alt Hacker NewsThis reads to me as fully written by LLMs. Pangram agrees. Note the (alleged) author misHQ’s comments on this thread are getting downvoted as obvious slop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706307
Even if it were written by hand, it’s a very poor and frankly stupid essay about an interesting topic. “The model's attention is a fixed quantity, and it has to add up to one, so the more things you make it look at, the less of that attention any single earlier thing can keep.” This is borderline gibberish and it outright rejects the interesting question about LLMs and attention, namely that they have very different capacities from us. LLMs can read an entire OpenAPI schema in seconds and immediately construct valid requests from it. The article first points this out, and then switches to arguing that LLMs have similar limits to us. It’s completely incoherent.
Replies
Alleged author here - on my regular account. Thanks for the feedback. I have been quite upfront about the use of AI in the foreword. I have severe inattentive ADHD and have used AI to take my writings and present them in a way in which I feel are much more coherent overall.
The actual criticisms you have about the content however, I'd like to challenge:
The "adding up to one" is just a simplified gloss over softmax. It's very possible it reads poorly, and thats on me - not LLM gibberish.
As for the incoherence - I have to totally disagree. You have merged the 2 things the post keeps apart - capacity and attention over it. That a model can swallow a schema and write code is a competence humans share. We have been doing it for decades. Besides, the claim was never about us sharing capacity (other than stating it is always bounded) - it was about our attention failing in eerily similar ways.
So, AI slop, no. AI assisted, absolutely. It's sad that some judge the "who" more important than the "what" - especially for this kind of writing. But it's fair feedback nonetheless. I'll see what else I can do with assisting my delivery.
I like the ideas presented, but you can only read so many variations of
> But an unbounded queue isn't a safety margin, it's a debt that keeps compounding [1]
before getting a headache.
I wish the whole thing was written better, because the idea of designing a codebase for humans and our limitations sounds fascinating. It's why I personally love type systems, you can keep less things in your head and let the type checker alert you of any possible errors.
[1]: https://shapeofthesystem.com/posts/2026/05/10/the-queue-that...