Thread

1. Nurysso · 1790707936 · focus · HN ↗

   OHH my god this is soo awesome, I wonder how people build such things.

   1. Retr0id · 1790707997 · focus · HN ↗

      They opened their AI agent and typed "make me a 16-bit computer built from NAND gates" and hit enter.

      1. phoghed · 1790708490 · focus · HN ↗

         Go ahead and paste that into your coding harness of choice and see if you get this out.

         1. Retr0id · 1790708565 · focus · HN ↗

            It'd take a few extra sentences to get the details, but I'm confident enough that it would work that I'd rather save my tokens for something more personally interesting.

            1. phoghed · 1790709256 · focus · HN ↗

               4 sentences huh? I think I’m going to remain a doubter.

               1. Retr0id · 1790709385 · focus · HN ↗

                  I'm sincerely curious, when was the last time you tried agentic coding?

                  1. phoghed · 1790709593 · focus · HN ↗

                     [dead]

                  2. phoghed · 1790712821 · focus · HN ↗

                     [dead]

               2. ktm5j · 1790713300 · focus · HN ↗

                  Sometimes people disagree, don't take it personally. You might be right and they're wrong, but even still you don't have to blow up about it. That's why you got flagged.
            2. [deleted] · 1790720082 · focus · HN ↗

               [deleted]

         2. socializer · 1790708566 · focus · HN ↗

            Yes, the secret ingredient of these kinds of AI projects is being rich and spending an ungodly amount of money on it.

            I kinda get it as a tech demo, but projects like this leave a bad taste in my mouth because I'm not sure what they're really supposed to accomplish for the author or the community. It's probably not something the person was genuinely interested in, it has no commercial or educational value, so it just... sucks the air out of a hobby? There are quite a few people who designed and built their own computers from discrete gates, and we're sharing this page instead.

         3. anonzzzies · 1790754913 · focus · HN ↗

            I am tempted to try it, but it would waste tokens that I need. I'm quite sure it'll do it one shot though.

            1. phoghed · 1790772637 · focus · HN ↗

               No, it’d do something perhaps similar, surely worse, and you’d justify your failure by saying “yeah but I just did xyz it would have blah blah”

               There’s 0 chance you one-shot this, especially with the prompt the other guy gave.

               Could you eventually make something analogous? Sure. Code will, sooner than later, be as cheap as ideas are. People should start to adjust to that reality now instead of trying to dismiss anything an LLM touched as slop.

   2. btilly · 1790708871 · focus · HN ↗

      It has long been known that you can build any gate from NAND gates.

      So you can take an existing model of a computer, turn everything that isn't a NAND into a collection of NAND gates, then run software for the original computer.

   3. moosedev · 1790709153 · focus · HN ↗

      They don’t. Not any more.

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