January 10, 2026
Book club or bot club?
Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books
AI tries to map 100 books; readers split between awe, eye-rolls, and 'monetize it'
TLDR: Someone used an AI tool to automatically map common themes across 100 books. The crowd’s divided: some say it smells like slick but shaky AI prose, others crack conspiracy and cash-grab jokes, and a few share legit use cases—highlighting promise, but also the need for accuracy and reality checks.
An internet tinkerer fed 100 books into Claude Code (an AI helper) to find hidden themes, spitting out poetic connections like “rule-breaking leads to understanding,” “monopolies rise, fall, repeat,” and “speed wins fights.” The visuals look slick and the ideas are spicy — but the comments are the real show. One early voice calls out the AI vibe immediately, saying the write-ups read like a robot trying to be profound, and flags a suspect link from “fictions” to “internal motives.” Cue the jokes: when the author notes the AI kept drifting toward secrecy and conspiracy, someone deadpans that it “wants the keys to your system.” Another reader goes full cautionary tale, warning this vibe is how you drift from book club to tinfoil-hat club. Meanwhile a startup-minded fan drops the classic “Monetize it!” grenade, and a power user jumps in with a real-world flex: they’ve been using Claude Code to “read” scary GitHub projects, even diving into a Russian deep‑packet inspection tool like GoodbyeDPI. The crowd splits between wonder at the creative mashups and suspicion that the links are pretty but flimsy. Bottom line: dazzling map, heated debate over whether it’s insight — or just AI-scented word salad.
Key Points
- •A project analyzes 100 books to discover thematic links using Claude Code.
- •The article presents a list of concise cross-book themes as the primary output.
- •Themes include deception, innovation through weak IP, and rule-breaking as a path to understanding.
- •Systems and coordination topics appear frequently, such as constraints shaping wholes and trust enabled by measurement.
- •An explainer is available that describes how the analysis and link discovery process works.