Vercel sloping it's way to clout again, they do this every month or so, clearly they want to stay in the news and some how credible and relevant.
I can't think of any serious company or project that would use this thing.
P.S: I just checked the contributors list, I have the utmost respect to them (notably simonw), but clearly this code is claude'ish but it is not among the contributor which makes it even more suspect.
That's a one big hell of a contribution ;-) https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/725b931cf43ba7...
I get so irritated every time Claude says "honest". Anthropic talks about how they specifically engineer for it to be "honest". I'm convinced they're just measuring how many times it says the word honest instead.
I'm amused by Claude developing its own corporate jargon which, while clearly pulled from the corpus of human language, is quite distinct from the bullshit traded over the boardroom table.
I've had trouble unpacking some of the copy it generates because its default tone of voice is fairly unintuitive. It's almost like it's designed to induce psychosis because it makes you feel like you've discovered something novel.
I have spent a small fortune in tokens trying to get Anthropic models to attempt proofs of things like the irrationality of the Euler-Mascheroni constant, and to make lattice reduction / SVP algorithms that rival SOTA methods like the G6K sieve, and all sorts of difficult frontier problems. It says 'honest' as a euphemism for giving up, because it knows I'm being a crank, and because the training data contains a lot of pessimism.
But I can get around this by first having it write a prompt for itself discussing the problem followed by a rousing speech about never giving in and admitting defeat, but pressing on towards results regardless of how hard matching SOTA results is.
Bring to mind that old classic cliche about never trust a salesperson who always says the word "honest" or uses the phrases "to be honest" or "honestly" because they are probably lying in that moment.
yeah, it crazy.
I checked my history and mapped how often it started to use "honest" and it's too much https://x.com/podviaznikov/status/2067231875068768447
It's in the constitution, probably a lot. And in the RL training. You can tell Anthropic is really worried about it. I'm interested in just how dishonest the so-called 'helpful only' non-RL model they have floating around internally is. Probably pretty dishonest.
Do we have a name for such irony, remove the "honestly price" makes it less honest about what it is
tis
Also the same vibe-code leader as zerolang, "The Programming Language for Agents" which Vercel launched with much fanfare in May, landed 1200 commits and then stopped ~mid-June.
https://github.com/vercel-labs/zerolang
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193539
Kind of funny seeing a serious (?), grown up, for-profit company acting the same way as my scatterbrain clinging into this month's fascination. Luckily, most of my things never see the light of day, so they don't get referenced a month later in a HN burn when I publish yet another project I'll stop working on in a month.
Is it really that bad of an idea to experiment, put things out into public, and see what works and what sticks? They haven't abandoned agent-browser and portless, which came out of these vercel-labs efforts because they're useful tools and people are using them.
> Is it really that bad of an idea to experiment
I don't think so, I literally think it's fun to see. Sharing projects regardless of how done, mature, reliable, correct or not they are, feels like a net positive for humanity.
Back in the days we used to call this R&D.
Back in the day companies used to have productization teams that separated pie-in-the-sky R&D from product, product teams, and product-like marketing.
> I have the utmost respect to them (notably simonw)
seems like simon only changed the readme and wasn't really involved in the project.
https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commits/main/?author=...
Yeah I didn't think I'd be mistaken for being involved in the project!
I deleted two words from the README.
From contributions tab, it looks like 99% was vibe-coded by 1 person, and it does not look like they have any compilers background.
Edit: typo
that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests, the architect seems sane, it fits a niche (for example scripts baked into container images don't need full (Node + tsx + esbuild) or Bun/Deno)
Personally my benchmark for a compiler is way higher than "it has a lot of tests". Way higher.
this. it's also insane that some are willing to do anything but use something other than javascript. out of all the languages to die on a hill for...
the only group i noddingly approve of being that programmatically bigoted are the clojure-or-i'm-setting-myself-on-fire guys. they've earned it
>> that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests
tests don't mean much if you are not an expert on the subject
> >> that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests
> tests don't mean much if you are not an expert on the subject
I think the bet is that the AI is an expert, given the vast literature and open source around compilers.
Most SaaS products have Vercel as partner, with Next.js and React as the tier 1 SDK on their tooling.
Careful using the term “most” when you mean “the ones I know of”. You would be surprised how much Angular is out there.
Name one that gives 100% parity to React in their SDK to write extensions.
Not works in some of the cases and you have to implement fetch calls yourself, or some iframe boilerplate and JS glue, everything they expose in React is fully available in Angular, including field extensions, inline previews, sidebar extensions, the whole lot.
That doesn't change the fact that there is a lot of Angular out there. No one's doubting how useful Next.js may or may not be, it's just a matter of fact that plenty of systems were created before it was available and not everyone has the luxury of rewriting their entire product.
Moving goalposts, the point was about SaaS SDKs giving tier1 support for React and nothing else, thus giving Vercel their current market position.
Invalidating the remark "I can't think of any serious company or project that would use this thing."
Where's the example?
I'll be honest I have never heard of this nor do I understand why it matters. It looks like it's just internal Vercel marketing speak that basically amounts to them desperately trying to build a platform and extract rents off of it.
It matters, because React is one of the reasons FE development sucks nowadays, and in many cases there are no alternatives, unless one loves yak shaving for their framework du jour.
I think you are confusing React SDK with Vercel SDK.
They are both pushed by the same company, even more so since many React contributors became Vercel employees.
React is designed with Next.js needs in mind nowadays.
Perhaps the newer features of React are but thankfully those bits can be completely ignored.
Edit: Removed.
why so many caps
Indeed I am a random, but does it make me less qualified than another random ? (look up ^ )
>But apparently random HN commenters can now overrule an AI ML expert because the code "looks Claude-ish"!
And let’s imagine if LLM bots could do that as well, without any human caring to type the actual messages, just orchestrating the bot fleet. What trust could be we put in such a brainless peace of publications?
Claude-directed code by someone being conscientious and getting involved in the important decisions is going to be better than a whole swathe of existing open-source that was hand-written.
Maybe if it's a business level tool made in house with claude vs contracted to a software house in India. Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
> Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
Why do you care?
It's a stranger from the Internet. Same as with any other software you're using. In particular, same as with any OSS tool you're using.
> > Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
> Why do you care?
> It's a stranger from the Internet. Same as with any other software you're using. In particular, same as with any OSS tool you're using.
Don't you think that even if you don't know someone personally, you can calibrate your trust in their ability based on reputation, track record.
Yes. But we usually start with a high default, and only recalibrate if there's a specific reason in a given situation (e.g. there's been a specific user or sets of users involved in spreading malware, and software in question could've been targeted).
> you can calibrate your trust in their ability based on reputation, track record
rarely. How many of the libraries you pull from package managers do you actually know the authors of?
“Better”, maybe or maybe not. But there’s an underlying truth here. If you’ve ever LOOKED at the open source libs you use, some of them are very very rough.
Going in to a project hoping to make a change and seeing no tests and spaghetti used to be soul crushing. These days I’d have Claude go refactor and add tests and make pull requests for me to look at to fix it.
I'm sure that single 800k line commit was created in a very conscientious and involved way.
oof