Picture this: you’re reviewing a pull request at 11pm, coffee going cold, and you notice the diff swaps out an IBM Quantum backend for /dev/urandom — Linux’s plain old pseudorandom number generator. You laugh. Then you stop laughing. Then you start reading the comments, because something real is being said here.
That’s exactly the situation that lit up Hacker News and Reddit in 2026, when a developer replaced the IBM Quantum backend in a project with /dev/urandom and pushed it live. Not as a joke. As a point.
What Actually Happened
The swap targeted what the community started calling “Project 11” — a solution that had wired in a quantum computing component in a way that, according to the people pulling it apart on Hacker News, wasn’t doing anything a basic random source couldn’t do just as well. The IBM Quantum backend was there, but it wasn’t earning its place.
The developer behind the change was clear about the intent: this wasn’t a shot at quantum computing as a field. The Hacker News thread made that explicit early on — “this isn’t a jab at QC but rather a jab at project 11 and possibly the submission author.” The quantum computer component of the original solution, as one commenter put it, simply wasn’t doing what quantum computing is actually for.
And /dev/urandom worked fine in its place. That’s the part that stings.
The Speed Argument Is a Red Herring
A lot of the initial reaction focused on performance — people assuming the point was that /dev/urandom is faster, or cheaper, or more accessible than queuing jobs on IBM’s quantum hardware. But the thread pushed back on that framing pretty quickly.
“They are missing the point though. The point is not even to be faster but to show that the QC component of the original solution is not doing” — and that sentence fragment from the thread says everything. The argument was never about speed. It was about whether quantum computing was being used for something it’s actually suited to, or whether it was being bolted on for the optics.
As someone who builds bots for a living, I see this pattern constantly. A new technology shows up, it’s exciting, and suddenly it’s in every architecture diagram whether it belongs there or not. Quantum computing is just the current high-status ingredient. Swap it in, mention it in the README, watch the eyebrows go up in the demo.
What This Means for Bot Builders Specifically
If you’re building bots — conversational agents, automation pipelines, decision-making systems — the temptation to reach for the most impressive-sounding backend is real. I get it. But your users don’t care what’s under the hood. They care whether the bot works.
Quantum computing does have genuine use cases. Optimization problems at scale, certain types of simulation, cryptography research — these are areas where the technology has something real to offer. But if your bot is picking a random response from a weighted list, or shuffling a deck of cards, or generating a session token, you do not need a quantum backend. You need /dev/urandom. Or crypto.randomBytes(). Or honestly just Math.random() depending on the stakes.
The discipline of asking “does this component actually need to be here” is one of the most underrated skills in software. Not every layer of your stack needs to be the latest thing. Some of it just needs to work.
The Broader Signal
What made this story travel — Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter reposts — wasn’t the technical detail. It was the recognition. Developers saw themselves in it, or saw projects they’d worked on, or saw pitches they’d sat through where quantum was name-dropped without any real justification.
The discussion it sparked around quantum computing’s practical applications is genuinely useful. Not because quantum is overhyped in some absolute sense, but because any technology gets misapplied when adoption is driven by prestige rather than fit. The field deserves better than being used as a badge.
Replacing a quantum backend with /dev/urandom and having nothing break is a solid diagnostic. If your system can’t tell the difference, your system didn’t need quantum in the first place.
Next time you’re scoping a bot project and someone suggests a flashy backend component, ask the uncomfortable question early: what breaks if we swap this for the boring version? If the answer is “nothing,” you just saved yourself a lot of complexity — and maybe a very embarrassing pull request.
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