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Posted by stefanvdw1 23 hours ago

Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project(www.openchaos.dev)
398 points | 82 comments
tedivm 20 hours ago|
When 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/

2. https://github.com/ScreepsQuorum/screeps-quorum

3. https://www.gitconsensus.com/

4. https://pypi.org/project/gitconsensus/

lucb1e 20 hours ago||
I don't get the title. Do I understand correctly this is basically "Twitch plays Github" without Twitch?
repeekad 16 hours ago||
GitHub plays GitHub?
mistrate 16 hours ago||
yea
Dinux 20 hours ago||
I'd expect even more chaos, let an LLM build the features and people vote.
Lerc 2 hours ago||
I kind-of want to see an experiment going the other way.

Have a repo that has a committee of AI models deciding what to merge. Inform them of the goals of the project and that they should only allow positive changes but people are allowed to make adversarial PRs.

It can be more active because the committee can meet on demand. Then people and AI's can attempt to bend the project to their wills.

stavros 18 hours ago|||
Behold: https://theboard.stavros.io/
oniony 20 hours ago|||
I honestly thought that this is what it was initially.
deadbabe 20 hours ago||
Is most code not written by LLMs these days anyway?
Kinrany 19 hours ago||
Most code by lines, perhaps, but not most code that works and is useful
genghisjahn 17 hours ago||
Says who?
all2 16 hours ago|||
Says 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.

K0balt 13 hours ago|||
I’ve been pleasantly surprised how useful it is for writing low level stuff like peripheral drivers on imbedded platforms. It’s actually-simple- stuff, but exactingly technical and detail oriented. It’s interesting that it can work so well, then go wildly off the rails and be impossible to wrestle back on unless you go way back in the context or even start a completely new context and feed in only what is currently relevant (this has become my main strategy)

Still, it’s amazingly good at wrestling the harmony of a bunch of technical details and applying them to a tried and true design paradigm to create an API for new devices or to handle tricky timing, things like that. Until it isn’t and you have to abort the session and build a new one because it has worked itself into some kind of context corner where it obsesses about something that is just wrong or irrelevant.

Still, it’s a solid 2x on production, and my code is arguably more maintainable because I don’t get tempted to be clever or skip clarifying patterns.

There is a level of wholistic complexity that kills it though. The trick is dividing the structure and tasks into self contained components that contain any relevant state within their confines to the maximum practical extent, even if there is a lot of interdependent state going on inside. It’s sort a mod a meta-functional paradigm working with inherently state-centric modules.

lucb1e 14 hours ago||||
> a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding

Wut, what's the purpose of that? Is this just a toy learning project? Would it be to make money off of people who don't know that an ad-free version of HN exists at news.ycombinator.com? Will you try to sell it to Ycombinator?

ceroxylon 51 minutes ago||
I am hoping they are developing it as a satirical art project, otherwise... yikes; needing a credit card and an ad blocker to use HN would be very depressing and is counter to everything I enjoy about this forum.
owebmaster 6 hours ago|||
I'm glad you are not being competent enough to create a paid version of HN with the help of AI
bigstrat2003 11 hours ago||||
Says anyone with a modest level of skill at programming. It doesn't take a genius programmer to realize these things are terrible at writing code.
jaredhallen 8 hours ago||
Not a developer by trade. But incidentally, today I took my first stab at "vibe coding". I wrote a little gui program to streamline a process that I've been doing for years. The code is an absolute wreck. But the program works and does what it's meant to do. I wouldn't ever expect anyone to maintain it, but for what it is, I can't complain. The alternative would have been for the tool to have not been written at all. The level of effort was so low that a) it passed the threshold of it being worth my time, and b) if it needs to be re-vibe-coded over again, then no worries.
jibal 16 hours ago|||
The name of the person who said it is on the left above the comment.
esquire_900 9 hours ago||
Cool 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.

bji9jhff 15 hours ago||
Is it a kind of computer-assisted Nomic [0]?

0: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

bshanks 12 hours ago||
See also PerlNomic: http://odbook.stanford.edu/static/filedocument/2009/11/15/Ch...
lexx 14 hours ago||
Nomic vibes indeed
sighansen 22 hours ago||
Really interesting. I wonder if something good will come out of it. It feels like twitch plays pomemon.
stavros 22 hours ago|
If you want to see a speedrun, I made the same thing around a month ago:

https://theboard.stavros.io

strangescript 19 hours ago||
This is cool, but once a week seems a little slow
throawayonthe 18 hours ago||
there's a PR for that! :p

https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos/pull/51

Kinrany 19 hours ago|||
The frequency should be adjusted based on the number of participants
lucb1e 14 hours ago||
Request merging the change you wish to see!
Kinrany 19 hours ago|||
It could merge any PR that reaches a set number of upvotes
Towaway69 18 hours ago||
is it forkable to have even more chaos?
mappum 22 hours ago||
Excited to see how this plays out, I made something similar a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286
drdeca 11 hours ago|
Oh 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.
anishgupta 18 hours 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 18 hours ago||
Would have been even more absurd if code AND PRs were all AI generated by different coding agents
appplication 18 hours ago||
Nothing is stopping that from happening tbh
jibal 16 hours ago||
It's not possible to generate anything productive this way.
lucb1e 14 hours ago||
Wikipedia 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 10 hours ago||
No, 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.

fourthark 20 hours ago|
The end product is... just the website?

I feel like I'm missing something.

drdaeman 19 hours ago||
It’s an absurdist art software project, devoid of any consistent intent or purpose beyond the operating principles.
Towaway69 18 hours ago||
codified dadaismus
danr4 19 hours ago|||
It can evolve into anything based on community votes
nish__ 8 hours ago|||
Just a website? Websites can do anything. It could evolve into a whole social network.
patcon 18 hours ago|||
So it begins?

Once you have governance that people stick around for, you can decide to do anything

ivanjermakov 18 hours ago||
It's not a product, it's a social experiment for programmers.
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