I had Gemini train its own replacement for $9

I had Gemini train its own replacement for $9(petervijeh.com)

88 points by p-s-v 5 days ago | 43 comments

Request subtopic be changed to “I used Gemini to design a tool to replace specific uses of Gemini.”

The thinking people who would find this interesting and read this are probably more than capable of understanding this and critical enough to expect that. Conversation over the title is distraction of what's important. Just stick to keeping original source title and let people vote and down vote if they don't like it. That's what votes are for.

miroljub 5 days ago | |

Or just: "I used Gemini to generate a tool".

verdverm 5 days ago | |

titles on HN should match the original, rare exceptions

plufz 5 days ago | | |

Use the original title: Submit the actual title from the source page unless it is misleading or linkbait.

And this can be said to be misleading in my opinion

faidit 5 days ago |

Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots to praise their own products on Reddit. Thanks to training on genuine comments, some models are very good at sounding like a human commenter, and can easily generate a comment history with diverse interests to appear human, making them basically undetectable. So it seems like this method will, at some point, not identify the company with the best knife, but the one with the most ad spend on bot comments.

jpadkins 5 days ago | |

who the fuck is using reddit for product recommendations? reddit was astroturfed in like 2015.

chneu 5 days ago | | |

If not earlier. Reddit has been highly manipulated since at least 2015.

I used to buy/sell reddit usernames for astroturfing and it was always hilarious seeing one of my usernames on the front page.

latexr 5 days ago |

> This article was written with the assistance of AI. If that bothers you, stop reading here.

Genuinely appreciate the honesty. If you believe there’s nothing wrong about writing with AI, there’s no reason to not own up to it.

niekverw 5 days ago |

It’s unreadable but then again it says it on top, but it really is so why post it

josefresco 5 days ago |

The other day I wanted to gather Reddit comments about a solar panel vendor. Claude doesn't have access to I had Gemini do some "deep research". When I fed the verbose report back to Claude it basically said it was a bunch of "hallucinated bullshit".

doctoboggan 5 days ago | |

Use Claude code and the chrome plugin to access reddit.

josefresco 5 days ago | | |

Indeed, I just wanted to try out Gemini Deep Research with their gated access to Reddit. The next step would be for me to use Claude Code to load each URL and write it's own analysis - in this case I just offloaded some of the searching to free Gemini rather than burn my paid Claude tokens. That being said, I trust Reddit comments just about as much as I trust AI analysis on topics like this (solar leasing company evaluation)

bootlooped 5 days ago | |

I've never had a Gemini Deep Research report that didn't sound like a load of pseudo-intellectual BS. It always starts with a long grandiose preamble and then sounds way too academic, almost like a caricature of academia.

HappyPanacea 5 days ago | |

Well was it hallucinated bs?

josefresco 5 days ago | | |

I didn't read it, I just used Gemini to gather a list of Reddit URLs I will then have Claude "read" using my Chrome with an authenticated Reddit session.

yread 5 days ago |

I was hoping he tricked Gemini into running the training on the cluster that Gemini itself is running on. That would be novel!

foltik 5 days ago |

I found it much more useful to go to a knife shop and handle a whole bunch of knives for myself. They’re all pretty similar besides material, so not much signal you’re going to be able to glean from people arguing on reddit.

infecto 5 days ago | |

Most of the attributes don’t matter. Most people would be much better off with a $50 Victorinox that they kept sharp and a wood cutting board they maintained than upgrading the knife. If you are using it all day there are definitely looking things from a comfort perspective but for most homes, does not matter.

moron4hire 5 days ago | | |

It reminds me of The Menu and Nicholas Hoult's character.

chneu 5 days ago | |

That's called taking responsibility for your actions and being an informed consumer or a critical thinker.

Unfortunately that is completely undoable for most people nowadays. That's seen as "too much work" for most people. That's something that people see as a waste of time and should be done by something else for them. A knife should be a 5 second one-click buy, then when it sucks people will complain that all their options are bad.

You spent time/money traveling to a shop? In 2026!? Omg what a waste of time! Why didn't you aggregate the 500 product review sites and Reddit comments to pick 5 possible knives? (Sarcasm)

cubefox 5 days ago |

> This article was written with the assistance of AI. If that bothers you, stop reading here.

Okay!

_6wbq 5 days ago | |

I feel like this warning solves it. No shame or trouble needed for anyone.

submain 5 days ago | |

I stopped reading three sentences in when I realized it was getting hard to follow. AI explains it.

mpalmer 5 days ago |

    This article was written with the assistance of AI. If that bothers you, stop reading here. The numbers are real: every score comes from the ten training runs described below, and the full run log is in the linked knife.day write-up.

"I didn't write any of this, but you should still trust that the remaining work, ideas and observations are all mine."

To include a disclaimer like this is to fail to recognize that "real numbers" are way less meaningful when there's clear evidence that the prompter of the LLM is not really qualified to validate them.

itsalwaysgood 5 days ago | |

The reader assigns value to what is read. I found some value in what I read, even with all the holes.

It's a different way to think about a problem, even if it's not applicable in all areas.

quirkot 5 days ago |

I think this is the way. An LLM is an expensive general purpose tool and for repeatable tasks, after it's clarified the process flow, it builds cheaper special purpose tools for each step

jjice 5 days ago | |

100%. We now have super general tools that reduce the cost to build other specific tools. My favorite thing with LLMs has been building a ton of little utilities for work and personal that I could've built before, but never had the time at work or the want to spend time on in my personal time.

bguberfain 5 days ago |

Isn't it just learning to map specific words, from the "knife world", to the correct class? If so, a simple dictionary would fit. What I think is a better way to validate is to split train/validation by words used presented in NER classes (like, it should be able to find new brands never seen before). It is a interesting problem.

itsalwaysgood 5 days ago | |

That's a key piece of the article. He 'trusts' Gemini to classify the posts, and never hand validates anything.

And he continues building on top of that shakey trust. Is this a good idea?

It just depends on what you're doing: sounds like he's just having fun with a hobby, so it's harmless.

All he's really done is work more efficiently to save token cost and time. But he hasn't validated anything, so there's no telling if he's wasting time or not. It's a hobby though....

p-s-v 5 days ago | |

It wasn’t as simple as just mapping brands… for one I don’t have a complete dictionary of all the brands that could be mention.