YHK - yet another hacker news clone

You say that like it’s a problem? Sounds like the junkies have to be fed one way or another.

Theyre already here. Theyre slower, but if you have 128GB And watts+time, you can so it.

Imvestors should be better. We dont need new models to do this, its now the hardware cartel propping up prices. Break that dam and moats gone Sam.

Nvidia, openai, anthropic; they know it now. 1 "frontier" model is for the 1%. Is equal to 10 models for ths majority.

Cloning existing games can be done with little to no work.

Building something new is challenging, with or without AI its orders of magnitude slower than copying.

Building something new is also risky. Copying something with proven vitality is less so.

Given this almost tautologically you should expect way more clones than novel things.

I have not explored this but If I wanted Claude Code to make a spiritual successor to Punch Out I would first have it clone Punch Out to see if it was capable of doing this, then if it worked I'd start changing the assets and mechanics one idea at a time until I had something with more novelty behind it.

Nostalgia

besides what the others replied, cloning can be done by people with very little skill in the area and in general it's always way easier to work from a proven design (existing game) than to come up with one from scratch.

As a game designer the answer is very obvious: That's hard work!

As a heavy LLM user there is another obvious answer: The LLM is very good at copying.

I suppose those are two sides of the same coin. All the hard decisions and all the creativity is already done.

Those aren't the only options though. I've long told people that want to get into game dev that the best thing to do is mod their favorite games. I'm hopeful that the technical ease to do that now leads to a lot of human creativity being expressed.

The U.S. labs may try to prevent their LLMs to be used for large-scale replicating of all software, hacking, etc, but I don’t understand the view that those things are history - I think they will become incredibly commonplace, especially if there aren’t any cross-industry standards. Do you really believe that it won’t become more commonplace over time?

> can't wait for the day when you end up in jail for the wrong prompt

I also can't wait for yesterday.

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-man-allegedly-dis...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1004747/...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/27/chatgpt...

One of the new threat models of local LLMs, especially abliterated ones, is hidden instructions or activation words that obscured trigger tool calls which exfil data.

For people touting about how their software can destroy the world, they aren't awfully creative on how it can achieve that. Hacking breaches of IP was probably most cynicists' top 3 questions asked when presented with the idea of "boosting productivity". If you make it "10x" faster to write code, you make it 10x faster for a hacker to hack. Naive cryptographic principles are less about an ironclad security and more about encryption that takes too much time to brute force. It all leads to one thing.

I'm still fairly adamant that those claims are mostly a myth. Because the worst inefficiencies in any workplace has little to do with the individual productivity of the proletariat. And because much of the most valuable work lies in creativity, ingenuity, and subtleties that lies outside of an LLM's expertise.

But loosely speaking, a lot of hacking does in fact come down to a lot of boring, repetitive tasks. Something a machine has always been king of.