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Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project
- kittikitti 8mo agoThis is a very interesting experiment where I hope the metamorphosis is more like a butterfly than Kafka.
- Esophagus4 8mo agoYes, this could end up either turning into a Linux or like when Microsoft released Tay and Twitter users taught it to be a Nazi. Or anywhere in between, really.
- jibal 8mo agoIt really can't for numerous reasons, one of them being that PRs have to be fairly low effort, and this will be even more so if the popular "merge daily" PR is voted in. People talk about this "evolving", but it's nothing like biological evolution or genetic algorithms. It's just a linear sequence of small changes, and without either planning and central authority or some stable fitness function (the ecological environment in biological evolution) the changes are directionless.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago> some stable fitness function The participants could always vote to add a test harness and CI/CD to vet pull requests against.
- jibal 8mo agoThat has nothing to do with a stable fitness function ... an external set of factors that determine which changes allow offspring to survive. This thing doesn't have offspring (or always has exactly one offspring and then the parent dies) and it survives until the whole thing collapses. And I think they already have what you describe or something like it ... PRs have to build and survive CI.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoIt should have been abundantly clear that wasn't the way the word "evolution" was being used here to being with. (Actually the comment you replied to used the word "metamorphosis" so what are you even going on about?) Nonetheless, if you're going to quibble that it isn't ahckchtually evolution because it's missing a fitness function then I'm going to counter that you can form a loose analogy so long as you have some fitness apparatus that's conceptually and operationally separable from the implementation itself. I think some unit tests and a CI pipeline is sufficient.
- jibal 8mo ago> It should have been abundantly clear that wasn't the way the word "evolution" was being used here to being with. My whole point was that the sort of evolution that this will undergo isn't like biological evolution so it won't be effective the way biological evolution is. That should have been abundantly clear. > Actually the comment you replied to used the word "metamorphosis" so what are you even going on about? Did you ever bother to look upthread? I wrote "People talk about this "evolving"", and that comment was not a response to the one mentioning metamorphosis. See the title: "Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project" I'm not quibbling and that's an offensive accusation as is your "ahckchtually" mocking as well as the rude tone of your clueless whooshes above so I will only respond you this once. Biological evolution has powerful mechanisms that this lacks ... in fact the biggest lack is that there's just one "organism" here, not a population, and just one change at a time. And your fitness function only determines whether something compiles and runs; it gives no direction to the "evolution" ... it's not being fit to anything that drives its progress (the choices come from the PRs, not from the fitness function, and they are independent of each other or at best loosely coupled--thus they aren't stable) which I explicitly pointed out previously when I mentioned the fitness function. So your "loose analogy" fails miserably and this thing is going to be directionless, as I said, and so it won't build up something like a Linux kernel or AGI (both of these have been mentioned, but hey, not in the comment that used the word "metamorphosis" -- apparently I have to say this).
- Esophagus4 8mo ago> the changes are directionless. I guess we’ll see whether that turns out to be true! Will be a fun experiment to watch, at least.
- polyomino 8mo agoThey should automate reading hacker news comments and generating PRs to address them
- staticassertion 8mo agoOpen a PR and suggest this.
- jibal 8mo agoYou can't just "suggest" something in a PR, you have to provide the change.
- staticassertion 8mo agoOkay, open claude code, tell it to open a PR
- sighansen 8mo agoReally interesting. I wonder if something good will come out of it. It feels like twitch plays pomemon.
- stavros 8mo agoIf you want to see a speedrun, I made the same thing around a month ago: https://theboard.stavros.io https://theboard.stavros.io
- mappum 8mo agoExcited to see how this plays out, I made something similar a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286
- drdeca 8mo agoOh man, I was going to try and find that to link to it. I can’t believe it was 10 years ago… I really enjoyed following that for a while. Thanks for making it.
- BinaryIgor 8mo agoAre guardrails, CI/CD, to make code at least compile-able and require minimal quality standards also possible to change via PR or managed somewhere else? With this possibility, it might went into oblivion indeed!
- 6r17 8mo agoI mean.... it's the spirit of the project to eventually be able to reach to that state. I freaking love that project woaw hahaha
- noncoml 8mo agoReading through the comments, it’s remarkable how many of us have had the same idea at some point Beautifully executed
- electrodisk 8mo agoconfused, what is this and what’s going on exactly?
- meltyness 8mo agoLike reddit but nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
- phreack 8mo agohttps://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos?tab=readme-ov-file#how-it-works https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos?tab=readme-ov-file#... Anyone makes a PR, there's a vote and highest voted one gets merged every week. It's marvelous.
- jedberg 8mo agoClick through to the GitHub link at the bottom, which has the README. It explains everything.
- libertyit 8mo agoGenius.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Dinux 8mo agoI'd expect even more chaos, let an LLM build the features and people vote.
- oniony 8mo agoI honestly thought that this is what it was initially.
- deadbabe 8mo agoIs most code not written by LLMs these days anyway?
- Kinrany 8mo agoMost code by lines, perhaps, but not most code that works and is useful
- genghisjahn 8mo agoSays who?
- all2 8mo agoSays anyone who has tried to do anything requiring the smallest amount of computer science or computer engineering. These models are really great at boilerplate and simple web apps. As soon as you get beyond that, it gets hairy. For example, I have a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding. Just those two features required a lot of hand holding. Figma Design nailed the UX, but the actual guts/business logic I had to spend time on. I expect that this will get easier as agentic flows get more mature, though. Then the only place that novelty will occur is in the actual study of computer science. And even then, a well contexted agentic pipeline will speed even R&D development to a great degree. One very bad thing about these things is the embedded dogma. With AI ruling the roost in terms of generation (basically an advanced and opinionated type-writer, lets be honest) breaking away from the standards in any field will become increasingly difficult. Just try and talk to any frontier model about physics that goes against what is currently accepted and they'll put up a lot of resistance.
- fourthark 8mo agoThe end product is... just the website? I feel like I'm missing something.
- drdaeman 8mo agoIt’s an absurdist art software project, devoid of any consistent intent or purpose beyond the operating principles.
- Towaway69 8mo agocodified dadaismus
- danr4 8mo agoIt can evolve into anything based on community votes
- ivanjermakov 8mo agoIt's not a product, it's a social experiment for programmers.
- patcon 8mo agoSo it begins? Once you have governance that people stick around for, you can decide to do anything
- nish__ 8mo agoJust a website? Websites can do anything. It could evolve into a whole social network.
- fwipsy 8mo agoTwitch plays Github?
- lucb1e 8mo agoI don't get the title. Do I understand correctly this is basically "Twitch plays Github" without Twitch?
- tedivm 8mo agoWhen I used to play Screeps[1], a MMO strategy game where you programmed to control your units and buildings, a group of us setup a player that was managed in this exact way called Quorum[2]. If anyone wants to run their own project in this way I open sourced the code to do so under the GitConsensus[3] project. There's a Github App (which may not still work, but if there's interest I'll restart it) and a "run it yourself" python library and CLI you can run from Github Actions[4]. 1. https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/ 2. https://github.com/ScreepsQuorum/screeps-quorum https://github.com/ScreepsQuorum/screeps-quorum 3. https://www.gitconsensus.com/ https://www.gitconsensus.com/ 4. https://pypi.org/project/gitconsensus/ https://pypi.org/project/gitconsensus/
- strangescript 8mo agoThis is cool, but once a week seems a little slow
- Kinrany 8mo agoThe frequency should be adjusted based on the number of participants
- lucb1e 8mo agoRequest merging the change you wish to see!
- Kinrany 8mo agoIt could merge any PR that reaches a set number of upvotes
- throawayonthe 8mo agothere's a PR for that! :p https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos/pull/51 https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos/pull/51
- Towaway69 8mo agois it forkable to have even more chaos?
- fullstackwife 8mo agoShould votes get invalidated after major change in the ongoing PR?
- alexpadula 8mo agoSorry to be a party pooper I just don’t get the point.
- izietto 8mo agoI don't think there's a point. You can always submit a point, if it gets voted you will have your point
- stingraycharles 8mo agoThis is exactly the point.
- Towaway69 8mo agoIt's a bit like bigtech but instead of product people voting on what gets merged, everyone gets a vote here.
- alexpadula 8mo agoYou know it’s kinda like a lottery the more I read it lol! If the repo got super popular and had lots of traffic say.
- anishgupta 8mo ago> The website IS the repo. The repo IS the website. I wonder if we get something productive by end of 2026 from this repo. Who knows, maybe we solve AGI
- Eldodi 8mo agoWould have been even more absurd if code AND PRs were all AI generated by different coding agents
- appplication 8mo agoNothing is stopping that from happening tbh
- jibal 8mo agoIt's not possible to generate anything productive this way.
- lucb1e 8mo agoWikipedia basically works this way. And instead of it being directly public, it goes through a voting process. One might argue it's actually much more curated than Wikipedia :P
- jibal 8mo agoNo, it doesn't work anything like this. > One might argue it's actually much more curated than Wikipedia Well duh. It's vastly more "curated" since Wikipedia isn't curated at all, almost anyone can change anything at any time but changes are supposed to reflect consensus (in theory, but there are numerous rogue agents who violate the rules) and it's a single instance with a linear set of changes that only occur once a week, whereas WP is a seething mass of constant change--but with a tight fitness function due to the (again theoretical) requirement that all changes must reflect reliable sources, not the whims of the editors--totally the opposite of OC. (There are additional policies and various governing groups but these make WP even less like OC). It's beyond absurd to liken OC to WP.
- SubiculumCode 8mo agoFirefox warns of a security threat when I visit the site.
- WithinReason 8mo agoMerging the security threat is yet to be voted on
- omoikane 8mo agoMaybe Firefox is prescient, just waiting for someone to create a problematic pull request that does something untoward while simultaneously locking everyone else from submitting pull requests (and get a bunch of bots to upvote it in the last second before the merge window closes).
- stingraycharles 8mo agoAm I the only one who's noticing that this "open chaos" project's most voted PRs are to add structure to the project (e.g., calculate +1/-1, etc.)? I guess people just desire a certain amount of structure to their chaos :)
- aalimov_ 8mo ago“Convenient chaos”
- hmokiguess 8mo agoCan’t have one without the other
- bji9jhff 8mo agoIs it a kind of computer-assisted Nomic [0]? 0: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
- flyrain 8mo agoI guess this is one sign that coding is drifting to an art, given the LLM is invading.
- oooyay 8mo agoA lot of engineering disciplines are a mixture of math, art, and science. Programming was no different, but I do think some people built up an identity that reinforced a difference that wasn't there to begin with.
- esquire_900 8mo agoCool social experiment. It's interesting how narrow the scope of all top voted PRs are: change this or that detail in the voting (daily, count down votes etc), or make it more efficient (rust). I wonder if this has the potential to build a "community" that will take this into a completely different direction, or if it will neatly stay within the initial boundaries.