https://github.com/bendlang/bend

You gotta not take it personal. Announcing on HN is a gauntlet. People can be a bit prickly. Just a bit though. You get lots of good feedback too.

If the author of the article had done just a small amount of research about bend or it's author before writing the article they would have known pretty quickly what they were saying was incorrect.

I think the larger pattern here is that nuance is one of the most valuable commodities in the AI era. If you're hand waving stuff away without even missing , you're going to miss a lot of stuff in this cycle.

This article reminds me a lot of the famous hacker news Dropbox comment.

I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted.

The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.

You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.

I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.

Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:

It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.

And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.

That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.

Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot.

Funny in either case.

A lot of handwringing about the security implications but I think the accomplishments of the swarm itself are the most interesting. Next rung up on the ladder of abstraction I suspect.

If an API is exposed you can just have the LLM write something against that.

Giving an LLM a computer makes it way more powerful, giving it a kubernetes cluster should extend that power much further and naturally fits well with the way LLMs work.

I think this abstraction can scale for a good long while. Past this what do you give the agent? Control of a whole Data Center I guess.

I'm not sure if it will replace openclaw all together since kubernetes is kind of niche and scary to a lot of people. But I bet for the most sophisticated builders this will become quite popular, and who knows maybe far beyond that cohort too.

Congrats on the launch!

You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine. They can find other people to spend time with.

You can probably find a good community where you are, and if not just move to SF which is something like the autism homeland. Being autistic there is valorized and even imitated in sort of amusing ways.

Masking is a kind of hell, living someone else's life. Unmasking and living as yourself feels scary at first but the people who will love you that way can only find you if you live that way.

Been on the lookout for an open source version but they all seem kind of unessecarily bulky or otherwise poorly maintained.

Would be interested in suggestions anyone has for whole apps or libs that work well when glued together for this purpose.

After a while, the more mature Linux engineers start going the other way. Ripping out as much as possible. Stripping down to the leanest build they can, for performance but also to reduce attack surface and overall complexity.

Very similar dynamic with k8s. Early days are often about scooping up every CNCF project like you're on a shopping spree. Eventually people get to shipping slim clusters running and 30mb containers with alpine or nix. Using it essentially as open source clustering for Linux.

I use it a lot for mapping out of the initial concepts but I find one of the best use cases is after understanding the basics, explaining where I need to learn more and asking for a book recommendation. The quality of my reading list has gone up 10x this way and I find myself working through multiple books a week.

Great for code too obviously, though still feels like early days there to me.