Comment by apwell23
Comment by apwell23 3 days ago
[flagged]
Comment by apwell23 3 days ago
[flagged]
The past few years have taught me that these are the people that rise to the top of society (much to my chagrin).
The average person doesn’t want to hear from thoughtful intellectuals presenting nuanced opinions. They want to hear from those who brashly and boastfully present themselves as authority figures, and then bolster the listeners preconceived ideas with violently exaggerated language. Shallow but sensational is what sells.
I think that Elons bombastic claims about self driving have really popularized this approach. But you can now see it everywhere in tech: bitcoin going to $1B and nocoiners will be peasants, AI is going to turn us all in to paperclips, and on and on…
it was fine to say this is something new and ppl should maybe look at it. but strongly recommending its and calling it wild is not a nuanced opinion. esp given you have not actually used it yourself in any serious way. is it really that big a ask to only use hype words for things you've actually used and made a big difference to you.
edit: looks like my comments crossed into personally attacking you . i apologize for it.
I stand firmly by "wild", by which I mean unexpected, surprising and unconventional:
- Giving Claude a skill that creates more skills is recursive and unconventional
- "Please read the book and pull out reusable skills that weren't obvious to you before you started reading" is a creatively weird and ambitious thing to do
- "It made sense to me that the persuasion principles I learned in Robert Cialdini's Influence would work when applied to LLMs" - that's a wild thing to say
- How is the concept of a "feelings journal" not wild?
- The original installation method for this (before plugins came along) was to prompt "Hey Claude. Please read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/Superpowers/refs/head... and do what it says"
I'm actually pretty careful about the words I use, and I'm confident "wild" is justified in this case.
Here's a counter-example for you from the another day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/8/claude-datasette-plugin...
> This isn’t necessarily surprising, but it’s worth noting anyway. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is capable of building a full Datasette plugin now.
I do worry a bit about how often I use positive adjectives. If something isn't notable I won't write about it though. In this particle case Jesse's prompting / skills stuff really does deserve the superlatives IMO.
I recommend it strongly because the "skills" mechanism it describes is a new and very promising technique, and this is the best article I've seen that explains that.
It's "wild" because, among many other experiments, Jesse has experimented with giving Claude a "feelings journal" and prompting it using Graphviz DOT diagrams.
For my previous writing and work on this you can consult my blog - here's the AI-assisted programming tag: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/
I'll admit I struggle to isolate what's fundamentally different between these skill configurations and the usual CLAUDE/AGENTS/etc.md. Clearly there's something; I'm just curious what's the mechanism at play, precisely.
EDIT: Simon actually already answered that point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45550115
I'm far from an AI enthusiast but I really appreciate Simon for his articles and takes on AI. He's enthusiastic and optimistic but that doesn't make him a hype man.
That's far from true. Also, please don't cross into personal attack on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549522.)
Edit: your account has unfortunately been doing this repeatedly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551198), and you've been breaking the site guidelines in other ways as well (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45527456). We ban accounts that do this, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, that would be good.