Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name.
I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed. I certainly don’t read the long-winded AI comments or the AI documentation, but perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass.
I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by making it more concise. It came back after 20 minutes of work, did a line count and was aghast that the line count had somehow increased...
Even then it is conservative. For the love of God, compact the comments.
Comments become a huge maintenance burden, especially in the age of AI. They just grow and grow, and then mislead the AI later on.
If you really want to save your career, learning how to have real conversations is a vital skill.
Asking because when I was at capital one, certain comments or questions about topics like this, would actually get you noticed negatively by your manager and being disruptive to what leadership wants hurts your career.
In fact being the one to ask and point out questions like yours ultimately got me PIP'ed and removed from the company. So, like, yeah, being vulnerable and the first one to tell the truth is risky. That's why the bystander effect can happen and in politics or risky situations silence is a common response, and why we don't have more courageous people doing the right thing - because the risk is higher on the person speaking up and the rewards aren't disproportionately in their favor (but are evenly distributed though, so its not favorable for you as I learned from a game theory perspective to voice up / defend certain stances).
All the execs know that they can refresh the screen faster and see the features for marketing and sales.
When has engineering ever had a voice anyway? The bean counters have been looking to cut us out since the inception of our industry.
In this fucked up job market, it is easier said than done.
I feel like it's all just perception and how companies can sell their stories to investors or potential acquirers, and everything else can be punted and dealt with later when we get acquired or when share prices are a zillion dollars etc.
It's a race to the bottom, for sure.
I don’t have time to go through and flag everything or even read the thousands of lines of code changes that are happening.
1) Document what's there, not the diff. Documentation of how code was removed or changed to fix a bug or add a feature is not useful and difficult to maintain; documentation should explain how code works now.
2) Documentation should live close to the source as possible. Prefer line based comments and standardized function documentation. Top-level sweeping architectural essays are not maintainable for every change.
The last will depend on your codebase. It CAN be very useful to have a human-readable spec documented for the entire program and have it updated when anything changes. But the key is again, you're CHANGING it every time. If you add a whole new disconnected documentation file it should set off alarm bells; nothing in one system is truly disconnected.
We recently added a similar thing to our style guide, It’s astonishing to me that we have to spell this out, that something as obvious as this needs to be explained to LLM’s at all. They’re supposed to be exceeding human intelligence, at least at things like programming, but can’t understand basic things like what code comments are.
I wouldn’t say “post reading code” but it’s definitely trending in that direction.
I’d rather the agents put jumbo verbose descriptions in the PR description than in code comments TBH.
How do you enforce that?
My worry is that after several passes this compounds and starts introducing errors or biases, a bit like in the "telephone game" children play.
I wonder if I can get a MacArthur grant for this epiphany...
They totally gotta be doing that at OpenAI. Meeting invitees: You, co-workers, GPT 5.6.
It might be touching one line of actual code in a file, and take advantage of it to remove 20+ lines of actual useful comments.
Everybody is talking about the opposite, so I'm wondering if this is rare.
Sometimes I have luck interrogating Claude on why it did something. It'll either point to a skill or agent file with the culprit, or it'll respond with some vapid nonsense and apologize.
I ask because when I started informing it I made personal edits, it stopped doing this kind of thing so often and let me work _with_ it more.
My saved prompt now says never to assume a file has not been edited since the last time it was read between prompts.
Give feedback that about the docs and block merging till the issue is resolved.
Actually, rejecting them is precisely what will make them easy.
"Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review."
You're giving everybody (including yourself) more work by:
1. Reviewing the code (even if you skip the documentation).
2. Letting too many abstruse comments in which everyone in the team will have to read.
3. Allowing the behavior to continue.
Become the bottleneck so the team can talk about it. If they decide this shouldn't be a blocker, just declare you won't review the comments going forward.
Not to mention that the response to each review will come with its own set of new comments and new documentation. The ability of people to write things has exploded tenfold. You can’t out review the slop.
Every PR can be rewritten and re-architected on a whim.
Write REVIEW.md.
I have CC check itself pretty well.
I also put into agent/claude/review instructions to write using simple English skill and humanizer skill. Then not to write redundant comments.
It’s not perfect but definitely catches lots of slop.
Yes, that's the entire point. And it is extremely useful. Why wouldn't I want this?
After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc.
Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.
Sometimes that's a yes, even if AI generated it and I can tell despite someone making half an effort to be a human for a minute during the PR process. But sometimes it's not.
It gets really dicey when you've kept an architecture a certain shape because there's a difficult feature you intend to slot into the negative space. There are two or three ways to implement that feature, and the one they chose just stomps all through your potential. But that's why we have code reviews. You don't have to read my mind if I just tell you. But it can be frustrating if someone asks you to do it a different way, and then has comments on how you accomplished that, and then comments on the fixes for your other comments.
If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?
LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say.
They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1]
So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are.
Various youtubers I subscribe to are using apparently AI-written scripts now. They all wrote and spoke just fine before, each with their own particular style. Now they just sound like Claude. I know it's still their thoughts, and I'm still interested in what they have to say. Maybe they're using AI to save time, or maybe they've read too much AI text and now that's how they write. But it kinda takes the sparkle and personality out of everything.
Really, does it matter? Lots of YouTube comments are zero-effort attempts to juice a video/channel's engagement metrics (aka "commenting for the algorithm"), and whether they're accomplices/sockpuppets, or just unimaginative parasocial parasites, is basically unknowable from the outside.
they probably weren't.
I remember talking to a business type who was so incredibly proud that GPT could turn his incredibly vapid thoughts into bland pointlessness on LinkedIn... not realizing that everyone in his feed was doing the same thing. We never did business with him for ... reasons, obviously :)
Now? My friend, we’ve been flooded with stupid people’s attempts to show us how smart they are ever since internet forums came to be. Heck, just look at 90% of the comments on any given HN post. It’s mind-numbingly stupidity by the handful disguised as PhD talk—big words, fancy terms, heavy phrasing, all to say a bunch of nothing or just pretend they have a part in said conversation.
Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link".
But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content.
(And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.)
> If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.
To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.
This is, of course, before people started sending Instagram Reel or YouTube Short links. Or, maybe worse, links to 3-hour-long YouTube podcasts.
As with everything, it depends on who is sending it. For some people, yes. For the rest (majority), it's a case of
He: Makes some claim
Me: I question some aspect of it.
... Potential back and forth
He: Oh, just look at this video/article/book that explains and answers all your concerns.
Thing is, in the majority of the cases, it didn't address my concern. I'd write up something in detail, and get back either silence or yet another link. Took way too long for me to realize I shouldn't bother clicking the link to begin with.
Too many people put up a lazy comment when it is clear they haven't thought about $it, googled $it, or asked AI about $it. Where $it == {whatever they are unsure about or arguing about}.
The lazy commenter desires a human to waste their time writing a response. Often others judge that the commenter doesn't deserve the time or effort, so instead of a thoughtful response others often just reply with a relevant link - giving the commenter a chance to learn or reply.
Unfortunately offhand responses like LMGTFY become a common behaviour in forums, even when wildly inappropriate (as you note).
When it happens to you, it isn't personal, you are just a victim because everyone has been trained to a pattern of behaviour by thoughtless commenters.
It is also likely your comments get pattern matched as not worthwhile reasoning clearly to. You can do something to change your writing to avoid appearing waffly/bullshitty/unworthy (or whatever the reason responders are not replying to the meat of your point).
See also: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vamp...
Sorry in advance if I've misunderstood your point or if I'm being Captain Obvious.
After a few years of this I also just stopped clicking thinks and refused to engage in conversations that seemed to be going that direction.
Arguably things like Cliff's Notes and "for dummies" books were sating this impulse before that, I wouldn't be surprised if the line can be traced back further.
Since dropping LLMs altogether I've made the connection to the impulse for a superficial jump to the conclusion just by noticing how I use web search, or feverishly scan some text to get to the point.
Theoretically I studied critical thinking and have learned decades ago how to recognize when this is OK and when it's a superficial placation of some addiction to closing the book on a subject or micro-subject... but boy whatever good instincts I might have developed back then have significantly eroded over time. Trying to reclaim that again is pretty humbling.
Not so. Posting links is not the same. If you were to copy+paste someone's blog post into the forum and post is as your own, without attribution, it would be seen as plagiarism. Everyone understands this; you're trying to pass another's work as your own.
On X there's actually a good modern equivalent to "posting links" which is @grok, and letting Grok add to the thread. There is occasional teasing but it's nothing like posting slop under your own name.
ChatGPT actually allows something like this; you can share a link to the conversation.
Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.
"ChatGPT says ... "?
> Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.
I guess the bulk of folks use ChatGPT as the preferred chatbot, but people like me have a completely different interface that doesn't use ChatGPT. I can't send someone links to my conversation.
(And as an aside, over 80% of ChatGPT conversation links I click on don't work - not sure if they clean them after some time, or I need to be logged in, etc).
And even if it did work, I really don't want to read the whole conversation. Just send me the relevant part that ChatGPT said!
Does it look lazy? Well, if you respond _as its sockpuppet_ you look like a hustler, too.
No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not.
Meet "the masses".
Sorry, but no. Sending me a link as an alternative to having a conversation is totally not OK.
That is not currently possible. At best, you could train on millions of personal examples of style, eg historical emails, reports, etc, and you'd still never get what the person would have written.
I'd be astonished if an LLM didn't even miss important nuance, data, and focus on the wrong point.
It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.
When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.
Yes there are deterministic tools for this, but grammar is actually kind of complicated and the tools either miss mistakes, or suggest obviously worse edits. Looking at you, Microsoft Word.
All the writing is my own and I read all of it. Naturally there’s no LLM-isms because I wrote 99.9% of the original text. But, it was AI assisted. So, I don’t think it’s cut and dry.
You wouldn't get it verbatim, but your mistrust in AI reflecting what you intended to say is unwarranted.
I use LLMs to clean up poorly OCR'd hand written notes. It's the exception where I need to "fix" its output. It figures out what the notes intended, and writes it up fairly well.
> It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.
For a lot (most?) of AI slop, I agree. But pre-LLMs, this was universally a bad idea. The first draft always sucked, and was easy to misunderstand. A good LLM, with a good system prompt, will usually produce something better than the input it is fed. Most people are poor at expressing their thoughts.
> When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.
Most people aren't Bob The Great, but Bob The Incoherent.
I do feel like there is some middle ground where AI helps, but there's this one guy who keeps emailing everyone with walls of dumbass text and does not integrate or understand the feedback he gets when we are telling him what he needs to do. He just runs it though the LLM and replies and then forgets half of it in the next email engagement which functions as /clear on his end apparently. Like... dude I have ChatGPT and Claude, too. Actually read your goddamn emails.
it probably doesn't help that the US education system is so deeply broken with how rooted it is in segregation-era practices [0][1][2]. the average gets dragged down quite a bit when some districts receive so much money that they're flying their Spell Bowl teams to nationals and putting them up in hotels while another one a few miles away can't afford to pay for textbooks. average reading levels suffer and consequently so too does the effort that people put into writing well and reading critically
[0] https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/s...
[2] https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/
- I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection.
- I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response.
- In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify.
- The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.
this a thousand times this
LLMs are information transformers. if you're trying to take some rough idea and blow it out into something that "feels" substantive, you're just combining your high-signal idea / prompt with a bunch of meaningless bloat and noise from the model weights.
I'd like them to go further and delete links to AI-generated content, but I haven't been able to persuade management to do that yet.
(Sharing next sentence for the newbies, since you know-) All our jobs to flag on site & even email the worst offenders to hn@ycombinator.com . That said I rarely flag or even downvote anything. People either really behave, or perhaps the rulebreakers break rules that don’t grind my gears. Politely admonishing good faith rulebreakers is another tactic in the arsenal.
AI-generated comment posters with comment histories of exclusively slop get email alerts from me. Don’t know whether they’re planning to sell or spam but they clearly need help finding the door :)
In my opinion, this is not the same as people who use AI comment bots.
Of course, other cheaters had other reasons, but the few I was friends with had similar motivations. (Actually, a few just created tools because they enjoyed creating tools, not so much actually using them.)
Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."
Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.
> the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation
This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past.
But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously.
It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.
Recently on a call with a junior coworker where they asked me to look at some changes they had made, they were completely unable to answer any questions that I asked on their own. The way the conversation went was: I ask a question, they type my question into a ChatGPT prompt, we read the output together and discuss whether it makes sense. This is a person I've had great discussions with in the past, and who has frequently had really good insights, but seems to have completely tapped out.
To be fair, the outputs from ChatGPT tend to be quite good. It's the inputs people give it where problems most often arise - and people seem far too eager to charge ahead with a vibe coded solution built on invalid or incomplete inputs/assumptions. And it's shocking to see how quickly and willingly people have handed over control to LLMs.
I'm so tired of AI Slopped architecture documents, code, messages in slack, emails etc. I'm close to flat out rejecting any architecture doc I get that's written by an LLM, because I'm not sure the engineers even understand what they're proposing. The code is often a nightmare under the hood, even if it works. I've got smart coworkers who now just copy paste everything via an LLM giving themselves something approaching a lobotomy in the process.
I may just get out of the tech industry altogether. But I'm also tempted to try my hand at an indie dev project that I have in mind. With AI, it seems like it would be easier than ever to get a new project off the ground. And I don't really mind AI-assisted development personally. It's mainly all the organizational and interpersonal disruption that is giving me a headache at the moment.
The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.
It is almost always low information density. Sometimes I can get it to remove most of the extraordinarily cliche phrases it injects into everything, along with the tortured, gauche prose (especially Claude). But what remains is an expansion algorithm: it takes a simple idea and expands it like polyurethane foam to fill however much space it can take, the volume filled mainly by grammatical syntax and only traced with any actual semantic meaning.
https://claude.ai/share/ac747c6d-2a62-40b7-b33e-06a94cf34344
There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour (I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them): "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't". My more considered reaction is pretty much exactly the same.
For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI.
I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).
You are likely not the target audience anymore and they don't care if you're going to read it.
But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output.
That's an added value
Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read
If you're not familiar with the concept... https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy
If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.
Depends on his countenance and how good a mood I'm feeling in!
In any case I might well ask how much time went into at least reviewing the output. Or I say (rather than a flat AI;WR) "I'll scan that and have an AI summerise it for me later".
I would crumple up the flyer, throw it on the ground, and then ask for another one. Then I would crumple up that flyer, throw it on the ground, and ask for another one. I would repeat this until he refuses to give me another flyer.
It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.
If your favourite creator is engaged in generating this style of content, then I think it says more about your tastes than their morals.
Don't smash the like button, don't share and unsubscribe.
Like I don’t need to be placated by someone else’s AI agent when I call out something in a PR, especially when they have such an aversion to conciseness and resolution
Back in the 00's you would have been allowed to mock, abuse and bully people who did stuff like that in the workplace -- and the shame might have put an end to it. Maybe the loophole is you tell their Ai agent to f' off not them.
None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself.
Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question.
Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination.
People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway.
No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.
1. This work was largely optional to begin with. Few people actually need to post on LinkedIn, write blogs, etc. It's arguably a mountain of content waste (which is why the term "slop" is so fitting). Not only does it waste the producer's time to produce it, but it also wastes the reader's time to try to consume it.
2. It's not a substitute for actual work. If it becomes clear that you're using LLM to do work you are paid to do, eventually the person who pays you will notice, and replace you with the LLM. If your employer values you because of the work you do, it's in your best interest to do the job yourself.
2. Yes, people get replaced at work all the time. And actually most employees who figure out who to maximize their own ROI (and thus their companies) get rewarded, not punished. If your slop code is "good enough" and you are moving the metrics the C suite cares about, your colleague taking far longer to create far less is obviously going to be punished.
If some sea change happens that replaces a whole class of workers, that is beyond the scope of the individual worker to think about. The modern economy can be viewed as one long process of automation, where most workers have been subsidizing their own eventual replacement, given the privileged position of capital over labor. This is historically obvious. It does not mean it benefits the individual to go back into some state of nature, or not reap what benefits they may gain from the prevailing system while it is still the one at hand.
While I'm hoping the AI bubble pops sooner than later, as I still hold out hope that knowledge work will continue to require knowledgeable humans at the helm, I wanted to add on that I think you make a good point.
A lot of users online can't read[1], and between a lack of pure reading comprehension, poor media literacy habits draining one's brains and ability to focus, and finally the increase in AI-enabled content, I'm not surprised at how redditor-cultured netizens love to throw up their hands and say "AI;DR!", as if that makes them somehow morally superior.
These users won't read dense texts or try to elucidate meaning out of human-written works, they ask for AI summaries or manual "TL;DR" entries as it is, now the AI is use is being used as an excuse to enable mental laziness and lack of attempts to read information.
So while I get lost in wikipedia walks because I'm looking for written entertainment for 'learning', they are getting mind-melted by algorithms, therefore, an uncharitable part of me wants to let the meat-proxying continue.
And then the other part of me that gets annoyed by having to sift through AI-slop-infested text to see what if any meat there may be in there decides that perhaps that's not as helpful of an attitude as I should take after all, because if everybody decides to meat-proxy the world away, I'll be unhappier than letting lazy functionally-illiterate-users complain aloud, even as the latter is boring reading as well.
[1] in the https://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-compu... sense
I view LLMs optimistically as the catchup phase. After all, they aren't really "reinventing" anything, rather they are a tool to synthesize the vast human corpus and catch up to the scale. Yes, at the moment they are used for all sorts of things, most of which are trivial. But when the bubble pops it will not mean knowledge work has a renaissance, rather it will be the nail in the coffin. The bubble pop will mean it will be cheap, compute/LLMs become a utility. So let the AI fill out the spreadsheet. Allow UBI to flourish, implement a severe wealth tax. End pointless wars. Slim government, which is a lot of bloat and obfuscation around what should be automated, open and transparent disbursements. End private taxes on the economy (credit cards duopoly, etc) and essentially, everyone gets to act like an enlightenment era university student. On this view, the hope would be that the present times are the wars of religion, the storm before the calm. If we are able to make it through in a hyper-networked, nuclear age.
LLMs are not going away, no matter how many Americans may want to go back to the proverbial land. Reactive movements have always existed, and always failed. I think you would simply be better served by advocating for the best case scenario, rather than aligning yourself with the AI skeptics who as you acknowledge, are also rather widely boring and intellectually lazy - that which you seek to remedy. The question of assuring UBI is not obvious. Imo there is far more rigor and interesting questions in the camp trying to create the optimistic future, than in those who resort to unexamined, parroted skepticism.
In the book-publishing context, ghost writers have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.
The practice of writing can serve the purpose of conveying an idea or information to the readers, but it can also be an invaluable tool for the writer to process, digest, and internalize a message.
The act of wordsmithing, and shaping the idea from its raw rambling form into a coherent narrative, is intellectual metabolism.
A good writer will both distill the ideas, present them in such a way that will be pleasurable to their readers, and also bring the reader along the way so they can learn as well, and feel like an active participant.
The LLM tend to produce prose that defeats the purpose for the writer, takes the joy out for the reader, and ultimately does nothing for anyone but take up space.
It's not more words that make good stories, and it's not more code that makes good programs. It's what use is this to anyone, and only humans understand what other humans want and only humans can care.
Seems like people in this thread agree that it's better to express oneself in a less skilled fashion but actually write something that represents your idea, than to present some polished turd and pass it off as your own writing.
Same as a birthday card on some stock paper written in crayon will always be more valuable than a store bought card with generic sentiment.
Clearly you either didn't read it, misunderstood it, disbelieved it, or just DGAF :)
Which is fine for you, but doesn't change that many people can get more insight out of your original text than they can out of the generated adaptation, and can do so with more interest and less fatigue.
And indeed, you don't have to care about that. But one would think that in publishing or sharing your writing at all, you do in fact have some investment in whether people receive those insights that you have. Otherwise, you could just keep the AI writings to yourself in the first place.
I don't want the prompt - I may not have access to an LLM to evaluate it. The entire argument here is misguided, and deeply angry about AI.
It's equivalent to answering a question with "google it". Which is often times just plain rude.
But I do see a consistent trend here regarding hostility to AI. It seems to be a pattern, and a strange one.
I've never had someone angry at me for posting a Google search, for example.
I have.
For example, I was looking for a bathmat. My wife pasted me a list. Just a week ago.
I don't think my wife is bizarre. It's unfortunate that you do.
SO BIZZARE!
You called my wife bizarre. Then you said "TECHNICALLY, I didn't call your WIFE bizarre I called her ACTIONS bizarre."
I would ask you to stop talking to me, but it seems unlikely to work.
So. You have a nice day, now.
I do not think that forwarding a listing from Google is bizarre.
These seem like reasonable positions to me. I am very sorry if my voicing these beliefs makes you uncomfortable.
Just because those of you who disagree are more vocal, downvote and flag-happy doesn't make you right.
He would make up an excuse that is entirely untrue and then flag them.
Oh wait, I'm thinking of my last encounter with him.
But I am glad you've decided to engage. Now will you answer my question?
You have an account on HN dating back to 2013 with over 6000 comment karma, you clearly didn't have trouble communicating like a normal person for a decade on this website before the advent of LLMs. Your spelling and grammar in posts predating LLMs are also far better than what you've produced in this prompt, so I'm tempted to think that you're exaggerating your inability to communicate normally to make a point.
But even so, the original wall of text communicates the point much more strongly and sincerely than the LLM trash.
It is the articulation of ideas that I struggle with and so I usually edit my comments multiple times. And to get rid of some of the more stupid stuff I say.
To be fair, that word salad would read more like this comment if I gave it some time, but it would take many hours to produce a simple post with the same readability as the LLM.
If you must use AI in this way, I'd tell it to take a _much_ lighter touch. It cleans things up without washing away the personality of your writing. ChatGPT example:
> adjust the following for spelling and grammar, making MINIMAL alterations to the original wording and content. do NOT rewrite, just clean up what is already there: [post]
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a8382b9-3620-83eb-b17e-4397aee5ad...
Thank you :)
There’s also a difference between “please edit my writing” and “please generate a blog post from these bullet points.”
The LLM response has none of that character, it doesn't give me that little sliver of insight into the writer. It strips the idea from the author, making it generic and anonymous. The only thing I can gleam from text edited with an LLM like this (besides the literal meaning of the text), is that the author didn't care enough to express themselves.
Sure, it's more polished, but doing the writing manually is half the point. You have an abstract idea, you refine into something that can be communicated, and in doing so, explore that idea and improve your understanding of it. I've re-written this paragraph a dozen times trying to do exactly that.
It's getting those abstract ideas back out from the word-vomit I find very difficult. It is almost completely impenetrable to me to read that text - even though I wrote it!
Someone in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338214) has shown a prompt to just break it up and fix the sentence structure rather than rewriting, which should hopefully help me to at least re-read what I have written.
...This part immediately made me link it to the hipster stereotype:
"oh, it's sooooo much better on vinyl because you can hear the cracks & pops"
Neither pieces in the chat log work for me: The prompt was a wall of ramblespeak. The output was a presentation that should've been an email.
Meanwhile, the LLM-generated essay is hard to read because it's essentially the high-school essay that's padding its paper to meet a minimum page count. I'm surprised that you find it easier to read than most human text, because I've invariably found that my first reaction to LLM-generated text is "where's the point?"--everything is just buried in so much fluff.
So yeah, I find the prompt much better than the LLM output.
AI writing is like the voice anonymizer they'd use in TV interviews when they wanted to hide the identity of the person speaking. The output is more adherant to convention but likewise more impersonal and exhausting, and when it's used by too many people it's so indistint that it becomes noise.
It might look good to you in isolation, because you're excited to see that it says what you meant to say without the features you feel self-conscious about, but to others it just reads like yet another sample of the same old AI slop. The message gets entirely lost behind that.
So the polite version I use now is: "Hey, just to get a bit more context, what was the original problem you were trying to solve?".
That gets them to distill their own problem a bit further.
Sharing information that is already in the corpus is simply not that valuable in a world where everyone has access to their own LLMs.
Of course, given that posting one is not mutually exclusive with posting the other, I would still think that posting both is the easiest way to satisfy both people who prefer to read the prompt and those who prefer the read the output.
Sounds like this isn't everyone, but rather, it's people who have nothing to say, and -- even after they've "sourced ideas" -- they don't know how to reason about it, nor how to communicate it.
This isn't everyone. This is people engaged in generating noise, for the sake of noise.
It turned out his prompt was equally uninspired... 1 or 2 sentences. That was the thought he put into it, which then had us spending hours trying to figure out the AI reply. He could have saved the whole team a full day by just sending the prompt... or nothing at all.
It's a tool like any other. It assists the intelligent, but makes the lazy - lazi-er.
"Here is the prompt and model I used, here is the portion of the output that stuck out to me as relevant and useful, and here, in my own words, is why I think that is so."
i.e. Highlight the good part of the output for me and, preferably, explain why you think it's good. Otherwise it's the same thing as posting slop, only with extra steps. You thought it was worth posting and I thought that made it worth looking at, but now I'm sorting through a bunch of monkey garbage looking for what made you think that. Being a different person, I may not find that hidden gem and I may become quite frustrated with you.
________________
~actual prompt i sent in to claude last week. doing what you propose would be basically impossible / nonsensical, and further undo the entire exercise, sending all the money spent on the tokens down the toilet.
put differently, if you use agents in any actually useful manner, the principle you describe erases whatever value they did end up providing. though since the whole underlying premise is that ai never provides any value, maybe that's the intended result and is as expected. in which case, i'd argue such a desire is more than a bit demagogue.
It's frustrating dealing with them since they all use AI in communications. Everything is written so flowery and with so much extra words. Any feedback I give is met with overwhelming praise about "how right I am". Its exhausting.
I understand many of them are in developing countries and aren't confident in their English skills. But I always tell them I'd rather they write in broken English to communicate their own ideas. I want to hear what they have to say, directly from their brain. I don't have issues with parsing bad english. Usually its straight and to the point.
They always end up defaulting back to AI messaging. Even when I tell them to be genuine. I'd love to give one of these firms a chance, but they fail this basic step. I think they think everyone in the developed world likes AI or something.
I guess the same thing goes for articles written by humans. I don't really read the articles that are "Shower thoughts that I think are profound" or "The way I do things is the way everyone should do things"
There is a fairly common wisdom that the way you get good at writing is by writing a lot, I'm prepared to cut people a lot of leeway at people putting all of the stuff out there before they are good at writing. It's just the path you have to take. That's OK, because I don't have to read it.
And I'm fine with people making crappy AI generated tutorials while they figure out how to make better AI generated tutorials. I am not fond of people who are creating bulk content by volume without any regard to quality or improvement. Some may be doing this to make money, and maybe that works, I suspect for the most part it doesn't. I don't appreciate it though, whether it be AI or human produced bulk content.
I'd spare a thought for those who feel that they are producing high quality content when they are not. Everyone has a poor perspective on something sometimes. Usually the harshest punishment they will face is the feelings their future selves experience when they look upon their work with a more balanced perspective.
The idea was to just avoid sending email altogether and just simulate the interaction entirely using Claude.
Alice being AI or a real person doesn't change those factors much.
I don't know if the contributors are writing any of the code they're submitting or just using AI to hop on every 'help wanted' tagged ticket in every product database but if it looks mostly like a smart human wrote it, which usually takes two rounds of reviews, then it can probably go in.
But if you make me work for it more than you did I'm just going to close the PR and do it myself.
Not to toot my own horn, but...[0]
On a more serious note, we're planning a trip with family, and my mother-in-law asked if I'd read "the planning doc" yet.
It was a shared ChatGPT thread. Thankfully I read enough LLM output to skim it easily and avoid offending her (:
Also, I may have already started looking into it, but now this other person just wasted money.
On the other hand, I suspect that we are pretty quickly going to get to the point within a few years where we realize that the best AIs are not just being overly verbose. But rather their communication is just more compressed and thorough.
So even though we still see a lot of jaggedness and weird failures in some places，in other ways I think this is actually an aspect of intelligence where AI has surpassed humans. Just in terms of being able to deal with a certain density of information.
Sure, before, there was always the possibility that the article wouldn't deliver. Sturgeon's Law. But now it's like 10× more, and the amount of slop out there means its even harder to find that (human-written) gem amongst all the chaff. This last month especially, I've started to wonder "what even is the point of HN?" as more and more of the frontpage ends up dominated by slop. The thing that made HN worth it in the beginning is that it had a high gem:chaff ratio — at least compared to other corners of the Internet at the time I joined.
Yeah...I'm probably dropping whatever services do this. If the company can't invest the capital to hire humans that help humans, then what does that say about their products?
I, of course, had no choice but to apologize. I hope I was right, but clearly there is some chance I was wrong.
Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?
However there's only 10% of AI-generated writing that is worth reading. If some articles convince me that there's somebody behind it contributing valuable understanding, I'm willing to overlook the telltale AI mannerisms. It's understandable that some domain experts aren't very proficient in English.
That said, statistically speaking 90% AI-generated pieces are a waste of readers' time. It's a good strategy to simply skip them.
I know this looks like a bot comment. It's not. It's a much older style of writing known as Chinglish. That's why as a non-native English speaker, I can totally understand why someone would want to use AI to help with their writing.
At the end of the day I don't care how much of what you're presenting is your own words vs AI generated, as long as I can see evidence that you have reviewed and understood what you've passed to me. My resentment and ire is raised when the onus is pushed on me to be the first real human reviewer, having to do all the weighing of merit, practicality and in some cases plausibility that the quote un-quote author should have done before ever hitting send. It's passing the buck and an abdication of responsibility. It is lazy and makes more work for those you foist it upon when your role should be making the effort in your communications to make it easier for the recipient. Not wasting their time having to spend orders of magnitude more effort refuting bullshit you shouldn't have put out there in the first place.
It is something that has always pissed me off, however AI has made it fair easier for lazy people to think they sound smart and externalise their costs into my face.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Stop-externalizing-your-costs-o...
Before I think he was using AI and other tools to translate his messages since english isn't his first language. His own words, then AI translated it. Sounded kinda clunky, but I could sense the human behind the words and I gave grace since I can only imagine how hard it is to properly communicate your ideas when English isn't your first language.
But now it's gotten to a point where I can tell he's not using it for just translation. I'm gonna need to chat with him.
Redacted example below
```Hey @PERSON_WHO_ASKED_QUESTION Both good, and the retrieval one isn't written down anywhere. In order.
One corpus or four. My lean is one. Same chunks and embeddings tables, source_type column to tell them apart.
Values I'd propose, flat rather than nested: paper, dataset_description, dataset_readme, dataset_contributors, dataset_records, dataset_files. Description and readme split because their units already differ, one row versus one row per paragraph. A discriminator that can't separate those isn't doing much. The existing 440 rows would need backfilling to paper.
Chunk id in the same spirit: dataset doi, source type, ord. So EXAMPLE_DOI.
Worth checking before any of this matters: does chunks.doi carry a foreign key to papers.doi in 0001_init.sql? If it does, a metadata chunk with a dataset doi can't go in that table at all, and separate storage stops being a choice. Ten second read, I haven't done it. Shout if you get there first.
Retrieval is the one that's bigger than it looks. Search once across everything and nothing guarantees a paper chunk and a metadata chunk both land in the top k. The facts we want relate the two, and the generator can only write those if it sees both sides in the same window. So if one type systematically wins the ranking, that class of fact doesn't get worse. It becomes impossible.
Which way it goes I don't know. Two mechanisms pull opposite ways. Metadata chunks are short, tens of tokens against roughly 450 for a paper chunk, so they may just lose. But we embed context header plus text, and on a short chunk the header is most of the vector. The header is the dataset name, which is also most of the query. That points the other way.
Cheaper to measure than argue. Load one dataset's metadata, run a normal dataset level query, record the rank of the first chunk of each source type. Runnable as soon as any one of our four subtasks lands.
After that it's one pool, per source with quotas, or one pool with a floor per source type. I'd rather not pick before there's a measurement. ```
I think sometimes people have a big long thread with Claude where they feel enthusiastic about the back and forth being very productive -- and then they genuinely want to share the summary of the conversation with their colleagues so that they can feel it too. It's not just typing a short prompt and copy/pasting the response.
But, Claude, especially Opus is so unnecessarily flowery, and smug -- and it's so identifiably characteristic.
It somehow rubs salt in the wound: "I didn't take the time to write this out in my own words, so now you get to listen to this petulant asshole mansplain it to you".
If it would get to the point, and with some humility, it would be a much different proposition.
I already saw someone getting fired for only producing AI text as part of their entire output, after being unable to explain what they “wrote” in multiple situations.
And recently my company enacted a mandate that text made for humans should not be AI generated.
Sooner or later every company will start realizing that this is just people too lazy to actually work and coasting on a paycheck, at the expense of every other worker.
Much how like essay's have a word limit - and people think you should max it out.
We will go in the opposite direction - which I'll be glad about!
There were too many incidents of “this doesn’t look right” in the same week, so when their boss did a thorough check a couple days after, it was all fake, everything. Eventually they admitted and got canned.
But AI was trained on good writing. Good writing looks like AI. I've had to reduce my use of em dashes for example because they are an "AI tell". I used to like using the term "load bearing".
And the list gets longer every day. Eventually every mark of a good writer will be an AI tell.
I don't know how to resolve this. But I've been accused multiple times of copy/pasting AI when I did no such thing, and it's getting equally frustrating.
AI writing isn't actually all that bad. But it has a very specific style, and there are MANY tells. I use Claude every single day, and it's immediately obvious to me when I'm reading something Claude wrote. "It's not X, it's Y" "That's the reframe" "The gap is" I could go on.
I too like using em dashes, and have been since I learned the keyboard shortcut over a decade ago. I've never been accused of posting ai-written text because of it.
AI is indeed trained on good writing, but it's also trained on bad writing. And it's post trained on specific things that are writing that aren't good or bad for reasons unrelated to style. What you're left with is a one-size-fits-all writing style. Doing math? Doing medicine? Doing anime waifu role play? It all starts from the same generic milquetoast style until you tell it not to. And to me (and apparently many other people) that's super easy to pick out.
Beyond that, most AI content is WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY longer than it needs to be to get its point across and is oversaturated with unneeded "mic drop" phrases
I even studied writing in college. I’ve written published books and articles. I can write well. But thanks for the tip!
The typical highly voted HN AI-written post has an annoying clickbait title, then jumps into a meandering chain of “so there I was” scene-setting, assertions of dubious reliability & relevance, and supposed supporting examples. All punctuated by short, unhelpfully dramatic sentences that would interrupt the high-level narrative, if only there were one.
I’m really curious what “good AI writing” you had in mind. My personal intuition is that for almost any topic, the HN LLM-generated post du jour has a far superior cousin sitting in the archive pre-2021.
TLDR: Content != Art
Really hate it when I send a tricky spec out for review and people respond a couple minutes later with a Claude summary. Way to add value bro.
i have what ill call a "condition" where i fear assuming someone did something stupid is insulting. i try not to patronize people because i also assume that would be insulting. this leads to issues where sometimes people really want to be lead to water rather than make an implied connection themselves
this is a roundabout way of saying, is there a genuinely polite way to tell colleagues posting ai copypasta makes them seem ignorant? i dont think ai:dr is workplace appropriate. id like to tell people gently and avoid patronizing if possible
TL;DR works because I can see the length at a glance
And you cannot tell all AI. Only mainstream crap like ChatGPT and Gemini which is full of cached tropes and boilerplate formats so it all sounds the same.
My custom invoicing software automates notes based on years of my previous notes and tasks I did - looks nothing like AI.
Use a real library and local model, mess with settings, there is a lot more to this than the mainstream consumer apps.
The problem is that those kinds of responses are rare in the tech world. But when you have someone competent at the helm, it's much better than reading human slop.
> I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Why? Because there is growing grumbling among everyone about AI writing. And it’s not just others; it’s me!
Classic AI "its not just, its..."
After you've exhausted your favorite audiobooks, I mean
Like, I love The Wind in the Willows, but I wish the part where Toad and the gang go on the road in the cart lasted for longer. I asked ChatGPT to invent some fill-in chapters matching the same style and speak it out loud, and it kinda did OK actually.
Claude, post that wall of output to Slack yourself. Make no mistakes.
No, no, no, no - the whole point of customer support is that I am having a problem that requires attention from a representative of the business I am dealing with. Businesses really don't like doing this; they call it a cost center to have to talk to their own customers, so they staff their call centers with increasingly useless script-readers designed specifically to shield the people with knowledge of the matter you're facing against customers like you. This is a great solution for dealing with technically illiterate people who don't do basic troubleshooting and terrible for literally anyone else who actually tries to be a good customer.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ai%3Bdr
This piece is still slop, human or ai created
fwiw, I'm partial to ns;nt (https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/), but it is different in nuance
Its awfully similiar to bitching about reading mails on a computer and attacking the sender.
The virtue signaling is beyond me. I dont care about AI;DR or TL;DR.
Give me good content. And I will read it.
> AI;DR (AI; didn’t read) is the solution for AI slop.
Maybe I'm the odd one out here and didn't plumb the worse-depths of social media, but I feel I need to defend good old TLDR as a slightly different, and less-hostile animal.
It can be a moral condemnation of the poster, where they're disrespecting everyone else's time by posting something big and vague... But it usually isn't. At least half the time TLDR is someone providing a summary because they think it'd be useful (even of it's sometimes a hostile interpretation.)
I'd say that sounds about the same for ai;dr. I could see myself posting a prompt like that in front of the generated report.
- Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing? And how would you know if the /content/ is worthwhile, unless you read it...
- The ability to "detect AI" is imperfect at best. 90% AI written? 5%? How would you know, unless you read it....
- If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"?
- If you are wrong, and you announce it to the world, how would it feel to someone who spent a lot of time and energy writing?
Two reasons:
1. I can't effectively engage in follow-up conversation with the "author." I can't do it with the human (principal) because they didn't write it and can't explain it--and, in fact, they may not even personally agree with all if it!
2. It shifts the cognitive burden from writer to reader. What makes writing hard, and valuable, is the effort put into translating one's raw, unfiltered thoughts into writing that is easy to comprehend, and the writer's own unique personality that is expressed in it. As ambient prose, AI-generated writing is often not only more difficult to read than human-drafted prose, but it also has this "sameness" quality that makes every "author" have the same personality.
Bragging about it is weird, but I will use it like I use 'RTFM'.
And detectability - My AI-DAR (radar), is fairly fined tuned but not perfect, so if I make a mistake, oh well, the point is I'm protecting my time.
> If someone tells their unattended LLM agent to create a blog, write whatever content will maximize banner ad revenue, and then share each post on Hacker News, would you read it? What if the content is actually interesting in your opinion?
Yes, I think if one of that content had a headline that interested me I would definitely click on it, because that's already happened!
The purpose of writing is to communicate. The person communicating is an important part of the message.
Consider the sentence "I'm waiting for you at home." It really matters if it's said by your loving wife or an evil clown. You can extrapolate from this.
Because what the clanker produces is almost always bad output compared to what a capable human would produce. Furthermore, even an incapable human is better than a clanker, because at least humans have intrinsic value that they bring to the table. Finally, it's just plain disrespectful to refuse to take some time to answer a question and hand it off to the clanker.
It's a reference to TL;DR. If you can understand that, you can understand AI;DR.
Why would you think it would?
You didn't put any meaningful thought into it.
Wow, peak ableism. It is a post about how I use an LLM as an accessibility aid for reading and writing. We're not all out here faking creative writing you know...
I don't agree that it's ableism to believe that you are far more worth talking to than a machine regurgitating attenuated averages.
Straw man. That literally wasn't what you said. You dismissed what I wrote as thoughtless. It wasn't about disagreement it was purely invalidation.
1. I do disagree with your position in both the prompt and the output; I don't think you're correct. That doesn't mean I don't think you're worth talking to.
2. I do think the output was thoughtless; there is thought evident in the prompt, but then you passed it through a blandifying filter that took it out. You made your contribution less valuable and less valid, removing intention. That's thoughtless.
You do not need a filter; it does not make your writing better, it makes it more pallid.
1) Content shouldn't be judged solely on the use of an LLM.
2) There is a distinction between slop and assisted authorship.
3) LLMs can be valuable accessibility tools.
As for the output, I regenerated it until I was happy that it communicated my position effectively. That in itself requires both thought and intention.
You may prefer my unedited prose, but your preference doesn't make either my input or my editorial choices thoughtless.
Yes. I think an LLM can be useful for trivial or functional tasks, but for expressing complex positions, it's worse than useless. It's absolutely valid to dismiss LLM-generated prose, and people who who think they're doing 'assisted authorship' tend to be mistaken.
I'm not saying you are incapable of thought; I'm saying that you've abdicated that by transmitting through an LLM.
Well you are of course entitled to disagree.
> I'm not saying you are incapable of thought; I'm saying that you've abdicated that by transmitting through an LLM.
What you actually said was that I "didn't put any meaningful thought into it". Thats the INPUT, not OUTPUT. Anyway. I think we're as far as we are going to get with this "discussion". Have a good evening!
What he literally said was [0][1]
You submitted thoughtless pap; of course it didn't get any traction.
...
> What was thoughtless about it?
You didn't put any meaningful thought into it.
You didn't submit the input, you submitted the output. In actual fact, Planktonne asserted that the input that you did not publish would have been much more strongly preferred to the output that you did publish: [2]
I would a thousand times rather read your stream of consciousness, even though I disagree with it, than the bland pulp of the LLM output. In every way that matters, it's stronger and communicating far more.
You have some solid ideas there but they are very poorly organized. I think you would benefit from a class in writing. I had a month-long technical writing workshop back a couple of decades ago that my company sponsored and it helped me tremendously with starting with wall of consciousness, progressing to writing plan, outline and then editing. It had a very positive impact on my career in professional services where clear communication via documents is an essential part of value prop.
AI writing is rapidly improving. Human writing, on average not so much.
https://www.promarket.org/2026/05/04/consumers-prefer-ai-mus...
>If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it...
>...then I’m not going to bother reading it.
Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but we've had copywriters and editors for generations now. Not reading something because AI did the post-writing work feels kinda weak. Skip stuff started from AI, fine, but this is just because it's AI, not because the author didn't do the task. And I do get the point is that if an AI did /most/ of the work, ok to that, too, but not post-write processing alone.
As an anecdote, someone posted a blogpost on Linkedin on using agents to implement a driver to access PCIe devices over TCP/IP. I was intrigued because that's not an easy task for several reasons, like handling PCIe interrupts and DMA. For exmaple, how does the remote machine map the device's PCIe BARs? And when it issues I/O to the devices registers, how are these reads and writes transferred to the remote device. In the end, this is just some virtual memory. In a local machine, this is either directly mapped to the PCIe physical addresses or some IOMMU virtual address space which is then translated by the hardware upon CPU/device/VM access.
After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc.
Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.
did you formerly hire copywriters for this task?
So in the end, I don't care if a human wrote it or an AI, I don't want to read it either way.
What's wrong with copyrighters? They write like corporations, not like humans (see the Cluetrain Manifesto for more on this). They sound like nobody - literally inhuman. I don't want to read that. I want to hear a human voice. If I can't hear that in your writing, I don't need to read it.
The implication is that expertise is being devalued in real time, and in a sense it really is, but I think that most people really do need to face the reality of their emotions and where it comes from. For myself personally, I have no qualms about reading or even engaging with AI content, as long as the content itself is of quality and truthful.
I described a problem to a new hire. Symptoms, how to reproduce, etc. and asked him to go investigate it, pin down the problem and solve it. It was a non-trivial and hard to reproduce bug.
Instead of doing any of that, he sent back very quickly a wall of text. Generic advice. Nothing relevant. Along with this he sent a PR that would have broken prod.
It was useless, and basically amounted to throwing the assignment back in my face. Since I, like literally everyone else, already have Claude Code, having an expensive person use it for me (slowly and badly) is worthless. In fact, it's negative value, and a huge waste of time. ChatGPT would have given me the same wall of text for pennies.
In the end I got rid of him.
I'm sure he thought I was "intimidated", and had "ego" issues. But he's actually just redundant.
The bar for what counts as expertise is shifting. If someone with relatively little background can use an LLM to get to a reasonably informed answer much faster than before, then experience and credentials alone carry a bit less signalling power than they used to. That obviously doesn't mean the inexperienced person suddenly has the judgement, context or intuition of an actual expert, but I do think some of the hostility toward AI comes from discomfort with that change.
AI is still wrong, goes in weird circular loops, and doesn't solve the fundamental human problems around judgement, organization, learning curves, accountability, etc. But it does seem to be raising the baseline expectation for what a competent knowledge worker should produce, and I feel that shift is genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of people who based their identities around being rigorous abstract problem solvers.
Is that an ego issue? Doesn't seem like it to me.
Plus I’ve been seeing where AI productivity is highest and it’s been when leveraged by an expert.