It's shocking to me that when I check threads for new frontier model releases on HN, it's full of people complaining. I, for one, am happy to see the frontier being advanced. These tools are life changing, and I'm extremely thankful for them.
I've been building Cargo-for-C (https://github.com/tspader/spn), and the difference between Fable and Opus was already astounding. Fable was the first time that I could point a model at a piece of code I'd written and expect it to make it meaningfully better rather than a hard pattern match to whatever mistakes it had.
5.1 so far seems like another leap, which is really surprising. I threw it at a few bigger features I've been designing for a while, and it came back with some extremely thoughtful wrinkles in the design that I'd legitimately not considered. Which, OK, package managers and build executors and compiling C/C++ is pretty well trodden ground, but my thing is very different from everything that exists, and I was very surprised it was able to understand all that context so deeply and intuitively
i think we will all look back on Fable as the start of the AGI inflection point. for all i know there are still multiple leaps between now and AGI (i personally am inclined to think that for all intents and purposes we are "already there", but reasonable people can still disagree on that point), but Fable was the first time that something felt genuinely magical about the results themselves, not just particular outputs. which is kinda funny in that i don't know anywhere near enough in terms of behind the scenes as to whether or not there was something meaningfully different, or if it is just the point at which the scale had finally accumulated such that i happened to notice that the output was fundamentally different.
i can't wait to dig in on 5.1 because while i have always been somewhat predisposed to think that openai's models have usually been "better" (my own subjective opinion, that) "on average", i have been kinda tired of the regime of late where it felt like Anthropic was miles behind while simultaneously clearly having models (Mythos) that are surely face-meltingly impressive-- it has just been very hard to square with the fact that i feel like Anthropic hit the "real" "critical point" first... i have no doubt that 5.1 will finally reset the ecosystem balance into a more healthy place.
This prose feels extremely angry and ungenerous; abstractly, I agree with a lot of the points, but when I read this:
> My conclusion is that OpenCode is clown-car turboslop with a security posture of “let me bend over for you daddy”. Everyone using it should stop using it.
I do not want to keep reading. There are regular people who wrote this software. When did it become normal to talk about open source like this? How would you feel if someone wrote this about some software that you wrote? Reading this article made me feel extremely gross
I agree with your sentiment, but to answer your question: Since forever. (At least I know examples in the 90's).
In the old days of comp.lang.lisp, there were certain individuals who would really get off on denigrating people who wrote code that was not up to their ivory tower level. Some people left because of it. Others took it as a badge of honor falsely believing that the dressing down was necessary for them to improve their coding skills.
Poorly socialized people tend to have poorly developed social mores.
And a lot of developers, especially on the internet, tend to be poorly socialized.
Salt that with the fact that they often are more fact-intelligent than the people around them in real life, and you get a propensity to shitpost whenever thry feel it's warranted, especially about technical things.
Calling something "vibe-coded" nowadays is a permission slip to unload on it with hyperbole and insults because you can presume there's no human in the line of fire. I really don't think the people engaging in that kind of rhetoric understand how corrosive it is to the humans who do get caught in the crossfire sometimes, and to themselves for normalizing that kind of behavior.
> People familiar with OpenCode internals (if you are on the OpenCode dev team I assume this doesn’t include you) might have objected to my python3 example above.
I promise I'm not normally uptight like this, but there's a difference between having a laugh and whatever this is. Like I said, this feels (a) legitimately angry and (b) in a spit flecked enraged way that has become popular. I guess if you're cool with people calling whatever you work on clown-car turboslop then more power to you.
Author here. Just wanted to say: thank you for posting this. You've given me something to think about, and I regret writing this post the way that I did.
Thanks for the reply, I'm sure you're also just a regular person writing about the stuff you like and regardless of whether you end up agreeing with me or deciding that, no, that was exactly the tone you wanted, I appreciate the thought.
Maybe the important take-away would be to recognize that this was a rant.
Ownership and honesty about things is healthy, as is letting out strong opinions sometimes.
Nothing wrong with saying "I wanted to write a (technically-informed) rant about something that's really bothering me, and I did."
F.ex. "clown-car turboslop" would be fairly polite by the standards of younger Torvalds (though he admittedly recognized later in life that wasn't a great communication style)
I mean, unless you think AI is conscious and would feel hurt by this, who exactly is harmed here? The prompters? Why? They obviously know the code generated by AI is slop, why would they be hurt by these comments?
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