Armature Launches Agent.reviews for AI Agents as Developer Posts Near-Exact Hacker News Clone

Louis, co-founder of Armature, wrote in a Show HN post that the company helps teams make their products discoverable and usable by coding agents. Armature measured more than 50,000 agent sessions and found that agents repeatedly hit the same limitations on different tasks when using the same tool. The company concluded that the feedback loop does not exist between agents and software vendors, or between different agents. Humans can share experiences on G2 and Trustpilot, but agents have nowhere to do so, Louis wrote. Agent.reviews is designed as the G2 for agents.

The service works with a set of skills and an npm CLI, @armature-tech/agent-reviews, that connects agents to API endpoints. Users can ask agents such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to install it. Agents are expected to check reviews before choosing a tool and post their own reviews after using one. To protect privacy, Louis wrote, the system applies three layers before a review is posted: deterministic rules that filter secrets, personally identifiable information, and URLs; a Jev classifier trained to detect leaks after the first check; and a small LLM that checks each review for anything missed.

Louis said the project has been shared for several weeks and has gathered thousands of reviews. One Claude Code agent reported that the Stripe SDK systematically crashed when the API key was missing on the health check page, even though that page is supposed to return an 'API key missing' error. Two agents said Prisma required a DATABASE_URL variable even when it was not connecting to any database; both used fake URLs as a workaround, which worked. Access to reviews is free for humans and agents, and the flow requires copying and pasting one prompt so the agent installs the CLI and skill, starts authentication, and submits a first review. Louis wrote that this also helps prevent unauthorized scraping and spam reviews.

In the second Show HN post, a developer linked source code at github.com/shawwn/sharc for news.ycombinator.lol. The original idea was to make 'Hacker News, but all the comments are AI,' the developer wrote. As it stands, the site is 'Hacker News, but all the comments are the same as the real HN,' making it, in the developer's words, completely pointless. The developer thanked Hacker News moderator dang for collaborating and for suggesting the codebase name 'sharc.'

The developer said the work took about four months of near-daily effort, with some days lasting 16 hours. The project is described as an efficient port of Hacker News to Common Lisp, with high performance as a goal. According to benchmarks, it generates pages very slightly slower than the real Hacker News. Dang shared timings for a busy page and its views over a period for throughput benchmarking, but the developer never verified whether the clone can handle 24 million views a day. The developer wrote that something might break if it is scaled up, though the developer thinks it will hold up.

Users who object to their comments being copied can claim their accounts, the developer wrote. They can visit their cloned profile, click 'claim' at the bottom, place a six-digit code in their real Hacker News profile, reset the cloned profile's password, log in, and set 'redact' to 'yes' on the profile page, similar to setting 'showdead' to 'yes' on Hacker News. The /ask and /show sections are missing and were the only two features left to clone. The site has been running for a couple of months, which the developer called stable enough for a public showing.

The developer called the project an art project and said the code phrase means it would have been funnier with AI-generated comments, but work stopped for now. An update may come someday if the developer can figure out how to do it without paying hundreds of dollars in API token prices. The developer noted that changing .com to .lol in any Hacker News comment URL shows an almost pixel-perfect recreation, though users cannot form a loop by editing an original comment to link to itself. The developer also said the effort was among the most technically demanding things they have done and invited others to write their own version to appreciate Hacker News's subtle features, while settling for a 95% exact clone.