My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't.
It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.
Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.
FWIW by this point, many of us are in deep symbiosis.
Useful or not, another Amiga / Unix fan probably had fun and some learnings too.
At the very least, the real-world impact is that tokens have been spent, the outputs open sourced.
It would be nice to hear their voice survive the loops of agentic abstraction of course but I don't know if that is even possible at that higha level.
Maybe it's that, maybe it's "just another issue of alignment"? Potentially serious in aggregate and over time..
I personally don't mind the imo little "neuralese" (is that what we call it now?) here specifically. In any case it's good for you that you can (still?) tell?
Why not applaud the playground time/energy/token budget directed? Especially as a decades long NetBSD (and Amiga:) fan I do appreciate multitudes; maybe here not exactly the case in tone of writing but in relatively cheap, fun experiments / projects during the agentic take-off of 2026. The whole
trend reminds me a bit of remix/DJ culture; the "producing DJ"?
This is the 3rd time I am reading such a comment on HN within a day and I absolutely agree. It comes off as instantly disingenuous and a ‘turn off’ for someone to use an LLM for basic writing stuff. Not to mention it ends up being distracting in a meta sort of way.
Also, to congratulate the author feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager for a project rather than the skills and knowledge of a programmer
It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management
And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so
It's not important at all and I wish people would stop mentioning AI. If you have criticisms on the docs or code, by all means make them but they shouldn't concern "AI vs human" considerations. Humans have written plenty of bad and documentations, too, it really doesn't matter who wrote what to what extent, what matters is whether it's the right quality.
I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.
> You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process.
These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
I ran NetBSD 0.8 on my Amiga 500 (with a 68030 w/MMU, 68881, and SCSI hard drive sidecar), which co-existed in the same timeframe as Commodore's release.
Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD, especially since the latest NetBSD 11 release still fully supports Amiga[0]
> I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4
With X, using an Amiga 3000/4000 as a daily driver is possible. I did use an IBM PowerPC 43P as a daily driver under AIX 3.1 for a long while (until I gave up on having ssh working on it).
The 43P was, however, paired to a humongous Intergraph CRT that I can't move across a national border because of the amount of rare earths used to make it, and was a very ample desktop for the 2010s. Until the advent of 4K monitors, I didn't have anything beating that - on a VGA connection. The Amiga is far more limited than that.
In terms of vintage Unix desktops, it's hard to beat Acorn's RISC/iX with its IXI desktop. I believe Atari Unix also had something similarly cool.
> Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD
Nostalgia is my guess.
SVR4 on Amiga was the first SVR4 commercial release IIRC. Solaris 2.x came later, but not much later.
At Sun we had a saying for referring to garbage from the SVR4 that we had to fix, rewrite, or terminate with prejudice over time (think STREAMS, XTI, and all that, but also much of userland): 'it came from New Jersey'. So, yeah, I wouldn't want to run SVR4 for any reason other than nostalgia, and honestly not even nostalgia. For me nostalgia is for OpenSolaris and such.
I tried to get NetBSD on an Amiga way back as well and that was supposed to be my gateway from home computers to a real OS, but there was some problem with getting enough or working hard drive space or something that I can't recall exactly anymore.
So close, but still so far. It took several more years before I got some hardware that would run either NetBSD or Linux.
As an Amiga user, I don't even get the nostalgia for Amiga Unix. I don't have nostalgia for early versions of the various Unix versions I've used. It doesn't hit nearly the same as using AmigaOS on the Amiga did. Partly, I guess, because it's not different enough from what I use now.
I mean, Debian 3.1 (sarge) supported Amiga hardware. The support was dropped in 2007 (the next release), because not enough people were maintaining it. I would assume that it would be easier to re-start that effort, unless compatibility with actual Amix was important for some reason?
Other than for the fun of it and the possible identification of obscure bugs, is running NetBSD on an Amiga actually useful? I love that they still support it, but once you've installed it, what would you do with NetBSD on an Amiga.
Not that anybody needs to in this day and age with heaps of old laptops and raspberry pis and whatnot, but I knew someone with an Amiga running BSD for their mail server. A simple web server with static pages, or anything which is low volume would work just fine.
I've used LLMs to get the distributed Sprite OS running again, though I've yet to release it, and I'm not sure what that release will look like, if it ever happens.
One thing I really don't get, and I really hope I never do, is leave the front page/README/etc so ... Claude-ified (or GPT, plausibly, I guess):
native SCSI and ethernet drivers, proven on real hardware
Quake — runs; a benchmark more than a game, for now
running under emulation, real hardware next
The grimoire records both, confidence-tagged
I am becoming probably too okay with LLMs, and I'm probably about as "forgiving" of this stuff as anyone, but man, it's disheartening to see that for something as much of a passion project as "Amiga Unix", seemingly no-one bothered to write a page in a human voice for it. Maybe it's LLM-written, maybe a hybrid thing, I dunno. But at best it sounds like "Apple product release", IMO.
I know others will say the same about seeing LLM usage at all, and yeah... I don't really have a defense. It just feels like the "bare minimum of decency" to, well, at least make the front page less LLM-sounding.
Can't argue with you there. There's a ton of cool projects that people have vibecoded, and exist in domains where the fact that it's possibly insecure/poorly optimised/unmaintainable by humans doesn't really matter much. e.g. porting retro systems to, or writing new utilities for MiSTer FPGA. I love the platform, and the more stuff I can run on it, the better. Bugs are annoying, but not critical. The community gets software that may have never existed otherwise.
But still, somehow, when I see a Claudish README, it instantly gives me the ick. Write about your project. Tell us why you built it. Talk about the problems the bot helped you work through. I'm not going to judge you for not being able to code it all up yourself - but at least write the README in your own voice and tell me why you cared enough to do it.
My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't.
It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.
Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.
I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.
FWIW by this point, many of us are in deep symbiosis.
Useful or not, another Amiga / Unix fan probably had fun and some learnings too.
At the very least, the real-world impact is that tokens have been spent, the outputs open sourced.
It would be nice to hear their voice survive the loops of agentic abstraction of course but I don't know if that is even possible at that higha level.
Maybe it's that, maybe it's "just another issue of alignment"? Potentially serious in aggregate and over time..
I personally don't mind the imo little "neuralese" (is that what we call it now?) here specifically. In any case it's good for you that you can (still?) tell?
Why not applaud the playground time/energy/token budget directed? Especially as a decades long NetBSD (and Amiga:) fan I do appreciate multitudes; maybe here not exactly the case in tone of writing but in relatively cheap, fun experiments / projects during the agentic take-off of 2026. The whole trend reminds me a bit of remix/DJ culture; the "producing DJ"?
This is the 3rd time I am reading such a comment on HN within a day and I absolutely agree. It comes off as instantly disingenuous and a ‘turn off’ for someone to use an LLM for basic writing stuff. Not to mention it ends up being distracting in a meta sort of way.
Also, to congratulate the author feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager for a project rather than the skills and knowledge of a programmer
It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management
And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so
> feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager
Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.
It's not important at all and I wish people would stop mentioning AI. If you have criticisms on the docs or code, by all means make them but they shouldn't concern "AI vs human" considerations. Humans have written plenty of bad and documentations, too, it really doesn't matter who wrote what to what extent, what matters is whether it's the right quality.
I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.
> You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process.
These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
Really sad to reduce ourselves to meat-proxies.
If people can't adapt then they will get left behind. There is little value in providing a username for LLM to speak instead of you.
I ran NetBSD 0.8 on my Amiga 500 (with a 68030 w/MMU, 68881, and SCSI hard drive sidecar), which co-existed in the same timeframe as Commodore's release.
Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD, especially since the latest NetBSD 11 release still fully supports Amiga[0]
[0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/
> I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4
With X, using an Amiga 3000/4000 as a daily driver is possible. I did use an IBM PowerPC 43P as a daily driver under AIX 3.1 for a long while (until I gave up on having ssh working on it).
The 43P was, however, paired to a humongous Intergraph CRT that I can't move across a national border because of the amount of rare earths used to make it, and was a very ample desktop for the 2010s. Until the advent of 4K monitors, I didn't have anything beating that - on a VGA connection. The Amiga is far more limited than that.
In terms of vintage Unix desktops, it's hard to beat Acorn's RISC/iX with its IXI desktop. I believe Atari Unix also had something similarly cool.
> Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD
Nostalgia is my guess.
SVR4 on Amiga was the first SVR4 commercial release IIRC. Solaris 2.x came later, but not much later.
At Sun we had a saying for referring to garbage from the SVR4 that we had to fix, rewrite, or terminate with prejudice over time (think STREAMS, XTI, and all that, but also much of userland): 'it came from New Jersey'. So, yeah, I wouldn't want to run SVR4 for any reason other than nostalgia, and honestly not even nostalgia. For me nostalgia is for OpenSolaris and such.
I tried to get NetBSD on an Amiga way back as well and that was supposed to be my gateway from home computers to a real OS, but there was some problem with getting enough or working hard drive space or something that I can't recall exactly anymore.
So close, but still so far. It took several more years before I got some hardware that would run either NetBSD or Linux.
As an Amiga user, I don't even get the nostalgia for Amiga Unix. I don't have nostalgia for early versions of the various Unix versions I've used. It doesn't hit nearly the same as using AmigaOS on the Amiga did. Partly, I guess, because it's not different enough from what I use now.
Your 500 had a 030?
You could buy accelerator boards for the 500 and 2000.
Ah, good point. I had a 500 and a 1200 but I can't really remember the wider scene.
This project might run into some trademark issues.
Do you think an AMIX owner is going to surface?
I primarily mean because of UNIX. And possibly also Amiga.
I mean, Debian 3.1 (sarge) supported Amiga hardware. The support was dropped in 2007 (the next release), because not enough people were maintaining it. I would assume that it would be easier to re-start that effort, unless compatibility with actual Amix was important for some reason?
NetBSD still runs on Amiga.
Other than for the fun of it and the possible identification of obscure bugs, is running NetBSD on an Amiga actually useful? I love that they still support it, but once you've installed it, what would you do with NetBSD on an Amiga.
Not that anybody needs to in this day and age with heaps of old laptops and raspberry pis and whatnot, but I knew someone with an Amiga running BSD for their mail server. A simple web server with static pages, or anything which is low volume would work just fine.
I get pet-cemetery vibes from these AI powered resurrections.
As in ... "the AI brought it back to life, but it came back /wrong/".
I've used LLMs to get the distributed Sprite OS running again, though I've yet to release it, and I'm not sure what that release will look like, if it ever happens.
One thing I really don't get, and I really hope I never do, is leave the front page/README/etc so ... Claude-ified (or GPT, plausibly, I guess):
I am becoming probably too okay with LLMs, and I'm probably about as "forgiving" of this stuff as anyone, but man, it's disheartening to see that for something as much of a passion project as "Amiga Unix", seemingly no-one bothered to write a page in a human voice for it. Maybe it's LLM-written, maybe a hybrid thing, I dunno. But at best it sounds like "Apple product release", IMO.I know others will say the same about seeing LLM usage at all, and yeah... I don't really have a defense. It just feels like the "bare minimum of decency" to, well, at least make the front page less LLM-sounding.
Can't argue with you there. There's a ton of cool projects that people have vibecoded, and exist in domains where the fact that it's possibly insecure/poorly optimised/unmaintainable by humans doesn't really matter much. e.g. porting retro systems to, or writing new utilities for MiSTer FPGA. I love the platform, and the more stuff I can run on it, the better. Bugs are annoying, but not critical. The community gets software that may have never existed otherwise.
But still, somehow, when I see a Claudish README, it instantly gives me the ick. Write about your project. Tell us why you built it. Talk about the problems the bot helped you work through. I'm not going to judge you for not being able to code it all up yourself - but at least write the README in your own voice and tell me why you cared enough to do it.
Your pet cemetery reference made me recall reviving puffy the dog in Something about Mary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzgrVW2uZWE
I mean, that Peri Fractic clown "owns Commodore" now and tried to sell people a phone that was rendered entirely using AI.
Maybe Amiga people are ready to drink from that chalice too?
Why do you feel he is a clown?
Because he's seeing success and fame, while the parent (most frustratingly) isn't.
If it didn't matter to them, they wouldn't have commented what they did.
His behaviour, mostly
He's primarily an entertainer, doesn't mean he's a clown.
I think there are worse clowns in corpos without careers on YouTube.
Wait, what? I'm on the waitlist for that phone as I thought it was a great idea in general, regardless of the renders. Have I been had?
I've never (ever) bought a phone because of what it looks like in marketing material.
From what I've read, the phone did not (does not?) yet physically exist
All his marketing has been via AI renders