Top all-time · #6234
Tom Bedor
Personal blog · tombedor.dev · on HN as jjfoooo4aiprogramming
Tom Bedor's personal blog at tombedor.dev covers ai and programming. Since 2025, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this post for its argument that asking for someone's attention means first showing human effort. Commenters cite it against AI-written sites, repos and blog posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thoughts on software, AI, and building things
Most-linked posts?
- If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2026-06-11
- Is the Future of AI Local?3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-03-21
- MCP Is a Fad2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-12-13
- Optimizing Repos for AI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-28
- Coding agents have no moat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-24
What Hacker News says?
There’s nothing special about llm tools. They’re really just script invocations. A command runner like just does everything you need, and makes the tools available to humans. I wrote a bit on the topic here: https://tombedor.dev/make-it-easy-for-humans/
Comment linking /make-it-easy-for-humans/
on “Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation”Submitted If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort as a story · 124 points
HN discussionI read this a couple weeks back and its appeal really stuck with me: if you expect someone to give their attention to something you made, make sure you've given your own attention and effort first. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
Comment linking /human-attention-and-human-effort/
on “Don't be a meat proxy”Submitted MCP Is a Fad as a story · 34 points
HN discussionThis site feels like AI slop, and it’s also not something I’d be able to send without feeling like asshole. I found this blog post to be much better at getting the point across: https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
Comment linking /human-attention-and-human-effort/
on “Don't Paste the AI, please”Submitted Coding agents have no moat as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort" https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
Comment linking /human-attention-and-human-effort/
on “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer”Submitted MCP Is a Fad as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPerry Street Software | https://www.perrystreet.com | Remote | Full-Time | Global Perry Street Software, the largest independent publisher of LGBTQ+ apps globally and creator of SCRUFF (www.scruff.com) and Jack'd (www.jackd.com), is hiring for Senior Ruby Developer. In this role, you will help build our Ruby API powering our family of mobile dating apps. We are looking for engineers who are passionate about architec…
Comment linking /human-attention-and-human-effort/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)”Submitted Coding agents have no moat as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI keep coming back to this https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/ The number of things that make it to the top of HN/Reddit/wherever now that are devoid a human's touch is exhausting. Whether it's a site that's got that Claude frontend smell, or a repo that's got a burst of 10 claude commits before getting shared and abandoned, or a series of blog posts that were written by LLMs... it's all, at this…
Comment linking /human-attention-and-human-effort/
on “Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper”Submitted Don't Write Docs Twice as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNo: https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
Comment linking /human-attention-and-human-effort/
on “Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper”Submitted MCP Is a Fad as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRequesting human attention demands demonstrating human effort[1]. Slop at its worst: obscuring actual insight. The main one being that there are no exponential growth curves, no hockey-sticks, they're all logistic s-curves at most. Sure, there is a lot happening right now, but although technologies such as trains reshaped society, society did not come to only consist of railways. [1] https://tombedor.dev/human-atten…
Comment linking /human-attention-and-human-effort/
on “S‑CURVES a field guide to technology adoption · 1825–2026”Submitted My First Encounter with a Political Spambot as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI favor automatic recall, invisible to the agent. For memory creation, I find tool calls do a pretty good job, though I also like automatic memory creation on context compression. I think with automatic creation you need async consolidation (calling it dreaming is a little dramatic for my taste). My implementation is at Elroy.bot, I recently wrote about different approaches to agent memory here: https://tombedor.dev…
Comment linking /approaches-to-agent-memory/
on “Open source memory layer so any AI agent can do what Claude.ai and ChatGPT do”Submitted The design of AI memory systems as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman. I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop. I wrote about it here: https://tombedor.dev/creativity/
Comment linking /creativity/
on “Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated”Submitted Is the Future of AI Local? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat is 100% what I think is going to happen. I wrote about it here: https://tombedor.dev/open-source-models/
Comment linking /open-source-models/
on “OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic”Submitted Is the Future of AI Local? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Make It Easy for Humans First, Then AI as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Make It Easy for Humans as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing Repos for AI as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing Repos for AI as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How I Use AI to Help Me Write as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Arguments Against Open Source AI Are Very Bad as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Instant Copy Trap Makes AI Creativity Impossible as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Can AI Be Creative? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion