Gaslight-driven development • Hacker News Board

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#11

Post by Kapura » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:03 AM UTC

hamish-b wrote: post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

i literally opened the developer console to delete that element from the page. no surprise somebody who has no idea how to make a readable website is getting bullied by a chatbot.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#12

Post by abtinf » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:04 AM UTC

> We see the same at Instant: for example, we used tx.update for both inserting and updating entities, but LLMs kept writing tx.create instead. Guess what: we now have tx.create, too.

Good. Think of all the dev hours that must’ve been wasted by humans who were confused by this too.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#13

Post by JimDabell » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:09 AM UTC

hamish-b wrote: post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

I found Safari’s “hide distracting items” feature was necessary to finish the article.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#14

Post by krackers » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:13 AM UTC

hamish-b wrote: post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

isn't this the page that used to have cursors everywhere in the background? I think the distracting design is some intentional running joke at this point

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#15

Post by meepmorp » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:14 AM UTC

If it were somehow a human that was consistently and confidently handing out made up programming advice about one's products, would companies still respond by just adding whatever imagined feature and writing a vaguely bemused blog post about it?

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#16

Post by consumer451 » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:15 AM UTC

hamish-b wrote: post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

Same here. Right-click the page and choose Inspect (or Inspect Element). Click the Console tab, paste this code, and press Enter:

    document.getElementById("presence")?.remove();

If you want to know why this is happening in your brain, it's likely a prey/predator identification thing. I would like to think that being so distracted by this just means I have excellent survival instincts :)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0703913104

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_%28neuroscience%29

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#17

Post by mathiaspoint » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:17 AM UTC

cnnlives wrote: post #8

hamish-b wrote: post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

Maybe if the background color on all pages was a heatmap of the current top line of the page, so that you could see where people were reading and how many were reading, it would be better? Also, what if it played slow and brooding music when fewer people were reading and epic action adventure music when many people were reading it? How about if the page mined bitcoin and the first person to enter a page made a percen…

That heatmap idea sounds really neat actually.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#18

Post by raddan » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:17 AM UTC

readthenotes1 wrote: post #9

trhway wrote: post #2

>Well, now there is a new way to serve our silicon overlords. LLMs started to have opinions on how your API should look we have code review by LLM. There is no point or a way to argue. Just submit to the wishes of the overlord, resistance is futile.

For some reason this reminds me of the conversation I had with a guy who didn't like the lane keeping assist on his car. He didn't like that it vibrated the steering wheel when he changed lanes without using the blinker.

I rented a car recently for a trip to Arizona that had lane keeping on by default. The highway I was traveling on was undergoing extensive repair. Not only did the car sound audible alarms with some frequency, since the highway had been rerouted in places using traffic cones, it also constantly tried to veer the car back into “the lane.” Since the lane was in some places just a hole, the consequences would have been bad. I ended up pulling over and fishing through the menus until I found a way to turn it all off.

It appears that there’s a very long tail of exceptional circumstances that must be handled with autonomous driving.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#19

Post by YesBox » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:18 AM UTC

hamish-b wrote: post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

I tried uBlock's element zapper and ended up playing a furious game whac-a-mole :D

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#20

Post by delifue » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:18 AM UTC

> for example, we used tx.update for both inserting and updating entities, but LLMs kept writing tx.create instead. Guess what: we now have tx.create, too.

If a function can both insert and update, it should be called "put". Using "update" is misleading.