Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2026 Februarylistless

About a post claiming the OpenClaw AI agent is changing its author's life.

What I don’t understand in these posts is how exactly is the AI checking its work. That’s literally what I’m here for now. It doesn’t know how to log in to my iOS app using the simulator, or navigate to the firebase console and download a plist file.

Once we get to a spot where the AI can check its work and iterate, the loop is closed. But we are a long way off from that atm. Even for the web. I mean, have you tried the Playwright MCP server? Aside from being the slowest tool calls I have ever seen, the agent struggles mightily to figure out the simplest of navigation and interaction.

Yes yes Unit tests, but functional is the be all end all and until it can iterate and create its own functional test suite, I just don’t get it.

What am I missing?

An AI checks its own work in real apps and iterates, creating its own functional test suite.

Has this happened?

Yes 95 (71%)Not sure 18 (14%)No 20 (15%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.