The second thing I have to point out is that bug bounty programs are inundated with garbage from people who don't know anything about programming and just blindly trust whatever the LLM says. We even have the 'author' reproducing this blind reinforcement in the article: "Tested Jan 2026. Confirmed working."
The third thing I have to point out is that the response from Valve is not actually shown. We, the reader, are treated to an LLM-generated paraphrasal of something they may or may not have actually said.
Is it possible this issue is real and that Valve responded the way they did? Perhaps, but the article alone leaves me extremely skeptical based on past experiences with LLM-generated bug bounty reports.
I think raising that the raw Valve response wasn't provided is a valid, and correct, point to raise.
The problem is that that valid point is surrounding by what seems to be a character attack, based on little evidence, and that seemingly mirrors many of these "LLM witch-hunt" comments.
Should HN's guidelines be updated to directly call out this stuff as unconstructive? Pointing out the quality/facts of an article is one thing, calling out suspected tool usage without even evidence is quite another.
If any of the other instances whereby HN users have quoted the guidelines or tone policed each other are allowed then calling out generated content should be allowed.
It's constructive to do so because there is obvious and constant pressure to normalize the use of LLM generated content on this forum as there is everywhere else in our society. For all its faults and to its credit Hacker News is and should remain a place where human beings talk to other human beings. If we don't push back against this then HN will become nothing but bots posting and talking to other bots.
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Things should be judged for their quality, and comments should try to contribute positively to the discussion.
"I suspect they're a witch" isn't constructive nor makes HN a better place.
Creating a social stigma against the use of LLMs is constructive and necessary. It's no different than HN tone policing humor, because allowing humor would turn HN into Reddit.