The Early Days of AI - Hacker News

Posted by tobihrbr 10/29/2025

21 points | 19 comments

kreetx 10/29/2025|

MCP isn't jQuery in the sense that it's supposed to be a standard or description of some sort, while currently isn't quite there yet: wrote about it from a brief reading here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44386078.

wrs 10/29/2025||

For some reason this post refers to duct tape (or the brand of it called Duck Tape) as “Duktape”, which was confusing because Duktape is actually the name of a JavaScript runtime engine!

wrs 10/29/2025||

“Most people reading this” are under 25? Where’d you get that statistic?

tobihrbr 10/29/2025|

I took the statistic from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery). I'm not sure about the age part though :)

behnamoh 10/29/2025||

> MCP is war.

Alright, enough with this bs blog.

tobihrbr 10/29/2025|

The war part is more about the competing AI companies. It's meant to be an analogy to the "browser wars" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars). Not meant to be BS, I just wanted to use the terms that were used during the early days of browsers.

isoprophlex 10/29/2025||

is this slop? is this an ad? it's both!

dont bother reading this. besides the overwrought statement in the title there is nothing novel or intellectually stimulating here, and it wants to sell you something.

jimbokun 10/29/2025||

It's an ad but the jQuery analogy is apt.

Probably could have said it in much fewer words, though.

AznHisoka 10/29/2025||

>> Probably could have said it in much fewer words, though.

So in other words, it's AI slop

tobihrbr 10/29/2025|||

It's an honest opinion that I had put into a blog post. It's written by me, though I did use LLMs to review and improve it (no copy pasting). I still feel like the analogy between early browsers and the current state of AI stands. There is in a sense a war being fought out and there are emerging standard and there is lot's of glue around that to make it work.

mock-possum 10/29/2025||

For what it’s worth, I did think it was an interesting line of thought -

The thing about LLM-generated content is that in order to get tracking it can’t look like it. Can’t read like it, can’t use the wording or the style of prose. It’s too much of a turnoff, it provokes revulsion.

You’re better off doing the opposite - use the LLM to help you with your initial content, then finish it yourself, taking care to remove the ‘tells’

antoniojtorres 10/29/2025|||

It has all the tells, em dashes as far as the eye can see, it even has the “Let me explain” from ChatGPT.

tobihrbr 10/29/2025|||

I wrote the post in notion which converts "--" to emdashes automatically.

mock-possum 10/29/2025|||

Also more than a few “it’s not X, it’s Y”

mock-possum 10/29/2025|||

Isn’t it a rule that if you’re going to write about LLMs you have to use an LLM to do it?

didacusc 10/29/2025||

Thank you for saving me many minutes. It has happened more and more recently that 'interesting' headlines lead to AI slop blog posts and it just all feels like such a waste of time. Sad that content has degenerated in this way.

zer00eyz 10/29/2025|

A better comparison would be XML.

What comes out of the other side will be better than what we have, but still not good... The next phase of XML agents is going to be its YAML age, better but not great, and we will just deal with it.

jimbokun 10/29/2025|

No, jQuery is a good analog for MCP. The author is absolutely right about the NxM -> N+M transition.

zer00eyz 10/29/2025||

No its not.

People still use jQuery... if you think any one is going to use any of the ductape and baling wire builds we have today I have news for you.

Everything we're building now is far more temporary, it's the DHTML/xhtml era.