Developer releases Jev-Leftpad, an API-based string padding library
A humorous npm package that uses an AI model to add spaces to strings instead of JavaScript's built-in padStart() method.
What to know
- Jev-leftpad is a deliberately impractical npm package that replaces a simple one-line JavaScript function (padStart) with an API call to an AI model.
- The package calls TypeSafe's Jev model for each padding operation, making it slower, more expensive, and more failure-prone than native code.
- The project gained 225 upvotes and 82 comments on Hacker News within hours, suggesting developers found it entertaining or noteworthy despite its lack of practical utility.
fka jev-leftpad developer
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Jev-Leftpad gains traction on Hacker News
The project rose to Hacker News frontpage with 225 points and 82 comments within hours of release, attracting developer interest despite the author's warnings about inefficiency and cost.
“Could this be one line with padStart() ? Yes. Does it need a model call? No. Anyway:…”
— fka, jev-leftpad developer · source -
2 outlets Jev-Leftpad
first by HN Best, 3d ago · also HN Frontpage
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> its confidence scoresimportant to note that the "confidence" score is... maybe not what people think it is - kind of useless, and just a convenience step from the probabilities.from the docs: "confidence is a statistic computed from the probability distribution the answer already gives you." [0] I actually encourage people to visit the docs…
2 more of the top 3 · 12 posts in this stretch
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Jev-Leftpad L: https:// github.com/f/jev-leftpad C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9784706 posted on 2026.09.21 at 04:39:32 (c=0, p=3)
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I have to be honest. While this is obviously a smart and useful idea, it misses one of the core features of Jev: its confidence scores. Partial confidence could easily be mapped to fractional spaces, using unicode characters like U+2009: THIN SPACE. As it stands, this package is not harnessing the full power of Jev.
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background
Developer releases jev-leftpad on GitHub — A developer published jev-leftpad, a Node.js package that uses TypeSafe's Jev AI model to add between 0 and 10 spaces to strings. The package requires setting a TYPESAFE_API_KEY, makes one API call per invocation, and explicitly warns against production use.
What people are saying 7 voices from 2 sites · best of 12 · verbatim
- Sep 21
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Jev-Leftpad: https:// github.com/f/jev-leftpad Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9784706
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This comes just in time. My app has been using Amazon Mechanical Turk for left-pad queries, and that service is shutting down in less than two weeks.
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Man we're going full 2015 ML, telling normies that confidence scores mean NOTHING to alleviate false negatives/positives.
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This is funny, because I just implemented the same feature, but mine is calling OpenAI’s Astra on High (very capable for this kind of feature).It works great, but maybe your implementation could save me some money. I’ll test it and report back.
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Instead of using Choice with criteria "space_0", "space_1"..., it could be even more elegant to use criteria names like "", " "... which could be directly inserted into response.
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This needs an SBOM and a SonarQube Qualitygate pass to be considered production grade code
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> This means the package can add between 0 and 10 spaces. If more than 10 spaces are needed, Jev has no correct option. Which feels appropriate for this project.I'll raise a PR which uses Jev to check if the target length is beyond this range