class products have ample access to plenty of frontier LLM tokens. Products like Linear, Instagram, Google Docs, Figma, etc. This class of products were super polished before LLMs took over, and they've stayed polished in the post-LLM era.

My question: What's different about how those products are built/maintained that keeps them feeling polished?

Compare with so many vibe-coded apps we've all seen, which almost universally feel like they're missing that polish that makes them feel professional.

For example:

- Are these organizations simply moving slower? (As they're already incumbent in the space.)

- Is visual design, copy editing, etc. still being done by (gasp) humans?

Would love to hear any first- or second-hand accounts!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812392

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I find it bizarre how intensely a bunch of these child/grandchild comments are criticizing the notion that people would even think to analyze the meaning behind the words.

Hacker News has always had a unique culture in which thoughtful discussion is basically the main goal, and it's intentionally incentivized in numerous ways. It's been my experience that any thoughts added to a post's conversation are seen as valuable as long as they are thoughtful and seeking to understand.

So these comments are clearly coming from a place that's antithetical to HN's culture. What that in mind, it seems likely to me (Occam's Razor) that these comments are either:

1. Astroturfing: Claude employees acting like everyday folks, secretly trying to shift public opinion.

2. AI cult mindset: "AI is humanity's salvation; how dare you have perspectives outside of those accepted by the cult."

Am I missing another likely option?

To bolster my point, right now we're posting on the top top-level comment, meaning a majority of active HN users find it to be a great addition to the conversation. Commenting to shut down the discussion is a red flag.

There have always been software companies that care about quality, and those that don't.

Many who don't care about quality exist because their products are forced onto their users. (Due to footholds from enterprise relationships, regulation, etc.) I bet slop will abound in these kinds of companies, but their codebases and products were already terrible anyways.

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But research reliably shows users do care about things Just Working™ and feeling polished. With few exceptions, if software feels at all buggy or doesn't look visually amazing, you won't acquire/retain that many users.

Natural selection will teach hard lessons to the industry. Customers will notice things feeling "off" on products where AI slop is allowed to abound, and they'll flee to companies with sane approaches.

A sane approach: Humans actually guide the direction of the code which means they have to understand + review the code and course correct bad decisions. This doesn't mean agentic coding goes away, but it means this mad rush for insane velocity goes away.

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Compare vibe-coded apps you've interacted with against world-class polished apps like Spotify, Gmail, Slack, etc. Those apps aren't obviously showing signs of AI slop, because the organizational structure is in place in those companies to prevent engineers from just throwing slop over the fence. Those engineers are doing agentic coding but are being forced to go at a sustainable pace.

The industry will eventually be forced (by the reality of business results) to recognize that this is the only approach that will lead to success.

Designing in a group can be very difficult, and doing it well is a skill set that most people don't naturally have.

I think this explains your point 1. Why do people view designed docs as pointless? Because they really don't have a vision or model for what and effective and healthy collaborative design process would look like.

I've complained plenty on here about Claude verbosity and TED-talk phrasing, and it seems by contrast Gemini has already arrived at the dream end-state of Claude from a prose standpoint.

Sometimes I ask for feedback, and I get back a list of multiple-choice options as if it's already ready to go. If I indicate I'm thinking about doing something, sometimes it'll just...do it. (Not in an annoying way.)

It seems very geared toward action in a way that's completely refreshing coming from months steeped in Claude essays.

For OpenAI and Anthropic, the $100 subscriptions cost 5x the $20 subscriptions and give you 5x the tokens. And the $200 subscriptions are 10x the cost for 20x the tokens. (Tokens cost 50% as much.)

It's particularly frustrating that it's simultaneously superhuman and incredibly unreliable when it comes to cognition.

E.g. it can whip out 100,000 lines of code in the time you'd write 500...but 5% of that code will be janky, or subtly buggy, etc.

It's the "oh...you're absolutely right!" effect. I can't think of any other tools that are so powerful yet so finnicky and almost guaranteed to fail in ways that are so difficult to detect.

(A model that can run reasonably well in a ~24GB MacBook.)

Putting readers through this exercise disrespects their time. Even if as a writer you did the work of researching, reasoning, and fact-checking, you shoot yourself in the foot by running it through an LLM because there's no way for the reader to know which thoughts/research are from you. It demolishes the Ethos of the writing; readers feel they must do quality assurance on the reasoning, research, and facts.

What's going to happen long term when this style of writing is so ubiquitous that people get comfortable reading it? Is it going to fundamentally change English? Are people going to start talking like Claude?

I just want to understand more.

Also, would you be willing to share the actual text of it that you put in AGENTS.md?

Any more detail you can share? Do the others feel more "human"? Are there any that are particularly digestible/human-friendly?

I've been wondering for a while if this is just Claude because I mostly use Claude, so this is very telling.

Does anyone have a read on if this is primarily a Claude issue, or if all LLMs do this?

I have a personal theory: LLMs are *fundamentally* handicapped at perceiving what's going on in the mind of the human (this can't be "innovated away") and that's at the root of what makes them suck at conversation.

Next time you're chatting with someone, notice how much understanding is shared without anything being said. E.g. the other person might share something deeply disappointing, and they can tell without you even saying anything whether you get what they're going through. This unspoken-yet-communicated information guides the conversation. Or as another example: humans can read the room -- you walk into a room and immediately adjust your demeanor based on what you see and sense.

LLMs are totally blind to things like this, and this adds an inescapable awkwardness to interacting with them. I don't believe they'll ever grow out of this. Which thankfully implies more long term demand for humans instead of robots. :)

1. LLM thinking 2. RLHF 3. The latest frontier models

that does anything to change this fundamental "suggestibility" of LLMs.

But who knows, maybe I'm wrong.

The reason "the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust" is because you said you "want to build reliable software".

It's not a signal of good judgment or understanding. It's just how LLM attention works.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?