6 ms·

AI will change the world but not in the way you think

91 points by tlhunter 2y ago

dtagames 2y ago
TL;DR: AI summaries and bullet points for everything will change human communication to that format. The problem with this post is that, despite mentioning programming languages in the title, the examples are about writing emails. The author forgets to address programming at all, which is very much a use case and will remain one as processors only run compiled machine code and not bullet points.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  Cory Doctorow just wrote about the bullet-point thing yesterday, in the context of referral letters: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/
  - est31 2y ago
    Also this meme: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html AI diplomats talking to each other, while humans stick to communicating via bullet points.
- halper 2y ago
  While there is more talk about emails, programming is addressed toward the end: "[…] this will affect computer programming languages as well. Right now I can open a codebase, […]"
- Galanwe 2y ago
  I'm not so sure that's a missing point or just an actual point. I'm not convinced myself AI will have much impact on the developers landscape, beyond better autocompletion and doc generation. All these fancy AI developers are cute, but we have had the cheaper vs lower quality trade-off available for quite some time now with outsourcing to emerging countries. When I was in my studies, we heard all the predictions of the destruction of software engineers because of outsourcing, the need to become an architect instead of a developer or you'll be replaced, etc. I've seen none of that happen over the years, except for very low skilled automation / CRUD jobs.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > When I was in my studies, we heard all the predictions of the destruction of software engineers because of outsourcing, the need to become an architect instead of a developer or you'll be replaced, etc. A lot of low level stuff has been outsourced to India over the last decades, and more if you count second or even third level support (won't even include first level support that's not required to be on-site). C-levels only see the expenses savings, but how their employees feel about internal support being utter dogshit can't be quantified in a language that beancounters speak...
  - haswell 2y ago
    > I'm not convinced myself AI will have much impact on the developers landscape, beyond better autocompletion and doc generation. I’ve been a developer for 20 years. Using an LLM to generate context-specific prototypes has completely changed my productivity. It has allowed me to start and finish projects that were previously relegated to “maybe someday” (read: never). It’s not clear what the net result will be in the long run, but it’s already changing what and how I build things, and I’m not nearly as bearish as I was before a few successful projects. I don’t think AI is going to replace good engineers. It’s going to make good engineers better engineers. This alone will lead to some interesting outcomes I think.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      > It has allowed me to start and finish projects that were previously relegated to “maybe someday” (read: never). I.e. stuff that probably never needed to get done, otherwise it would have been a higher priority than what you were otherwise working on.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        That is not true, see "mental health disorders" which I do suffer from. Me not doing something does not mean it never needed to be done. The opposite is true, too. Something I have done does not mean it had to be done, if that makes sense.
      - 2y ago
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  > bullet points for everything will change human communication to that format I'd be okay with that! Verbosity has become too pervasive as of late.
seydor 2y ago
There was a moment when google introduced autocomplete and it was a game changer. LLMs are still waiting for their autocomplete moment: when they become an extension of the keyboard and complete our thoughts so fast, that i could write this article in 2 minutes. That will feel magical. The speed is currently missing
- GiorgioG 2y ago
  No, that is not the only thing missing. Right now AI continues to make mistakes a child learns not to make by age 10…don’t make shit up. And by time you’re an adult you figure out how to manage not to forget (by whatever means necessary) the first thing your boss told you to do after he added a new ask.
  - roflmaostc 2y ago
    That's not entirely true. AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population. Yes AI makes mistakes, so do humans very often.
    - root_axis 2y ago
      Humans make mistakes, sure, but if a human starts hallucinating we immediately lose trust in them. > AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population So can a calculator.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      > AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population I've studied electronic engineering and then switched to software engineering as a career, and I can say the only time I've been exposed to math puzzles were in academic settings. The knowledge is nice and help with certain problem solving, but you can be pretty sure I will reach out to a textbook and a calculator before trying to brute-force one such puzzle. The most important thing in my daily life is understand the given task, do it correctly, and report about what I've done.
      - 2y ago
josefritzishere 2y ago
The primary commercial application for AI seems to be enshittification. I think that will continue.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Frankly I don't think the end users will notice much difference. Excel '98 probably covers 90% of what the average excel user needs, yet here we are with a grossly bloated SaaS excel app in 2025. Constant SaaS feature-pack enshitification that people are either pushed or tricked into. I think software is in a for a big disruption when people realize they can prompt an LLM "Make me a simple app for tracking employee payroll for my small business. Just like lotus 1-2-3 was more than capable of doing 40 years ago."
  - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
    I distinctly remember a review in a 1996 computer magazine calling the new version of MS Word bloated, overcomplicated and slow. If only they knew how bad things were going to get.
dkdcwashere 2y ago
the author ironically uses a lot of words to say very little, though I agree with the conclusion. it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little (especially in a business context). now it’s free and easily accessible for anyone, whereas before it at least took some social stamina so people will do it, people will be annoyed by it, people will prioritize to more efficient communicators
- ferguess_k 2y ago
  > it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little Totally agreed. I'd like to cut to the point with a bit of pleasantry at the beginning just because I have to.
- czk 2y ago
  “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
  - codydkdc 2y ago
    "more time shorter letter"
- carimura 2y ago
  and society requires efficiency as attention spans have been reduced to near 0 with tiktok videos and youtube shorts being the norm now. maybe we end up back at hieroglyphs.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    We should invent a language like stenography or algebra, in which it would be impossible not to express something if it is not either a fact or an implication. Then we can see at first sight whether it’s dense or not.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
bobek 2y ago
It is like https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html being written down at length. I do agree with the fact, that this is an annoying phenomenon. It took me a while to understand that there are people who are not just using LLM to write these style of emails, but those people are the source of the training data for LLMs. The solution is "simple", to move aways from such people and stick to genuine communicators.
- frank_nitti 2y ago
  I consider myself a “genuine communicator” insofar as I write messages thoughtfully and thoroughly. Though I suspect many of my emails go unread, and people have confessed that they ran my personal messages to them through an LLM to generate something for them to report up in some spreadsheet etc tool. Or in the case of some managers for whom the critical technical detail goes over their head, they just re-ask their questions in a call and try to get to “is it done yet” and “how many engineers can I add to make it go faster”. I think I might be on the chopping block if a move was made to get rid of overly-thorough verbose communicators, genuine or not
  - DennisP 2y ago
    But it sounds like you might be filling your emails with actual facts, rather than the sort of fluff that an LLM could do for you.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  If a picture is worth a thousand words, the blog author seems to have chosen "a thousand words."
- DennisP 2y ago
  And if that's not an option, another solution is to use AI to summarize those long emails. In the end both parties will be writing and reading terse little emails, with the verbose text in the middle as the world's most ridiculous communication protocol.
mschuster91 2y ago
> One day we'll just send bullet points as emails. We'll reach business speak protocol version 2.0. That which was verbose becomes terse. No more time wasted translating thoughts and injecting platitudes. I'll celebrate the day this happens and gets widespread. Conversing with Americans is painful compared to Germans, because Americans insist on being coddled all the time and the very second you don't they'll complain behind your back to your boss. Fun fact - that cultural difference was also a huge part why Wal-Mart failed to gain traction here in Germany. German consumers really didn't like staff welcoming them with a forced smile, that and bad press from crossed labor laws was their downfall.
- przemub 2y ago
  Smile isn’t that bad, smiling with a pistol to the back of their head is :)
- sdsd 2y ago
  >staff welcoming them with a forced smile Walmarts notorious "people greeters" are there to prevent theft, and as far as I can tell, the people greeter reason seems to be purely speculative, and less explanatory than more solid political reasons (established competitors conspired, just like Walmart does to incumbents in the US).
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Walmarts notorious "people greeters" are there to prevent theft How is some old pensioner sitting (or worse: standing) at the entrance going to deter theft? Thieves don't care unless there are actual security guards on patrol.
the_bear 2y ago
I agree that LLMs turn short prompts into long code blocks, but I don't agree that it's fluff in the same way that email pleasantries are fluff. The short prompt leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The code itself leaves zero room for interpretation (assuming the behavior of the coding language is well understood). I don't agree that AI will allow us to start relying on code that isn't fully defined just because it might allow our emails to remove fluff that didn't contribute to the meaning at all.
1oooqooq 2y ago
i was expecting a "written from these bullet points by an llm" at the end.
gioazzi 2y ago
Personally I want to double down on this approach I wrote about a couple of weeks ago: https://www.sealambda.com/blog/this-post-passed-unit-tests/ https://www.sealambda.com/blog/this-post-passed-unit-tests/ Which is, to keep using LLMs as reviewers, rather than as writers.
moralestapia 2y ago
This was a very common meme two years ago when ChatGPT was released. It's fine to see Thomas catching up with the times, but two pages of writing seems a bit overkill, imo. Edit: Found it, https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html ... and yeah two years ago to the date, always right :).
proggy 2y ago
In my view the author is putting the cart before the horse here. His primary argument seems to be that people already think in bullet points, so the fluff around them is unnecessary and can be excised without destroying the original message. But that fluff is there for many reasons. It adds context, it allows us to commingle our meaningful and valid emotions alongside our facts, and ultimately, it lets us tell a human story. The way in which we create and consume information has a direct effect on our experience of the world, and I think there is a deeper point to be made here about how the way we use communication technology. The endless firehose of information is drowning our brains to the point that we are compelled to find a way to cope. But I would argue that the way to do that is to rate limit receipt of messages so that only the quality stuff gets through, rather than letting everything through and destroy every human aspect of them in the process. It’s Twitter’s 140 character limit argument from last decade all over again; the medium becomes the message, so we must be careful what mediums we use.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > It adds context, it allows us to commingle our meaningful and valid emotions alongside our facts, and ultimately, it lets us tell a human story. You are correct of course, The fluff is the "delivery vehicle" but that also introduces errors. the problem is, this kind of extra information is hard to do effectively, and its not really taught formally. Worse still its very hard to do if there are cultural or neurological differences(ie being on the spectrum, or a Dutch person talking to someone English)
- bko 2y ago
  I agree, I think he overstated the desire to add fluff. It's true that LLMs now add a bunch of fluff by default, but I imagine that will get better. I actually do the reverse of the example the author gave (bullet points - fluff). I give train of thought to an LLM about what I want to communicate and instruct it to use no BS and make it tight and it gives me a well structure short message with clear action items logically structured. It adds the minimal amount of fluff (e.g. "Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today") but it makes it a lot easier for the other person to comprehend, without using an LLM.
- 2y ago
zonkerdonker 2y ago
> One day we'll just send bullet points as emails. We'll reach business speak protocol version 2.0. That which was verbose becomes terse. No more time wasted translating thoughts and injecting platitudes. I'm not sure about you all, but as a non-manager at [big tech company] I can count on one hand the number of actual emails I've sent in the past year. Everything is IM chats. Its actually pretty nice
ineptech 2y ago
> Messages are expected to be written across several coherent English sentences, neatly organized into paragraphs, finally with some sort of signature. In the programming world we refer to this as boilerplate. "This HTTP call has no message body and therefore no content, and can thus be ignored" he said confidently, not noticing the status code. The verbiage is where you find out useful information, like whether the speaker is on your side and whether they understand the problem the same way as you and whether they're dumb. It's not as if the reason we didn't adopt bullet-points-only ten years ago is that it required better AI. More generally, I submit that when faced with a long email thread, skim reading is superior to LLM summaries in all cases (except maybe the one where the reader is too inexperienced to do it well). It's faster, captures more detail, and (probably most important) avoids the problem of the people on the thread coming away with subtly different understandings of the conversation.
palmotea 2y ago
> That said, is it a beneficial assignment to ask a student to read a long book? I haven't a clue. Is it beneficial to ask a student to write an essay? More on that in a moment. As far as I can tell, he dropped this thread, and there wasn't, "more on that in a moment." But I'm kinda surprised why he "hasn't a clue" that the answer to that question is a clear "yes." The whole point of school is to teach kids to use their brains, and reading something complicated, understanding it, and being able to synthesize something about it is a pretty important brain-use. > Here we can think of the long email with meaningless fluffy padding as being the business speak protocol that office employees communicate with today. And we can think of the bullet points as how we actually think. You've got to be careful to not overgeneralize this kind of observation, a problem that software engineers are especially prone to. Sometimes the "fluff" is meaningless, and "bullet points" are all that's really there. Other times the "fluff" is important stuff that the person making the judgement just doesn't understand or has trouble comprehending. Software engineer types are often pretty ignorant, without really realizing it, and often assume their superiority because "intelligence" or some dumb shit like that. Yes, LLM expansion of bullet points is fluff that wastes everyone's time, but that doesn't mean all or even most true thought can be compressed into concise bullet points. Furthermore, even when it can, there's are often good reasons why the most concise and compact form is not the most desirable presentation.
- jjulius 2y ago
  >But I'm kinda surprised why he "hasn't a clue" that the answer to that question is a clear "yes." The whole point of school is to teach kids to use their brains, and reading something complicated, understanding it, and being able to synthesize something about it is a pretty important brain-use. I also believe that there's something to be said about being able to sit and focus on something like reading a book for a long period of time. Patience and focus seem to be diminished these days.
  - kurthr 2y ago
    That and it's only in reading A LOT that builds the proficiency needed to absorb, evaluate, comprehend, and respond to other documents you will eventually come upon. Whether it is reading for enjoyment and allowing a virtual world to wash over you, while simultaneously scanning your eyes across a page, or reading a scientific paper to understand the research topic and results well enough, to know when to review and reread for context and understanding. Some level of long focus and deeper awareness of written material is necessary to create anything substantially new and massage it into what you actually desire.
metacritic12 2y ago
Would it also be true to say: AI will change the world, but not in the way the OP (Thomas Hunter) thinks. -- The first statement, AI will change the world, is low surprise and clearly true already. The second statement, not in the way X thinks, is also low surprise, because most technologies have very unpredictable impacts, especially if it is "close to singularity" or the singularity.
igleria 2y ago
I actually got a very similar automatic response to a take home (that I spent 12 hours of my time on) for an interview process. Some feedback was good, but other feedback was not (one example: The feedback mentions not enforcing a Node version, while such enforcement was in the package.json file). That combined with the formatting made me realize that it was either a 100% copy paste output based on some prompts, maybe tuned two or three words without checking for factuals. A very distressing experience that prompted me to change how I approach take home assignments.
- dmbche 2y ago
  What changes did you implement, if I can ask?
  - igleria 2y ago
    These are not set in stone and if a dream company comes may be overruled, but: At least one or more of the following MUST be true: - Take home takes 2 hours or less - Take home has a posterior instance that will take place with a human being in order to allow me to defend/discuss/expand the take home. Of course this assumes I eliver something that is not just the word "farts" in a txt. - Take home is monetarily compensated. These are heuristics that do not imply I am an impressive IC or something like that. It's just self defense.
mdip 2y ago
I mostly agree with what the author is saying with regard to "the current state of things." I do not feel, however, that it is a particularly large concern, especially long-term, given the second step (summarizing) is probably already integrated into everyone's e-mail client, and if not -- it will be at some point. The "smoothing out of difficult communications", however, may end up being worth the whole "having to read a summarized response." The reason it won't matter "long term" is that e-mail clients are solving/will solve[0] the "give me 'the point' of this e-mail." If my couple of decades of experience across multiple employers is any indication[1], the vast majority of people in software development fall into one of two camps: (a) They don't have the basics of written communication down. It's not a matter of misspellings or improper semi-colon, or emdash. It's all lower case[2] with no punctuation, or with "..." (no spaces between, either) in place of every other form of punctuation. Or (b) they are generally grumpy people who write in a manner that fits their personality. Conveying tone, correctly, via written text is hard unless the tone you're trying to convey is "frustration/anger/impatience". And, of course, the same folks who can't figure out punctuation tend to respond tersely. Between co-workers who work closely together, that's preferred. When my boss has to tell me something minor about my performance and sends it in a five-word e-mail, it comes off like I need to start looking for new work. Prior to AI, "good managers who were writing-challenged" would find templates online and replace words. It never sounded genuine. AI brings us a lot closer to that, while not requiring an enormous amount of effort on the part of the writer. It'll be a matter of time before a lot of that process happens within the client (if it doesn't, already). I know tone detection is a common feature on communications tools I use[3]. [0] Not entirely sure; I use e-mail so infrequently, but thinking about the chat app we use at work, it provides AI summaries of the day's chats in each channel. [1] Anecdata, I know, but it's all I've got [2] Including the first letter of every meeting invite and subject; if I have OCD, that triggers it. [3] Divorce communications ...
KaiserPro 2y ago
I was expecting some analysis on the economic impact of losing a whole class of jobs, and decimating a load of others which causes the wages to drop. Thats the way it'll change the world, think manufacturing job losses in Europe/america. in the late 90s/00
wheelie_boy 2y ago
I don't think the final point about programming languages makes much sense. In the overall software development process, lots of people contribute different things to create the product. The job of the software developer is to bring the amount of ambiguity in the specification to zero, because computers can only run a program with zero ambiguity. There have been lots of high level programming languages that abstract away certain things or give the programmer control over those things. The real thing that you want to do is pick a programming language that allows you control over the things you care about. Do you care about when memory is allocated and deallocated? Do you care about how hardware is used (especially GPUs and ML accelerators) or do you want the hardware completely abstracted away? Do you care more about runtime or dev iteration time? Does your program need to exist in a certain tech context? There's no programming language that will let people who care about different things deal with them or not deal with them.
bsenftner 2y ago
Let's discuss this spot on the wall while the building we are in is being excavated from beneath. Yes, AI is going to change the world, not as anyone seems to be discussing. We've created interactive logical assistance for everything and anything intellectual anyone does. The ramifications of this are ambitions requiring intellectual difficulty are going to skyrocket. This is thanks to the magical thinking that is already rampant is all aspects of society. Net result will be significantly higher demands on anyone with a knowledge based career, after all "you have AI assistance now, why are you not 10X?" We will all be forced to become adept using AI, and not just casually. We will be required to operate on our intellectual edge, or we will find ourselves unemployable.
discmonkey 2y ago
By definition if I knew how AI would change the world, I would invest/build things to that end. The fact that we still don't have a great AI product outside of chatgpt, shows that no one knows what will happen.
- trash_cat 2y ago
  I think the author points to cultural changes in business comunication, which doesn't give any clues to what you should invest your money.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
apierre_cardoso 2y ago
"Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?" - Malone, Kevin
jonnycat 2y ago
A bullet-point list of ways you screwed up communicates something entirely different than a long form email filled with flowery "fluff" (as the author puts it). In fact, if the author feels confident in this theory, I suggest they replace the blog post with this AI-generated bullet-point summary I just made...
neilv 2y ago
I have a new rule: if someone sends me an "AI" message, I will probably denylist them. Not only hasn't the person thought about it or invested in it, but now they're jamming my ability to read into exactly what that one person said, and how they said it. Many people have made the observation/joke that meaning->LLM->LLM->meaning is silly, but I don't recall anyone pointing out that information that a skilled reader/listener can discern from direct expression is lost.
thrawa8387336 2y ago
Laughable, the author is really bullet-point-brained. Taking wagers he only knows English
irrational 2y ago
> How are professionals expected to communicate with each other? Usually with empty platitudes to kick things off like "Hey! How's it going? How's the family? How are you doing?" Messages are expected to be written across several coherent English sentences, neatly organized into paragraphs, finally with some sort of signature. In the programming world we refer to this as boilerplate. What is it that we are really trying to communicate? Usually a few short ideas that could be represented as bullet points, but that we need to fluff up with meaningless words so that we don't sound rude. Of course, this changes by culture and by language and is not applicable to many parts of the world, but it is definitely a thing in American English. Do the rest of you really do this? I can’t recall receiving any slack or emails with this sort of thing over the 25+ years I’ve been working in a business environment, even though all of them have been in American English. I certainly don’t use that sort of “boilerplate”. I just jump straight into what the topic is.
nialv7 2y ago
Stop assuming how I think! I hate titles that attempt to address the reader directly and personally when they can't possibly do so. You can express the same idea without using this tactic. Just say "... but not in the way most might think"
bluepoint 2y ago
The author claims to be able to tell AI content. I am wondering, is there any test to help me train to distinguish AI content? Like: this paragraph is written by a human this by an AI and see how well we all do?
- owebmaster 2y ago
  Not really. AI is too good now—no test reliably tells the difference. Although LLMs have a tendency of using — in place of - - which is the one I use.

91 points by tlhunter 2y ago

TL;DR: AI summaries and bullet points for everything will change human communication to that format. The problem with this post is that, despite mentioning programming languages in the title, the examples are about writing emails. The author forgets to address programming at all, which is very much a use case and will remain one as processors only run compiled machine code and not bullet points.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
Cory Doctorow just wrote about the bullet-point thing yesterday, in the context of referral letters: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/
- est31 2y ago
  Also this meme: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html AI diplomats talking to each other, while humans stick to communicating via bullet points.
halper 2y ago
While there is more talk about emails, programming is addressed toward the end: "[…] this will affect computer programming languages as well. Right now I can open a codebase, […]"
Galanwe 2y ago
I'm not so sure that's a missing point or just an actual point. I'm not convinced myself AI will have much impact on the developers landscape, beyond better autocompletion and doc generation. All these fancy AI developers are cute, but we have had the cheaper vs lower quality trade-off available for quite some time now with outsourcing to emerging countries. When I was in my studies, we heard all the predictions of the destruction of software engineers because of outsourcing, the need to become an architect instead of a developer or you'll be replaced, etc. I've seen none of that happen over the years, except for very low skilled automation / CRUD jobs.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > When I was in my studies, we heard all the predictions of the destruction of software engineers because of outsourcing, the need to become an architect instead of a developer or you'll be replaced, etc. A lot of low level stuff has been outsourced to India over the last decades, and more if you count second or even third level support (won't even include first level support that's not required to be on-site). C-levels only see the expenses savings, but how their employees feel about internal support being utter dogshit can't be quantified in a language that beancounters speak...
- haswell 2y ago
  > I'm not convinced myself AI will have much impact on the developers landscape, beyond better autocompletion and doc generation. I’ve been a developer for 20 years. Using an LLM to generate context-specific prototypes has completely changed my productivity. It has allowed me to start and finish projects that were previously relegated to “maybe someday” (read: never). It’s not clear what the net result will be in the long run, but it’s already changing what and how I build things, and I’m not nearly as bearish as I was before a few successful projects. I don’t think AI is going to replace good engineers. It’s going to make good engineers better engineers. This alone will lead to some interesting outcomes I think.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    > It has allowed me to start and finish projects that were previously relegated to “maybe someday” (read: never). I.e. stuff that probably never needed to get done, otherwise it would have been a higher priority than what you were otherwise working on.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      That is not true, see "mental health disorders" which I do suffer from. Me not doing something does not mean it never needed to be done. The opposite is true, too. Something I have done does not mean it had to be done, if that makes sense.
    - 2y ago
stronglikedan 2y ago
> bullet points for everything will change human communication to that format I'd be okay with that! Verbosity has become too pervasive as of late.

seydor 2y ago

There was a moment when google introduced autocomplete and it was a game changer. LLMs are still waiting for their autocomplete moment: when they become an extension of the keyboard and complete our thoughts so fast, that i could write this article in 2 minutes. That will feel magical. The speed is currently missing

GiorgioG 2y ago
No, that is not the only thing missing. Right now AI continues to make mistakes a child learns not to make by age 10…don’t make shit up. And by time you’re an adult you figure out how to manage not to forget (by whatever means necessary) the first thing your boss told you to do after he added a new ask.
- roflmaostc 2y ago
  That's not entirely true. AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population. Yes AI makes mistakes, so do humans very often.
  - root_axis 2y ago
    Humans make mistakes, sure, but if a human starts hallucinating we immediately lose trust in them. > AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population So can a calculator.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    > AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population I've studied electronic engineering and then switched to software engineering as a career, and I can say the only time I've been exposed to math puzzles were in academic settings. The knowledge is nice and help with certain problem solving, but you can be pretty sure I will reach out to a textbook and a calculator before trying to brute-force one such puzzle. The most important thing in my daily life is understand the given task, do it correctly, and report about what I've done.
    - 2y ago

josefritzishere 2y ago

The primary commercial application for AI seems to be enshittification. I think that will continue.

Workaccount2 2y ago
Frankly I don't think the end users will notice much difference. Excel '98 probably covers 90% of what the average excel user needs, yet here we are with a grossly bloated SaaS excel app in 2025. Constant SaaS feature-pack enshitification that people are either pushed or tricked into. I think software is in a for a big disruption when people realize they can prompt an LLM "Make me a simple app for tracking employee payroll for my small business. Just like lotus 1-2-3 was more than capable of doing 40 years ago."
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  I distinctly remember a review in a 1996 computer magazine calling the new version of MS Word bloated, overcomplicated and slow. If only they knew how bad things were going to get.

dkdcwashere 2y ago

the author ironically uses a lot of words to say very little, though I agree with the conclusion. it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little (especially in a business context). now it’s free and easily accessible for anyone, whereas before it at least took some social stamina so people will do it, people will be annoyed by it, people will prioritize to more efficient communicators

ferguess_k 2y ago
> it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little Totally agreed. I'd like to cut to the point with a bit of pleasantry at the beginning just because I have to.
czk 2y ago
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
- codydkdc 2y ago
  "more time shorter letter"
carimura 2y ago
and society requires efficiency as attention spans have been reduced to near 0 with tiktok videos and youtube shorts being the norm now. maybe we end up back at hieroglyphs.
- eastbound 2y ago
  We should invent a language like stenography or algebra, in which it would be impossible not to express something if it is not either a fact or an implication. Then we can see at first sight whether it’s dense or not.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

bobek 2y ago

It is like https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html being written down at length. I do agree with the fact, that this is an annoying phenomenon. It took me a while to understand that there are people who are not just using LLM to write these style of emails, but those people are the source of the training data for LLMs. The solution is "simple", to move aways from such people and stick to genuine communicators.

frank_nitti 2y ago
I consider myself a “genuine communicator” insofar as I write messages thoughtfully and thoroughly. Though I suspect many of my emails go unread, and people have confessed that they ran my personal messages to them through an LLM to generate something for them to report up in some spreadsheet etc tool. Or in the case of some managers for whom the critical technical detail goes over their head, they just re-ask their questions in a call and try to get to “is it done yet” and “how many engineers can I add to make it go faster”. I think I might be on the chopping block if a move was made to get rid of overly-thorough verbose communicators, genuine or not
- DennisP 2y ago
  But it sounds like you might be filling your emails with actual facts, rather than the sort of fluff that an LLM could do for you.
ryandrake 2y ago
If a picture is worth a thousand words, the blog author seems to have chosen "a thousand words."
DennisP 2y ago
And if that's not an option, another solution is to use AI to summarize those long emails. In the end both parties will be writing and reading terse little emails, with the verbose text in the middle as the world's most ridiculous communication protocol.

mschuster91 2y ago

> One day we'll just send bullet points as emails. We'll reach business speak protocol version 2.0. That which was verbose becomes terse. No more time wasted translating thoughts and injecting platitudes. I'll celebrate the day this happens and gets widespread. Conversing with Americans is painful compared to Germans, because Americans insist on being coddled all the time and the very second you don't they'll complain behind your back to your boss. Fun fact - that cultural difference was also a huge part why Wal-Mart failed to gain traction here in Germany. German consumers really didn't like staff welcoming them with a forced smile, that and bad press from crossed labor laws was their downfall.

przemub 2y ago
Smile isn’t that bad, smiling with a pistol to the back of their head is :)
sdsd 2y ago
>staff welcoming them with a forced smile Walmarts notorious "people greeters" are there to prevent theft, and as far as I can tell, the people greeter reason seems to be purely speculative, and less explanatory than more solid political reasons (established competitors conspired, just like Walmart does to incumbents in the US).
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Walmarts notorious "people greeters" are there to prevent theft How is some old pensioner sitting (or worse: standing) at the entrance going to deter theft? Thieves don't care unless there are actual security guards on patrol.

the_bear 2y ago

I agree that LLMs turn short prompts into long code blocks, but I don't agree that it's fluff in the same way that email pleasantries are fluff. The short prompt leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The code itself leaves zero room for interpretation (assuming the behavior of the coding language is well understood). I don't agree that AI will allow us to start relying on code that isn't fully defined just because it might allow our emails to remove fluff that didn't contribute to the meaning at all.

1oooqooq 2y ago

i was expecting a "written from these bullet points by an llm" at the end.

gioazzi 2y ago

Personally I want to double down on this approach I wrote about a couple of weeks ago: https://www.sealambda.com/blog/this-post-passed-unit-tests/ https://www.sealambda.com/blog/this-post-passed-unit-tests/ Which is, to keep using LLMs as reviewers, rather than as writers.

moralestapia 2y ago

This was a very common meme two years ago when ChatGPT was released. It's fine to see Thomas catching up with the times, but two pages of writing seems a bit overkill, imo. Edit: Found it, https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html ... and yeah two years ago to the date, always right :).

proggy 2y ago

In my view the author is putting the cart before the horse here. His primary argument seems to be that people already think in bullet points, so the fluff around them is unnecessary and can be excised without destroying the original message. But that fluff is there for many reasons. It adds context, it allows us to commingle our meaningful and valid emotions alongside our facts, and ultimately, it lets us tell a human story. The way in which we create and consume information has a direct effect on our experience of the world, and I think there is a deeper point to be made here about how the way we use communication technology. The endless firehose of information is drowning our brains to the point that we are compelled to find a way to cope. But I would argue that the way to do that is to rate limit receipt of messages so that only the quality stuff gets through, rather than letting everything through and destroy every human aspect of them in the process. It’s Twitter’s 140 character limit argument from last decade all over again; the medium becomes the message, so we must be careful what mediums we use.

KaiserPro 2y ago
> It adds context, it allows us to commingle our meaningful and valid emotions alongside our facts, and ultimately, it lets us tell a human story. You are correct of course, The fluff is the "delivery vehicle" but that also introduces errors. the problem is, this kind of extra information is hard to do effectively, and its not really taught formally. Worse still its very hard to do if there are cultural or neurological differences(ie being on the spectrum, or a Dutch person talking to someone English)
bko 2y ago
I agree, I think he overstated the desire to add fluff. It's true that LLMs now add a bunch of fluff by default, but I imagine that will get better. I actually do the reverse of the example the author gave (bullet points - fluff). I give train of thought to an LLM about what I want to communicate and instruct it to use no BS and make it tight and it gives me a well structure short message with clear action items logically structured. It adds the minimal amount of fluff (e.g. "Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today") but it makes it a lot easier for the other person to comprehend, without using an LLM.
2y ago

zonkerdonker 2y ago

> One day we'll just send bullet points as emails. We'll reach business speak protocol version 2.0. That which was verbose becomes terse. No more time wasted translating thoughts and injecting platitudes. I'm not sure about you all, but as a non-manager at [big tech company] I can count on one hand the number of actual emails I've sent in the past year. Everything is IM chats. Its actually pretty nice

ineptech 2y ago

> Messages are expected to be written across several coherent English sentences, neatly organized into paragraphs, finally with some sort of signature. In the programming world we refer to this as boilerplate. "This HTTP call has no message body and therefore no content, and can thus be ignored" he said confidently, not noticing the status code. The verbiage is where you find out useful information, like whether the speaker is on your side and whether they understand the problem the same way as you and whether they're dumb. It's not as if the reason we didn't adopt bullet-points-only ten years ago is that it required better AI. More generally, I submit that when faced with a long email thread, skim reading is superior to LLM summaries in all cases (except maybe the one where the reader is too inexperienced to do it well). It's faster, captures more detail, and (probably most important) avoids the problem of the people on the thread coming away with subtly different understandings of the conversation.

palmotea 2y ago

> That said, is it a beneficial assignment to ask a student to read a long book? I haven't a clue. Is it beneficial to ask a student to write an essay? More on that in a moment. As far as I can tell, he dropped this thread, and there wasn't, "more on that in a moment." But I'm kinda surprised why he "hasn't a clue" that the answer to that question is a clear "yes." The whole point of school is to teach kids to use their brains, and reading something complicated, understanding it, and being able to synthesize something about it is a pretty important brain-use. > Here we can think of the long email with meaningless fluffy padding as being the business speak protocol that office employees communicate with today. And we can think of the bullet points as how we actually think. You've got to be careful to not overgeneralize this kind of observation, a problem that software engineers are especially prone to. Sometimes the "fluff" is meaningless, and "bullet points" are all that's really there. Other times the "fluff" is important stuff that the person making the judgement just doesn't understand or has trouble comprehending. Software engineer types are often pretty ignorant, without really realizing it, and often assume their superiority because "intelligence" or some dumb shit like that. Yes, LLM expansion of bullet points is fluff that wastes everyone's time, but that doesn't mean all or even most true thought can be compressed into concise bullet points. Furthermore, even when it can, there's are often good reasons why the most concise and compact form is not the most desirable presentation.

jjulius 2y ago
>But I'm kinda surprised why he "hasn't a clue" that the answer to that question is a clear "yes." The whole point of school is to teach kids to use their brains, and reading something complicated, understanding it, and being able to synthesize something about it is a pretty important brain-use. I also believe that there's something to be said about being able to sit and focus on something like reading a book for a long period of time. Patience and focus seem to be diminished these days.
- kurthr 2y ago
  That and it's only in reading A LOT that builds the proficiency needed to absorb, evaluate, comprehend, and respond to other documents you will eventually come upon. Whether it is reading for enjoyment and allowing a virtual world to wash over you, while simultaneously scanning your eyes across a page, or reading a scientific paper to understand the research topic and results well enough, to know when to review and reread for context and understanding. Some level of long focus and deeper awareness of written material is necessary to create anything substantially new and massage it into what you actually desire.

metacritic12 2y ago

Would it also be true to say: AI will change the world, but not in the way the OP (Thomas Hunter) thinks. -- The first statement, AI will change the world, is low surprise and clearly true already. The second statement, not in the way X thinks, is also low surprise, because most technologies have very unpredictable impacts, especially if it is "close to singularity" or the singularity.

igleria 2y ago

I actually got a very similar automatic response to a take home (that I spent 12 hours of my time on) for an interview process. Some feedback was good, but other feedback was not (one example: The feedback mentions not enforcing a Node version, while such enforcement was in the package.json file). That combined with the formatting made me realize that it was either a 100% copy paste output based on some prompts, maybe tuned two or three words without checking for factuals. A very distressing experience that prompted me to change how I approach take home assignments.

dmbche 2y ago
What changes did you implement, if I can ask?
- igleria 2y ago
  These are not set in stone and if a dream company comes may be overruled, but: At least one or more of the following MUST be true: - Take home takes 2 hours or less - Take home has a posterior instance that will take place with a human being in order to allow me to defend/discuss/expand the take home. Of course this assumes I eliver something that is not just the word "farts" in a txt. - Take home is monetarily compensated. These are heuristics that do not imply I am an impressive IC or something like that. It's just self defense.

mdip 2y ago

I mostly agree with what the author is saying with regard to "the current state of things." I do not feel, however, that it is a particularly large concern, especially long-term, given the second step (summarizing) is probably already integrated into everyone's e-mail client, and if not -- it will be at some point. The "smoothing out of difficult communications", however, may end up being worth the whole "having to read a summarized response." The reason it won't matter "long term" is that e-mail clients are solving/will solve[0] the "give me 'the point' of this e-mail." If my couple of decades of experience across multiple employers is any indication[1], the vast majority of people in software development fall into one of two camps: (a) They don't have the basics of written communication down. It's not a matter of misspellings or improper semi-colon, or emdash. It's all lower case[2] with no punctuation, or with "..." (no spaces between, either) in place of every other form of punctuation. Or (b) they are generally grumpy people who write in a manner that fits their personality. Conveying tone, correctly, via written text is hard unless the tone you're trying to convey is "frustration/anger/impatience". And, of course, the same folks who can't figure out punctuation tend to respond tersely. Between co-workers who work closely together, that's preferred. When my boss has to tell me something minor about my performance and sends it in a five-word e-mail, it comes off like I need to start looking for new work. Prior to AI, "good managers who were writing-challenged" would find templates online and replace words. It never sounded genuine. AI brings us a lot closer to that, while not requiring an enormous amount of effort on the part of the writer. It'll be a matter of time before a lot of that process happens within the client (if it doesn't, already). I know tone detection is a common feature on communications tools I use[3]. [0] Not entirely sure; I use e-mail so infrequently, but thinking about the chat app we use at work, it provides AI summaries of the day's chats in each channel. [1] Anecdata, I know, but it's all I've got [2] Including the first letter of every meeting invite and subject; if I have OCD, that triggers it. [3] Divorce communications ...

KaiserPro 2y ago

I was expecting some analysis on the economic impact of losing a whole class of jobs, and decimating a load of others which causes the wages to drop. Thats the way it'll change the world, think manufacturing job losses in Europe/america. in the late 90s/00

wheelie_boy 2y ago

I don't think the final point about programming languages makes much sense. In the overall software development process, lots of people contribute different things to create the product. The job of the software developer is to bring the amount of ambiguity in the specification to zero, because computers can only run a program with zero ambiguity. There have been lots of high level programming languages that abstract away certain things or give the programmer control over those things. The real thing that you want to do is pick a programming language that allows you control over the things you care about. Do you care about when memory is allocated and deallocated? Do you care about how hardware is used (especially GPUs and ML accelerators) or do you want the hardware completely abstracted away? Do you care more about runtime or dev iteration time? Does your program need to exist in a certain tech context? There's no programming language that will let people who care about different things deal with them or not deal with them.

bsenftner 2y ago

Let's discuss this spot on the wall while the building we are in is being excavated from beneath. Yes, AI is going to change the world, not as anyone seems to be discussing. We've created interactive logical assistance for everything and anything intellectual anyone does. The ramifications of this are ambitions requiring intellectual difficulty are going to skyrocket. This is thanks to the magical thinking that is already rampant is all aspects of society. Net result will be significantly higher demands on anyone with a knowledge based career, after all "you have AI assistance now, why are you not 10X?" We will all be forced to become adept using AI, and not just casually. We will be required to operate on our intellectual edge, or we will find ourselves unemployable.

discmonkey 2y ago

By definition if I knew how AI would change the world, I would invest/build things to that end. The fact that we still don't have a great AI product outside of chatgpt, shows that no one knows what will happen.

trash_cat 2y ago
I think the author points to cultural changes in business comunication, which doesn't give any clues to what you should invest your money.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

apierre_cardoso 2y ago

"Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?" - Malone, Kevin

jonnycat 2y ago

A bullet-point list of ways you screwed up communicates something entirely different than a long form email filled with flowery "fluff" (as the author puts it). In fact, if the author feels confident in this theory, I suggest they replace the blog post with this AI-generated bullet-point summary I just made...

neilv 2y ago

I have a new rule: if someone sends me an "AI" message, I will probably denylist them. Not only hasn't the person thought about it or invested in it, but now they're jamming my ability to read into exactly what that one person said, and how they said it. Many people have made the observation/joke that meaning->LLM->LLM->meaning is silly, but I don't recall anyone pointing out that information that a skilled reader/listener can discern from direct expression is lost.

thrawa8387336 2y ago

Laughable, the author is really bullet-point-brained. Taking wagers he only knows English

irrational 2y ago

> How are professionals expected to communicate with each other? Usually with empty platitudes to kick things off like "Hey! How's it going? How's the family? How are you doing?" Messages are expected to be written across several coherent English sentences, neatly organized into paragraphs, finally with some sort of signature. In the programming world we refer to this as boilerplate. What is it that we are really trying to communicate? Usually a few short ideas that could be represented as bullet points, but that we need to fluff up with meaningless words so that we don't sound rude. Of course, this changes by culture and by language and is not applicable to many parts of the world, but it is definitely a thing in American English. Do the rest of you really do this? I can’t recall receiving any slack or emails with this sort of thing over the 25+ years I’ve been working in a business environment, even though all of them have been in American English. I certainly don’t use that sort of “boilerplate”. I just jump straight into what the topic is.

nialv7 2y ago

Stop assuming how I think! I hate titles that attempt to address the reader directly and personally when they can't possibly do so. You can express the same idea without using this tactic. Just say "... but not in the way most might think"

bluepoint 2y ago

The author claims to be able to tell AI content. I am wondering, is there any test to help me train to distinguish AI content? Like: this paragraph is written by a human this by an AI and see how well we all do?

owebmaster 2y ago
Not really. AI is too good now—no test reliably tells the difference. Although LLMs have a tendency of using — in place of - - which is the one I use.