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.
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 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]
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Hacker News is so annoying about this. It really feels like sour grapes that people are shipping cool projects without one of the Y Combinator-type software engineers blessing the project with their handwritten code.
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
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"?
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.
That attitude unfortunately leads to people criticizing something without having enough evidence about it in the first place, like criticizing a book and later admitting you've only seen the cover and read the summary on the back.
I've written a lot in my life so far, including books and novels, and never used AI for it. I don't see the parallel. If you were right and it was the same as plagiarizing, then the use of AI should be prohibited entirely. However, to me it appears more akin to using tools like spell checkers, CAS pocket calculators, and Grammarly. It's another tool. I don't really get the fuzz people make about AI. I'm also fond of judging the content of texts regardless of the author. Has that idea come so much out of fashion?
Because plagiarization is not illegal. It’s just unethical and dishonest, and in certain contexts it gets you in trouble. Copyright violation is a specific type of plagiarism that is illegal, but LLM output is not and, in current legal understanding, can not be copyrighted.
Using the services of a human editor is not plagiarism, and mere editing is not considered coauthorship. Mentioning or thanking the editor is just a courtesy. LLMs don’t need thanks so most people probably agree it’s fine not to mention it.
What is absolutely not editorial use is making a hundred-word prompt and asking an LLM to expand it to a thousand-word blog post, or a thousand-line computer program, just like it wouldn’t be to ask or pay another human to do it for you. At most you’re then a coauthor of the LLM. This should be obvious, really, we have literally hundreds of years of history on the ethics and norms of assigning authorship on creative works. LLMs should change very little of that.
Obviously LLM-generated text generally doesn’t have the right quality. People aren’t just annoyed by it being LLM-generated, they are annoyed because the writing is bad in a soulless way.
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.
As I’ve also repetitively said, it’s simply dishonest and plagiarizing to offload most of the work you (explicitly or lying by omission) claim as "yours". I can’t understand people who think it’s just fine.
LLM generated text lacks a certain "soul" to it, and it becomes more and more empty the more places one reads it.
It has a certain quality to it that, when read again and again, feels hollow. That hollowness comes not only from the text itself and the same sentence structures and turns of a phrase, but also (and yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) that it suggests that the author didn't do more than massage the text with their eyeballs (as my high school Latin teacher accused me of doing).
And so, why should I (a human mind running on wet stuff and fueled with caffeine and various sugars from my morning soda and breakfast roll) pay any significant amount of my limited attention during a day on something that shows no indication that it was ever had its human co-author think about a single word that was put into the page?
And sometimes, the text belies that it wasn't written by a human as it misses things that are part of the human experience (or adds things that are not). "Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out." No human would write that. No human proofread it.
There is a deluge of content out there. Far too much for me to read everything that might be interesting. Text that looks like it's written entirely by an AI is more likely to be uninteresting than something that was crafted by a human.
If the page itself hasn't shown indication of a few seconds or minutes of a human touch... how much time should I spend reading it to see if it might be interesting to read more or look into the project?
Being an owner of Apollo V4 ITX UEB, I wondered what about 68080. With 64-bit and AMMX vector extensions. But the website briefly mentions "and on today's accelerator hardware". MiniMig is also not mentioned, but at least PiStorm is.
With regards to 68080, the toolchain that can make use of all features of 68080, is based on some old GCC and currently hosted on Linux amd64 which is a shame. And if original Amiga target is desired, this toolchain can do it too, and it is told to be more optimal than other compilers, especially self-hosted ones. GCC first lost ability to run on Amiga, then lost ability to generate m68k code.
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 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?
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.
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.
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
Your pet cemetery reference made me recall reviving puffy the dog in Something about Mary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzgrVW2uZWE
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.
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.
Probably the same things you do with NetBSD on a Macintosh IIci. In my case, it handles internal print services, AppleShare, DHCP and DNS.
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/
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.
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.
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 have nostalgia for early SunOS 4 because that was the first Unix system I got access to!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hacker News is so annoying about this. It really feels like sour grapes that people are shipping cool projects without one of the Y Combinator-type software engineers blessing the project with their handwritten code.
Use AI all you want but don’t imply that the work was done by you in any sense.
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
Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.
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"?
They can have all the fun they want however they want, but it's not interesting or valuable to anyone else.
It's annoying how many people think they have discovered the cheat code to collect Manhattens for trinkets.
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.
Since we cannot address criticism on the docs or code to the author, we have to address our criticism to the middleman and what he did.
That attitude unfortunately leads to people criticizing something without having enough evidence about it in the first place, like criticizing a book and later admitting you've only seen the cover and read the summary on the back.
Criticisms should have substance.
People really need to learn that using AI to build something doesn’t automatically mean you just left every plan, spec and decision up to the AI.
Can you do that? You absolutely can. Does everyone do that? No, absolutely not.
It’s not a black and white issue. And, honestly, it’s quite narrow sighted and narrow minded to think so.
The dev is not the middleman because Claude is not the author. Claude is the tool.
No. It’s dishonest, not in any way different from plagiarizing another human’s text or code without proper attribution.
I've written a lot in my life so far, including books and novels, and never used AI for it. I don't see the parallel. If you were right and it was the same as plagiarizing, then the use of AI should be prohibited entirely. However, to me it appears more akin to using tools like spell checkers, CAS pocket calculators, and Grammarly. It's another tool. I don't really get the fuzz people make about AI. I'm also fond of judging the content of texts regardless of the author. Has that idea come so much out of fashion?
Because plagiarization is not illegal. It’s just unethical and dishonest, and in certain contexts it gets you in trouble. Copyright violation is a specific type of plagiarism that is illegal, but LLM output is not and, in current legal understanding, can not be copyrighted.
Using the services of a human editor is not plagiarism, and mere editing is not considered coauthorship. Mentioning or thanking the editor is just a courtesy. LLMs don’t need thanks so most people probably agree it’s fine not to mention it.
What is absolutely not editorial use is making a hundred-word prompt and asking an LLM to expand it to a thousand-word blog post, or a thousand-line computer program, just like it wouldn’t be to ask or pay another human to do it for you. At most you’re then a coauthor of the LLM. This should be obvious, really, we have literally hundreds of years of history on the ethics and norms of assigning authorship on creative works. LLMs should change very little of that.
Obviously LLM-generated text generally doesn’t have the right quality. People aren’t just annoyed by it being LLM-generated, they are annoyed because the writing is bad in a soulless way.
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.
It's simply a pretty good proxy for lack of quality and care.
As I’ve also repetitively said, it’s simply dishonest and plagiarizing to offload most of the work you (explicitly or lying by omission) claim as "yours". I can’t understand people who think it’s just fine.
(concurring opinion)
LLM generated text lacks a certain "soul" to it, and it becomes more and more empty the more places one reads it.
It has a certain quality to it that, when read again and again, feels hollow. That hollowness comes not only from the text itself and the same sentence structures and turns of a phrase, but also (and yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) that it suggests that the author didn't do more than massage the text with their eyeballs (as my high school Latin teacher accused me of doing).
And so, why should I (a human mind running on wet stuff and fueled with caffeine and various sugars from my morning soda and breakfast roll) pay any significant amount of my limited attention during a day on something that shows no indication that it was ever had its human co-author think about a single word that was put into the page?
And sometimes, the text belies that it wasn't written by a human as it misses things that are part of the human experience (or adds things that are not). "Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out." No human would write that. No human proofread it.
There is a deluge of content out there. Far too much for me to read everything that might be interesting. Text that looks like it's written entirely by an AI is more likely to be uninteresting than something that was crafted by a human.
If the page itself hasn't shown indication of a few seconds or minutes of a human touch... how much time should I spend reading it to see if it might be interesting to read more or look into the project?
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.
Being an owner of Apollo V4 ITX UEB, I wondered what about 68080. With 64-bit and AMMX vector extensions. But the website briefly mentions "and on today's accelerator hardware". MiniMig is also not mentioned, but at least PiStorm is.
With regards to 68080, the toolchain that can make use of all features of 68080, is based on some old GCC and currently hosted on Linux amd64 which is a shame. And if original Amiga target is desired, this toolchain can do it too, and it is told to be more optimal than other compilers, especially self-hosted ones. GCC first lost ability to run on Amiga, then lost ability to generate m68k code.
I like that the screen recordings are ‘Real time, with the long waits taken out.’