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Show HN: Sphinx – A hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping

81 points critiquebrowser 2 hours ago 23 comments

FOSS, Basically it plugs into your existing coding agent workflow and every time you push to prod it'll throw up a questionnaire that checks if you understand how the code you're pushing works.

totallykvothe 1 hour ago | parent

"Outsource your thinking"

I'm sorry, what?

tripleee 1 hour ago | parent

we're just leaning into it now

altmanaltman 1 hour ago | parent

I am trying to outsource my depression but the market is rough

freshnode 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah this is cooked

jamienk 1 hour ago | parent

I can kinda understand the motivation here: you push a bunch of slop (or is it deep, genius code?) but you have a kind of nagging suspicion that you should get to know it more familiarly, like back in the good old days a few months back when you sort of understood what was going on. I... don't... think this is going to work...? Remember Confirmation Fatigue? Soon we will have agents that interact with Sphinx for us.

linkdd 1 hour ago | parent

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/

Your slop generator should check if a name exist before claiming it.

shepherdjerred 46 minutes ago | parent

Just wait until you learn about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx

altmanaltman 1 hour ago | parent

People who care about the problem will definitely not be using this as a method to "understand" their code. People who don't care about this problem will continue to not care.

So, who is this for?

gandhiandy69 1 hour ago | parent

We went from micromanaging code to micromanaging tools and markdowns.

freshnode 1 hour ago | parent

Have you ever heard the idiom "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff"?

sshah03 1 hour ago | parent

I considered doing this with an open source app I have that let's you get a visual summary on a PR + get quizzed on it, but ultimately decided it's better to keep it an optional thing for people that want to understand AI PRs rather than force it as a gate, the volume is slowly becoming too high for even that. I agree with the sentiment behind this though as I felt this was needed as well.

hypfer 1 hour ago | parent

I mean I see the idea, but at least I use LLMs for code generation in two distinct ways.

The first is when I care about the code. That's when I actually read what it produces and force it to use my mental model of how things should be.

The second is when I just need a solution that sorta fits the requirements provided. Then I don't read the code because I really do not care.

So this hook would either ask me things I know, or it would ask me things I do not care about.

But I guess this is very workflow-dependent.

mikepurvis 33 minutes ago | parent

I think this tool is meant to be something you impose on your colleagues who treat all code like the second bucket.

nkmnz 54 minutes ago | parent

It’s ironic that all negative comments on here are dismissive because “slop’s baaaaad”. Yes, slop is bad. Carelessness is bad. Lack of understanding is bad. It always has been. Code has been copied from stackoverflow. Built-in methods or std libraries have been used in a wrong way. Edge cases haven’t been covered. Rate-limiting and other hardening tasks haven’t been taken care of until the system broke. The code wasn’t DRY.

Now, people are building tools that not only hide the solutions to these problems in some obscure coding tool, markdown file, or agent harness, but they build gates that help developers to elevate themselves from the darkness of not knowing better. The number of developers roughly doubles every ~3 years, so at any given time, half of the people building software have less than 3 years of experience. Most of them didn’t even study CS before starting their careers. Tools like this will be the new warning voice that told people like us 5 to 10 years ago to never copy code from stackoverflow that you didn’t understand. It’s great.

man_luke 46 minutes ago | parent

So who is the master of whom?

sailorganymede 32 minutes ago | parent

Honestly I love to see people working on this problem ! I actually built a similar project myself (https://github.com/bhurghundii/vibecheck.dev) except it prevents you from merging on the PR level. I’d love to get in touch to talk about it sometimes.

Edit: I see there are a lot of people questioning the value of this. The thing is that there are teams where people are just pumping tons of AI code without understanding their work (literally take the ticket and dump it) and shipping it. culture change is the right answer but v hard but this at least slows things down and is quick to implement

compounding-err 31 minutes ago | parent

This is cute and novel, but practically useless. For those who use AI efficiently and effectively, this is useless. For those who don't, this becomes friction they don't want. Who really needs this?

cjimesh 26 minutes ago | parent

Its the right problem statement, but we normally let the code review process take care of this.

thomask1995 25 minutes ago | parent

I think this would be killer for OSS maintainers.

jan_m_savage 9 minutes ago | parent

a tool written by AI (mostly) to check code written by (possibly other) AI.

however, it still feels like a lot of work. what if AI hallucinates during the check?