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nikcubyesterday at 5:46 PM12 repliesview on HN

Claude Code defaulting to a certain set of recommended providers[0] and frameworks is making the web more homogenous and that lack of diversity is increasing the blast radius of incidents

[0] https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks/report


Replies

operatingthetanyesterday at 6:03 PM

It's interesting how many of the low-effort vibecoded projects I see posted on reddit are on vercel. It's basically the default.

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neilvyesterday at 7:07 PM

The other day, I was forcing myself to use Claude Code for a new CRUD React app[1], and by default it excreted a pile of Node JS and NPM dependencies.

So I told something like, "don't use anything node at all", and it immediately rewrote it as a Python backend, and it volunteered that it was minimizing dependencies in how it did that.

[1] only vibe coding as an exercise for a throwaway artifact; I'm not endorsing vibe coding

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nightskiyesterday at 5:53 PM

It's a good point, but I don't think the problem here is Claude. It's how you use it. We need to be guiding developers to not let Claude make decisions for them. It can help guide decisions, but ultimately one must perform the critical thinking to make sure it is the right choice. This is no different than working with any other teammate for that matter.

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neal_jonesyesterday at 6:29 PM

The thing I can’t stop thinking about is that Ai is accelerating convergence to the mean (I may be misusing that)

The internet does that but it feels different with this

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lmmtoday at 12:41 AM

Is that bad? I would think having everyone on the same handful of platforms should make securing them easier (and means those platforms have more budget to to so), and with fewer but bigger incidents there's a safety-of-the-herd aspect - you're unlikely to be the juiciest target on Vercel during the vulnerability window, whereas if the world is scattered across dozens or hundreds of providers that's less so.

elricyesterday at 7:24 PM

Interstingly, a recent conversation [1] between Hank Green and security researcher Sherri Davidoff argued the opposite. More GenAI generated code targeted at specific audiences should result in a more resilient ecosystem because of greater diversity. That obviously can't work if they end up using the same 3 frameworks in every application.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6pgZKVcKpw

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slashdavetoday at 12:03 AM

I'm not against making agents scapegoats, but this is a problem found among humans as well.

betocmnyesterday at 7:51 PM

Yeah, I’ve been tracking what devtools different models choose: https://preseason.ai

mvkelyesterday at 7:29 PM

That's only looking at half of the equation.

That lack of diversity also makes patches more universal, and the surface area more limited.

btownyesterday at 6:17 PM

"Nobody ever got fired for putting their band page on MySpace."

stefan_yesterday at 6:25 PM

It's so trivial to seed. LLMs are basically the idiots that have fallen for all the SEO slop on Google. Did some travel planning earlier and it was telling me all about extra insurances I need and why my normal insurance doesn't cover X or Y (it does of course).

andersmurphyyesterday at 6:07 PM

That's the irony of Mythos. It doesn't need to exist. LLM vibe slop has already eroded the security of your average site.

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