One underrated thing about the recent frontier models, IMO, is that they are obviating the need for image gen as a standalone thing. Opus 4.6 (and apparently 3.1 Pro as well) doesn't have the ability to generate images but it is so good at making SVG that it basically doesn't matter at this point. And the benefit of SVG is that it can be animated and interactive.
I find this fascinating because it literally just happened in the past few months. Up until ~summer of 2025, the SVG these models made was consistently buggy and crude. By December of 2026, I was able to get results like this from Opus 4.5 (Henry James: the RPG, made almost entirely with SVG): https://the-ambassadors.vercel.app
And now it looks like Gemini 3.1 Pro has vaulted past it.
> doesn't have the ability to generate images but it is so good at making SVG that it basically doesn't matter at this point
Yeah, since the invention of vector images, suddenly no one cares about raster images anymore.
Obviously not true, but that's how your comment reads right now. "Image" is very different from "Image", and one doesn't automagically replace the other.
This reminds me of the time I printed a poster with a blown up version of some image for a high school history project. A classmate asked how I did it, so I started going on about how I used software to vectorize the image. Turned out he didn't care about any of that and just wanted the name of the print shop.
Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought processes that create good code.
However, I think there is also something qualitatively different about how work is done in these two domains.
Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader).
The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants, primary sources) are used along the way.
Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a readership. Many thanks for helping me do that.
I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested: https://github.com/benjaminbreen).
I am a historian and am putting together a grant application for a somewhat similar project (different era and language though). Would you be open to discussing a collaboration? My email is bebreen [at] ucsc [dot] edu.
Mostly, I gave it some feedback and steered it a little but it's 99% percent Gemini 3. It would be interesting to make something like this "live" in that it could simulate each day of 1995 (say) anew, updating each morning.
Especially this bit: "[Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status...]"
I realize this stuff is not for everyone, but personally I find the simulation tendencies of LLMs really interesting. It is just about the only truly novel thing about them. My mental model for LLMs is increasingly "improv comedy." They are good at riffing on things and making odd connections. Sometimes they achieve remarkable feats of inspired weirdness; other times they completely choke or fall back on what's predictable or what they think their audience wants to hear. And they are best if not taken entirely seriously.
Was going to say - it would be fascinating to go a step further and have Gemini simulate the actual articles. That would elevate this to level of something like an art piece. Really enjoyed this, thank you for posting it.
I'm going to go ask Claude Code to create a functional HyperCard stack version of HN from 1994 now...
Edit: just got a working version of HyperCardHackerNews, will deploy to Vercel and post shortly...
First let’s have it create maybe 100 more entries, then have people vote on which are the best 30, THEN put all the effort into creating all the fake articles and discussions. As good as the current 30 are, maybe the set could still be made twice as good. And have a set of short “explain xkcd”-style entries somewhere so people can read up on what the joke is, when they miss a specific one. Then send it to The Onion and let them make a whole business around it or something.
Definitely one of the best HN posts ever. I mean come on!:
FDA approves over-the-counter CRISPR for lactose intolerance (fda.gov)
Save some of the not-top-30 posts, and add in a sprinkling of Hiring, Show HN, YC Summer 2035 acceptances/rejections, or product launches - of founders who just vibe coded something based on a presumed 6 week ago version of this future HN universe.
I read Ulysses Grant's memoirs awhile back, and loved his description of being in San Francisco in the 1850s. (Another tidbit I loved is that he imagined an alternate path for his life where he would have settled down in the Bay Area and become a math teacher):
"The immigrant, on arriving, found himself a stranger, in a strange land, far from friends. Time pressed, for the little means that could be realized from the sale of what was left of the outfit would not support a man long at California prices. Many became discouraged. Others would take off their coats and look for a job, no matter what it might be. These succeeded as a rule. There were many young men who had studied professions before they went to California, and who had never done a day's manual labor in their lives, who took in the situation at once and went to work to make a start at anything they could get to do. Some supplied carpenters and masons with material—carrying plank, brick, or mortar, as the case might be; others drove stages, drays, or baggage wagons, until they could do better. More became discouraged early and spent their time looking up people who would 'treat,' or lounging about restaurants and gambling houses where free lunches were furnished daily."
Same. Never lived there- though almost moved in the 1990s- and now feel a pull to learn/feel the history. Did also just finish Grant's memoirs- and would strongly recommend Sherman's if you haven't read those, not only for the SF parts. Some of his letters are incredible and dare I say relevant today.
Terrible, no good, upsetting, false class consciousness-derived take.
The point of the left is to bring prosperity into reach for everyone, not to stroke the hair of able young men in poker dens who refuse to work, and whisper "You're valid."
That's what capital wants the left to degrade into.
Thank you! So glad people here are reading (I'm the author of the post). I'm doing student meetings and grading all day but happy to answer questions or discuss anything historical with the HN community in between!
Question: How would you characterize the response to LLMs across the historical profession as a whole? Do you expect LLMs to lead to major changes in how historians approach research in the next ~5 years, or do you think they will be used by just a minority of people?
I think the median response is something between revulsion and mild dislike if it's spoken about in the context of the classroom. But there are also a pretty significant group of people who find it interesting as a potential research tool. (Also the question of what "it" is matters a lot here - if you asked people in history about ChatGPT, the response would be massively different than if you asked about machine learning tools for OCR and data mining historical documents, which there is a lot of support for).
Personally I think it absolutely will lead to major changes in historical research. The transcription and translation abilities of transformer models alone are already leading to significant changes and advances. For instance, I'm working on a post about new transformer based OCR tools like Leo that are geared specifically for historical research and led by historians (https://www.tryleo.ai - I'm not involved in the project, just an interested observer).
IMO AI tools will definitely still be used by a minority of historians in a 5-10 year horizon. Historical research is not like some STEM fields where there is a lab-base culture oriented around adopting new tech and finding applications quickly. It's a lot more of a solo, idiosyncratic process of personal research and that is partly why I like it, but it also means that uptake of new tools is much slower. That said, historians do use technology and digital tools all the time and are not inherently adverse to it. It's interesting reading history books from the 1970s, like the works of Lawrence Stone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Stone) and seeing the footnotes about how the data was encoded in punchcards and analyzed by mainframes. I expect we will be seeing history books by the end of the 2020s that use custom data analytics and tagging tools developed by the historians themselves using vibe coding.
Thanks for the question, will be writing more about this. Feel free to get in touch any time.
Agreed. Or at least the best non-Shakespeare play I've ever read, and among the best works of 20th century literature. I really can't recommend Arcadia highly enough. It's both deeply moving and extremely thought-provoking, clever, and intellectual interesting.
Currently working on an idea like this, but its a history simulator for educational use - I find that LLMs respond rather well to being grounded in a specific time/setting in real world history, as opposed to being told to roleplay a fictional setting. The latent space of any fictional world is close enough to other fictional worlds that they will rapidly slide off into other similar-sounding settings. Whereas if you return them to a super-specific historical context each go-around ("The time is now 3:13 pm. It is August 3, 1348. You are currently simulating the functioning of a small vineyard in Normandy. The farmer, [NPC name], is looking for helpers in the fields") they will be able to pull from a pretty solid baseline of background knowledge and do a decent job with it.
Some fun things I've been experimenting with is 1) injecting primary sources from a given time and place into the LLMs contex to further ground it in "reality" and 2) asking the LLM to try to simulate the actual historical language of the era - i.e. a toggle button to switch to medieval French. Gemini flash lite, the only economical model for this sort of thing, is not great at this yet but in a year or so I think it will be a fascinating history and language learning tool.
Have been meaning to write this project up for HN but if anyone wants to try a very early version of it, it's here - you can modify the url to pick a specific year and region or just do the base url for a fully random spawn, i.e. here is Europe in 1348:
https://historysimulator.vercel.app/1348/europe
I find this fascinating because it literally just happened in the past few months. Up until ~summer of 2025, the SVG these models made was consistently buggy and crude. By December of 2026, I was able to get results like this from Opus 4.5 (Henry James: the RPG, made almost entirely with SVG): https://the-ambassadors.vercel.app
And now it looks like Gemini 3.1 Pro has vaulted past it.
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