I received several very emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author. They felt very out of place and did not engage substantively with any of the things I said. It was indeed very weird

The author, who I hadn't heard of before yesterday, actually seems like a cool dude. He was quite responsive, normal, and engaged with my feedback, which makes other random accounts being offended on his behalf all the more uncanny

Your post and the ones that followed are a good example of the contrarian dynamic that dang often talks about. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

In my own professional life, I've found this to be a very divisive statement. For some, it is a sign of wasting time and effort. For others, they use this to describe themselves when they want to do exploration for the goal of finding improvements, without any clear goal because they have a few ideas but none worth putting forward. I've been told to spend time learning AI and have found that saying "Yeah, I'm playing around with it." was the wrong thing to say because it was seen as not doing anything worthwhile. It doesn't matter that I would also say the majority of my tech skills were developed when I was "playing around".

I wonder if this is purely a linguistics breakdown, or if this is tied to some deeper difference in a person's relationship to tech?

Ironically, people with this mindset will sometimes ask people who they recognize as having strong skills to share their magic secret, which is assumed to be some books they read, videos they watched, courses they attended, etc. If you tell them that experimenting, playing around, etc. is a key element, they may assume you're just selfishly hoarding your fount of knowledge.

The whole "Wow, looks AI" > "Yeah, some of it is, we'll fix it later" was such a small part of the conversation, but then there are countless of other people chiming in about specifically the "Is It Slop Or Not?", rather than the meat of the conversation. And here we are adding even more meta-comments about it.

I took a look and honestly the replies were a lot more reasonable than I was expecting them to be. I don't think it's that out of place for people to inform you that the author has been in this space for some time and has prior work to look at (pre-vibe coding era). Really there was one reply citing his prior work, you responded to it calling it a very strange reply and were "very confused" why they would point to his history, even though you had just said things like:

>I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering

To me, it makes sense why someone would say the author has been interested in this area for a long time and pointed you to some prior work that was not vibe-coded, given your comment strongly implies they are just messing around and don't know much about the field.

To be clear, I share much of your feelings in your original comment. I just felt the replies weren't so unreasonable either. At least, I was expecting them to be a lot worse.

I agree with the other poster that is was very suspicious initially (sus af is not how I would put it, that sounds like a generational term) the author nuked their commit history while simultaneously pointing to a (Fable-written) paper which referenced the commit history in benchmarks. Then they seemingly had no understanding of why that's trust-breaking.

So to me, it sounds like the author didn't even read the paper they wrote, because otherwise they'd have remembered referencing the commit history, and wouldn't be asking us why we'd even care about it. “They” told us care! I'm glad they restored it but apparently that wouldn't have happened without the criticism.

What I didn’t understand when expressing confusion with the responses, and still don’t, is the personal nature of the response. It wasn’t pushing back against anything I said really, moreso it tried to bring up the credentials of the speaker; and, I guess this feels a nonsequitr

Like, if I say “I have these problems with thing X”, it doesn’t really matter who made X. Sure, it’s context I didn’t have and there is something to be gained in saying it; but, it doesn’t really change any of the critiques I had. Appealing to the authority of the creator doesn’t engage with nearly everything I said

How is that a non-sequitur? You're the one who brought up the topic of credibility in the first place. The comment was simply made in response to that.

"I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding" comes across as very backhanded and condescending. It sounds like you may have actually meant that genuinely, but it doesn't read that way in text form.

"you sound sus af" is not respectful or constructive in my opinion. It's a description of your own feelings, not a critique of the project, and there's not really any way for the author to respond besides ignoring it or saying "sorry you feel that way" or something.

I think that line undermines the rest of your comment, because I'm left thinking that you don't really expect good answers to your questions and you just think the whole thing is dumb.

I was writing the comment very stream of consciousness and not really think about how it may come across

If I were trying to boil down what I’m attempting to communicate, it would be 1. The project seems cool, but it’s also making some very strong claims that I’m hesitant to accept

2. The coolness of the thing is undermined by the presentation of it. It comes across as putting the cart is put before the horse, and the overly strong claims and marketing speak read as trying to rhetorically sway the audience rather than engage with them technically.

3. I genuinely am happy that the creator made this, but modulo the above worries I think it should be reeled in a bit. In part because of the concerns I have about the content, and further because it is the kind of language that I expect others to have a strong averse reaction to. Possibly to the point of also reaching the top of HN with their negative response

To a friend, it might be easy to capture some of this message with “you sounds sus af”, but to a stranger in the internet I see how I just sound like a jerk. Words do matter, and I think I’ll be more careful about this in the future

If I have years of experience on the topic and invested significant time into the project, I'd not be as civil as the author if someone came in and essentially called it vibecoded slop.

There is nothing weird about how others pointed out that the project appears to have merit contrary to how it at first might have looked to you.

If this is your first HN account and you haven't seen the site in the prior decade, the "emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author" is the SOP. The site has yielded to that attitude because dang never enforced a sensible code of conduct, and relies mostly on favoritism and in-groups. Who says is more important than what is said, and the critiques you give are ranked according to whom you are critical of.

Think of this as a propaganda channel of a VC startup incubator who is brazenly looking for a product-market fit for anything and everything AI. Look at the roster of the recent startups and how many are AI-focused. Adjust expectations from there.

But I guess I totally ignored the YC context in that interpretation

1. How does this benefit from GPU parallelism? I don't know much about implementing proof assistant, as I am just a user, but its my understanding that these tasks aren't amenable to running on a GPU.

2. The comparison to Lean/Agda/Isabelle/etc have no meaning without understanding what programs are being used for comparison. I also so far have no reason to believe large-scale verified programs would ever adapt to Bend. For instance, I have a large software verification project written in Cubical Agda https://github.com/um-catlab/cubical-categorical-logic it's not clear to me how one would even begin to port this over to Bend, especially given the dependence on cubical

3. Single commit history is hella sus

4. Bend uses "an affine dependent type theory". Substructural dependent type systems are an active area of research. If this weren't slop, I'd expect such a system to be worthy of publication at a top programming languages conference. It sounds quite unlikely that a random vibecoded project with a Fable-written paper has worked out all of the kinks

5. I would've at least expected this paper to be cited https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15258 but it is noticeably absent

I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering, but you are wildly overstating what you have here and sound sus af

1. The paper explains it well (sadly it is written by Claude for now, but it is accurate):

https://github.com/bendlang/bend/blob/main/paper/BendRT.pdf

In short, we implemented a complete allocator, garbage-collector, closure evaluator and functional evaluator, on the GPU (with zero interaction net overhead this time). We then use a very simple (for now) scheduler that spreads binary recursive calls as to saturate all CPU or GPU cores, depending on where it is running. This is the simplest thing that works fast. In the future, we want to have a more flexible task stealing queue, but contention destroys GPU performance, so, that's the best thing that works, for now.

2. Benchmarks aside, large scale verified programs would run much faster on Bend for a simple reason: Bend is fully explicit. It has no tactics, and it does zero compile-time search. As always: the less a computer does, the faster it runs. This is a tradeoff. In exchange, Bend code is substantially more verbose than Lean, and it is more laborious to write Bend proofs. I argue this is the right tradeoff, because AI write proofs, and AI time is cheap, while bugs take human time, which is expensive.

3. Sorry I'm not proud of the commit history

4. I don't think it is worthy publication because the core idea is simple. We just use QTT-like linear types to fully prohibit runtime closures. So, paradoxes like Russel's and Girard's are blocked. In exchange, functions like List.map are not expressive (without templates). So it is not a research breakthrough. I just made a conscious trade here, which makes Bend way closer to C or Rust, than to Haskell or Lean.

5. Will patch.

Great questions actually, and surprisingly respectful. I appreciate it a lot.

2. With no offense, but until it is demonstrated that this is useful for larger verified software projects I will be intensely skeptical; and, I'd advise not making claims like this until you have empirical evidence

4. Assuming this all holds air and isn't AI-bs (I'll make no claims in either direction), then yeah I'd say its valid research. To be clear with what you're claiming here, you're giving the impression that you have a GPU-accelerated proof assistant that is 2 orders of magnitude faster than Lean. If true, then that's a big and interesting contribution

Best of luck with everything. I certainly understand the frustration with how slow proof assistants can be, and I hope that we as a community can significantly speed them up

Thanks and your feedbacks are reasonable, I appreciate

1. When I see a comparison of a new proof checker to something like Agda/Lean, I initially evaluate them as systems for formalized mathematics, but I don't think you're making claims of that nature. Would you say that you'd expect, say, the new giganto proof of Fermat's Last Theorem to be expressible in Bend and faster than the corresponding Lean proof?

2. If the answer to the last one is no, that's not expressible, then what is the class of propositions/types that you express? My initial reading was that it was the whole of affine dependent type theory

3. Is the GPU used at both runtime and compile time?

2. You can express anything actually, because you can clone data, just not functions. So, anything you could implement with datatypes (i.e., without cloned closures), you could probably also prove. But again, people use and abuse closure cloning a lot in Lean. So, how ergonomic would that be? I don't know. It is less about expressivity and more about ergonomics.

3. No, just in the runtime for now. Checking proofs on the GPU will happen when we implement Bend in itself.

I suggest you read his history: https://gist.github.com/VictorTaelin/77fd5a2a8a4a07e1da6157e...

before making slop accusations. Older variant of what became Bend is 5 years old, so definitely not "vibe coded": https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM1

First, I think everything I said was respectful and rooted in the content of the Bend page rather than an assault of Victor as a person. I’m very confused by your random appeal to the author’s reputation here. He seems like a smart and cool dude, and I still have things to say in response to what’s presented here for Bend

Second, the paper is openly written by Fable 5.1, so I’m not making any unfounded accusations

Calling this "a random vibecoded project" is rather disrespectful, don't you think?

Regarding the paper, he states it clearly "designed by the human author". That's not at all the same as just asking Fable to write a paper. I mean the important thing is ideas, not the way they are described.

Please tell me how "I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding" is not disrespectful?

I thought that you thought Bend web site is all that is to it and wanted to point to relevant information. But if you think that "having fun vibecoding" is an appropriate thing to say to somebody who spent many years doing research, I don't know what else to say.

Again, as a "proof of research" take a look at : https://github.com/VictorTaelin/Interaction-Type-Theory that's 3 year old, pre-dates Fable, but OMG doesn't look like a paper.

External parties can’t do any meaningful discrimination between human and agent effort when the agent is doing the communicating. One may only read what’s there

I’m not saying that the author is inept or that they have done no work. There can be plenty of great underlying mathematics behind something that is vibecoded.

The reason I worry about the use of agents here is not because it invalidates any ideas or research done by the author; rather, it editorializes and oversells. It presents the claims of the work as an all encompassing solution to all of the worlds problems

There may very well be tons of great ideas here. However as presented, it reads as though the language is the solution to creating vibecoded apps and is equipowerful to state of the art proof assistants while being orders of magnitude more performant. That is a huge claim that has not yet been substantiated, and I do not believe that solely a human is currently making that claim

Regarding substantiation -- they released source code and demos. As far as I understand, the weakness is that proofs are very verbose as there are no strategies. etc. However, they are making a separate service for making these proofs using proprietary technology: https://bend-lang.com/bender

Yes, it doesn't look like a paper at all. I can see the idea, and it's an interesting idea, but no proofs that it works, no measurements, and no proper citations.

Nobody claims Victor hasn't done a lot of research. But academically inclined people typically expect claims to be substantiated either formally or empirically or both.

Academic people might have more trust in a paper which when through a lengthy publication process. But if you think about it, it's not a better proof than a direct access to the thing. It used to be hard to try out software but with modern tech it literally takes minutes...

Have you evaluated it?

Wouldn’t you be inclined to withhold any claims of anything being substantiated until it’s actually been evaluated?

Are you arguing with me or the parent who actually called it “sus af”?

> a random vibecoded project

> If this weren't slop...

> I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering

These impute both his motives ("fun") and particularly his level of seriousness ("random project" and "I like that you're interested"—imputing passivity, as opposed to "are studying" or "are researching," which would be more appropriate given the amount of time invested). They're all dismissive and patronizing.

I would actually regard this as bullying. Some feedback.

(I suspect you're an academic, either a researcher or student. I know from my own experience that bullying is endemic in many academic research environments, so if you find the negativity you're receiving "strange," I suggest finding a therapist, who may help you understand how your communication habits could be negatively affecting other people and unintentionally damaging your relationships.)

Your comment is a personal attack though, and much closer to bullying.

FWIW the author can and has spoken for themselves and noted the comment was “reasonable”.

The author was very polite to even reply at all.

I don't think stschaef is a bully; in fact, if my guess that he's a researcher is correct, I think he's likely highly altruistic (I've never met him, but categorically, researchers are people who chose a difficult, low-paying job doing work of great societal value).

However (again if my guess is right), I think he could easily be in an environment where narratives about people's work being worthless, about them being stupid or unserious or otherwise beneath consideration, are common. It's a reaction to the fact that in any field, the amount of research produced is overwhelmingly more than anyone can digest. There's a lot of unstated anxiety and guilt about that, on the side of both writers (who worry no one will read their research) and readers (who feel obligated to try to read everything and are eventually, inevitably overwhelmed), which IMO is itself a product of the basically altruistic nature of most researchers.

The overwhelming reality of being a researcher is an inescapable, empirical fact, but the narratives people create around that reality, about peoples' work and its worth, are not. People are hard-wired to be sensitive to rejection, because humans are a cooperative species and social acceptance is existential to each of us, and the problem is that a lot of researchers, who are steeped in these narratives, are trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle of community attachment threat: their research sucks (or could start to suck if they ever went on vacation), and the research of most of the people who are evaluating them sucks too.

What if these stories about the worth of people and their work aren't true? Guess what: one can do amazing research and it still goes nowhere, because ultimately it's not possible to control other peoples' behavior. If one's goal in research is acceptance and respect from the community, they should consider that they're gambling their time, energy and youth on an outcome they can't control. The research community can be a fine place, but it's not special—one does not have to be a researcher, and if the experience of being a researcher sucks for them, they should quit, because living a good life is their responsibility.

I grew up around this attitude, and children are particularly sensitive to attachment threat. It's bad enough that researchers tell these stories about each other, but once these narratives and communication patterns about peoples' work and its worth leak outside the context of the research community, they run right into the reality of human attachment and the expectations of communities that aren't the research community. I'll say about my own family: I think they were good people who learned an unhealthy, judgmental attitude (towards themselves as well as others). I think they immiserated themselves (and inevitably the people around them), because perpetual attachment threat had traumatized them into false sense of obligation, and I wish they had quit.

Even if one stays, they should understand the mismatch between the narratives and culture of the research community, and they needs and expectations of most people outside of it. That was the context of my comment. I think it's fine if stschaef doesn't like TFA and doesn't find Bend novel or interesting, but my analysis of the sentences quoted reflected my organic reaction to them, and I stand behind it and my other feedback.

Maybe not necessarily so, but while looking through the paper's bibliography I get the sense that these were AI-gathered references because there seems to be gaps in the current literature on this topic

I've also considered the possibility of a Rust rewrite of emacs, but after doing some more digging it seems like it may not be worth the effort. The remacs project seems to have been abandoned. I think they hit diminishing returns

Moreover, this ready like AI slop

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.21 (SwiftLaTeX PDFTeX 0.3.0) (preloaded format=swiftlatexpdftex) I can't find the format file `swiftlatexpdftex.fmt'!

Likewise for XeTeX

If we're talking about categories, then we should be able to provide definitions of objects and morphisms clearly and independently. I guess I expected this to give denotational semantics of machine learning in an appropriately structured category, and then afterwards we can provide an implementation of these abstractions in Rust; however, this doesn't seem to be the case in this book. Rather, the category theory does seem somewhat stapled on. I wished that this would talk about things like Markov categories (or some other appropriate appropriate semantic domain) and then characterized machine learning algorithms via adjunctions between certain categories, such as in https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44163-025-00707-w

As it's written, I don't see much of an opportunity for deriving theorems about the implementation from abstract nonsense, which, to me, would be the biggest strength of such a categorical description. This seems to be a simultaneous high-level introduction to Rust, machine learning, and category theory. The writing suffers from this, as the reader doesn't have much of an opportunity here to detangle these ideas from each other or see how one aids in understanding the others. Instead, they are all provide at once, and to an insufficient level of detail (for the amount of skimming that I did).