If the slop passes my tests, then I'm going to use it for precisely the role that motivated the creation of it in the first place. If the slop is functional then I don't care that it's slop.
I've replaced half my desktop environment with this manner of slop, custom made for my idiosyncratic tastes and preferences.
How would it work if LLMs provide incorrect reports in the first place? Have a look at the actual HackerOne reports and their comments.
The problem is the complete stupidity of people. They use LLMs to convince the author of the curl that he is not correct about saying that the report is hallucinated. Instead of generating ten LLM comments and doubling down on their incorrect report, they could use a bit of brain power to actually validate the report. It does not even require a lot of skills, you have to manually tests it.
Let the reporter duke it out with the project's gatekeeping LLM. If it keeps going on for long enough a human can quickly skim the exchange. It should be immediately obvious if the reporter is making sensible rebuttals or just throwing more slop at the wall.
I think fighting fire with fire is likely the correct answer here.
It’s not like you needed LLMs for quickjs which already had known and unpatched problems. It’s a toy project.
It would be cool to see exploits for something like curl.
I don’t think anyone serious would recommend it for serious production systems. I respect the Ralph technique as a fascinating learning exercise in understanding llm context windows and how to squeeze more performance (read: quality) from today’s models
Even if in the absolute the ceiling remains low, it’s interesting the degree to which good context engineering raises it
How is it a “fascinating learning exercise” when the intention is to run the model in a closed loop with zero transparency. Running a black box in a black box to learn? What signals are you even listening to to determine whether your context engineering is good or whether the quality has improved aside from a brief glimpse at the final product. So essentially every time I want to test a prompt I waste $100 on Claude and have it an entire project for me?
I’m all for AI and it’s evident that the future of AI is more transparency (MLOPs, tracing, mech interp, AI safety) not less.
there is the theoretical "how the world should be" and there is the practical "what's working today" - decry the latter and wait around for the former at your peril
You probably wouldn't use it for anything serious, but I've Ralphed a couple of personal tools: Mac menu bar apps mostly. It works reasonably well so long as you do the prep upfront and prepare a decent spec and plan. No idea of the code quality because I wouldn't know good swift code from a hole in the head, but the apps work and scratch the itch that motivated them.
I do not understand where this Ralph hype is coming from.
Back when Claude 4.0 came out and it began to become actually useful, I already tried something like this. Every time it was a complete and utter failure.
And this dream of "having Claude implement an entire project from start to finish without intervention" came crashing down with this realization: Coding assistants 100% need human guidance.
I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI.
I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?
I've been left wondering when is the world going to find out about Input Method Editor.
It lets users type all sorts of ‡s, (*´ڡ`●)s, 2026/01/19s, by name, on Windows, Mac, Linux, through pc101, standard dvorak, your custom qmk config, anywhere without much prior knowledge. All it takes is to have a little proto-AI that can range from floppy sizes to at most few hundred MBs in size, rewriting your input somewhere between the physical keyboard and text input API.
If I wanted em–dashes, I can do just that instantly – I'm on Windows and I don't know what are the key combinations. Doesn't matter. I say "emdash" and here be an em-dash. There should be the equivalent to this thing for everybody.
Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.
You are absolutely right — most internet users don't know the specific keyboard combination to make an em dash and substitute it with two hyphens. On some websites it is automatically converted into an em dash. If you would like to know more about this important punctuation symbol and it's significance in identitifying ai writing, please let me know.
Thanks for that. I had no idea either. I'm genuinely surprised Windows buries such a crucial thing like this. Or why they even bothered adding it in the first place when it's so complicated.
The Windows version is an escape hatch for keying in any arbitrary character code, hence why it's so convoluted. You need to know which code you're after.
To be fair, the alt-input is a generalized system for inputting Unicode characters outside the set keyboard layout. So it's not like they added this input specifically. Still, the em dash really should have an easier input method given how crucial a symbol it is.
It's a generalized system for entering code page glyphs that was extended to support Unicode. 0150 and 0151 only work if you are on CP1252 as those aren't the Unicode code points.
And Em Dash is trivially easy on iOS — you simply hold press on the regular dash button - I’ve been using it for years and am not stopping because people might suddenly accuse me of being an AI.
What are you gonna do with the results that are usually slop?
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