11 ms·

AI makes you boring

• nemomarx 9mo ago
  I've seen a few people use ai to rewrite things, and the change from their writing style to a more "polished" generic LLM style feels very strange. A great averaging and evening out of future writing seems like a bad outcome to me.
  • embedding-shape 9mo ago
    Yeah, if anything it might make sense to do the opposite. Use LLMs to do research, ruthlessly verify everything, validate references and help you guide you in some structure, but then actually write your own words manually with your little fingers and using your brain.
    • add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
      Are you joking? The facts and references are the part we know it will hallucinate.
      • PaulHoule 9mo ago
        You can check the references.
  • skissane 9mo ago
    I sometimes go in the opposite direction - generate LLM output and then rewrite it in my own words The LLM helps me gather/scaffold my thoughts, but then I express them in my own voice
    • taude 9mo ago
      that's a perfect use, imhno, of AI-assisted writing. Someone (er-something) to help you bounce ideas, and organize....
    • jonpurdy 9mo ago
      I do something similar: give it a bunch of ideas I have or a general point form structure, have it help me simplify and organize those notes into something more structured, then I write it out myself. It's a fantastic editor!
    • ExtremisAndy 9mo ago
      This is exactly how I use them too! What I usually do is give the LLM bullet points or an outline of what I want to say, let it generate a first attempt at it, and then reshape and rewrite what I don’t like (which is often most of it). I think, more than anything, it just helps me to quickly get past that “staring at a blank page” stage.
  • quijoteuniv 9mo ago
    I have an opinion of people that have opinions on AI
  • baal80spam 9mo ago
    It's not them, it's you.
  • PaulHoule 9mo ago
    I had to write a difficult paragraph that I talked through with copilot. I think it made one sentence I liked but found GPTZero caught it. I would up with 100% sentences I wrote but that I reviewed extensively with Copilot and two people.
• tptacek 9mo ago
  That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no question. Don't let a single word an LLM generates land in your document; even if you like it, kill it.
  • kspacewalk2 9mo ago
    It's not a hazing ritual, it's a valuable learning experience. Yes, it's nice to have the option of foregoing it, but it's a tradeoff.
    • tptacek 9mo ago
      So the point of a "Show HN" is to showcase your valuable learning experience?
      • discreteevent 9mo ago
        What the article is saying is: "the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had. The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective."
        • tptacek 9mo ago
          Right, so it's about the person and how they've qualified themselves, and not about what they've built. I feel like I've been around these parts for a while, and that is not my experience of what Show HN was originally about, though I'm sure there was always an undercurrent of status hierarchy and approval-seeking, like you suggest.
• stuckinhell 9mo ago
  I mean, can't you just… prompt engineer your way out of this? A writer friend of mine literally just vibes with the model differently and gets genuinely interesting output.
  • guywithahat 9mo ago
    I think the point of the article is that on sites like HN, people used to need domain expertise to answer questions. Their answer was based on unique experience, and even if maybe it wasn't optimal it was unique. Now a lot of people just check chatgpt and answer the question without actually knowing what they're talking about. Worse the bar to submit something to Show HN has gotten lower, and people are vibe coding projects in an afternoon nobody wants or cares about. I don't think the article is really about writing style
• wagwang 9mo ago
  Isnt this just flat out untrue since bots can pass turing tests
  • hyperhello 9mo ago
    The bot doesn’t pass, the human fails.
  • wsowens 9mo ago
    People are often boring in conversation. Therefore, an AI agent doesn't need to be interesting to seem human enough in a Turing test.
    • saalweachter 9mo ago
      "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
  • recursive 9mo ago
    The turing test isn't designed to select for the most interesting individuals. Some people are less interesting than other people. If the machine is acting similar to a boring human, it can make you more boring, and still pass the test.
• lasgawe 9mo ago
  The more interesting question is whether AI use causes the shallowness, or whether shallow people simply reach for AI more readily because deep engagement was never their thing to begin with.
  • embedding-shape 9mo ago
    More interesting question than what? And also, say you have an answer to that question, what insight do you have now that you didn't have before?
    • igor47 9mo ago
      Well the claim was that AI makes you boring. The counter is that interesting people remain interesting, it's just that a flood of previously already boring people are pouring into tech. We could make some predictions that depend on how you model this. For instance, the absolute number of interesting projects posted to HN could increase or decrease, and likewise for the relative number vs total projects. You might expect different outcomes
  • swiftcoder 9mo ago
    AI enables the stereotypical "idea guy" to suddenly be a "builder". Of course, they are learning in realtime that having the idea was always the easy part...
    • lywald 9mo ago
      I had found this rebuttal: Ideas are cheap only if you have cheap ideas. I would argue good ideas are not so easy to find. It is harder than it seems to fit the market, and that is why most of apps fail. At the end of the day, everyone is blinded by hubris and ignorance... I do include myself in that.
      • swiftcoder 9mo ago
        They may not be the easiest thing to find, but I'd submit that good ideas are way more common than the skill and resources needed to capitalise on them
• mym1990 9mo ago
  Most ideas people have are not original, I have epiphanies multiple times a day, the chance that they are something no one has come up with before are basically 0. They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it. There is a huge case for having good taste to drive the LLMs toward a good result, and original voice is quite valuable, but I would say most people don't hit those 2 things in a meaningful way(with or without LLMs).
  • spijdar 9mo ago
    Most ideas people have aren't original, but the original ideas people do have come after struggling with a lot of unoriginal ideas. > They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it. The insight is that good ideas (whether wholly original or otherwise) are the result of many of these insightful moments over time, and when you bypass those insightful moments and the struggle of "recreating" old ideas, you're losing out on that process.
• taude 9mo ago
  AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. It'll also make people who write better than average, worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use wisely. EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. Don't be lazy, just because you're leaning on LLMs.
  • wagwang 9mo ago
    Highly doubt that since its the complete opposite for coding. Whats missing for people of all skill levels is that writing helps you organize your thoughts, but that can happen at prompt time?
    • notahacker 9mo ago
      Good code is marked by productivity, conformance to standards, and absence of bugs. Good writing is marked by originality and personality and not overusing the rhetorical crutches AI overrelies on to try to seem engaging.
  • PaulHoule 9mo ago
    After telling Copilot to lose the em-dash, never say “It’s not A, it’s B” and avoid alternating one-sentence and long paragraphs it had the gall to tell me it wrote better than most people.
  • runarberg 9mo ago
    This claim sounds plausible, but it is also testable. Do you know whether this has actually been tested in an experimental setting?
  • latexr 9mo ago
    > AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. Maybe it will make them output better text, but it doesn’t make them better writers. That’d be like saying (to borrow the analogy from the post) that using an excavator makes you better at lifting weights. It doesn’t. You don’t improve, you don’t get better, it’s only the produced artefact which becomes superficially different. > If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. The point of the article is the thinking. Style is something completely orthogonal. It’s irrelevant to the discussion.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• matsemann 9mo ago
  If you spent 3 hours on a show HN before, people most likely wouldn't appreciate it, as it's honestly not much to show. The fact that you now can have a more polished product in the same timeframe thanks to AI doesn't really change that. It just changes the baseline for what's expected. This goes for other things as well, like writings or art. If you normally spent 2 hours on a blog post, and you now can do it in 5 minutes, that most likely means it's a boring post to read. Spend 2 hours still, just with the help of AI it should now be better.
  • Forgeties79 9mo ago
    AI is great for getting my first bullet points into paragraph form, rephrasing/seeing different ways of writing to keep me moving when I’m stuck, and just general copy-editing (grammar really). Like you said it generally doesn’t save me a ton of time, but I get a quality copy done maybe a little bit faster and I find it just keeps me working on something rather than constantly stopping and starting when I hit a mental wall. Sometimes I just need/wanf to get it done, and for that LLM’s can be great.
  • ahmeneeroe-v2 9mo ago
    This is a great way to think about it. Put in the same effort and get farther. AI is a bicycle, not a motorcycle.
• add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
  Also sounds likely that it's the mediocre who gravitate to AI in the first place.
• aeturnum 9mo ago
  I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak) but it's inelegant and boring. I do think AI is great at allowing you not to write the dumb boiler plate we all could crank out if we needed to but don't want to. It just won't help you do the innovative thing because it is not innovative itself.
  • uean 9mo ago
    > I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Amen to that. I am currently cc'd on a thread between two third-parties, each hucking LLM generated emails at each other that are getting longer and longer. I don't think either of them are reading or thinking about the responses they are writing at this point.
    • rkomorn 9mo ago
      It's bad enough they didn't bother to actually write it, but often it seems like they also didn't bother to read it either.
    • overtone1000 9mo ago
      Honest conversation in the AI era is just sending your prompts straight to each other.
      • multjoy 9mo ago
        I mean one thing we have learnt from Epstein is that the 'elite' don't spend much time crafting the perfect email!
        • rurp 9mo ago
• himata4113 9mo ago
  I've actually ran into few blogs that were incredibly shallow while sounding profound. I think when people use AI to ex: compare docker to k8s and don't use k8s is how you get horrible articles that sound great, but to anyone that has experience with both are complete nonsense.
• Sol- 9mo ago
  The headline should be qualified: Maybe it makes you boring compared to the counterfactual world where you somehow would have developed into an interesting auteur or craftsman instead, which few people in practice would do. As someone who is fairly boring, conversing with AI models and thinking things through with them certainly decreased my blandness and made me tackle more interesting thoughts or projects. To have such a conversation partner at hand in the first place is already amazing - isn't it always said that you should surround yourself with people smarter than yourself to rise in ambition? I actually have high hopes for AI. A good one, properly aligned, can definitely help with self-actualization and expression. Cynics will say that AI will all be tuned to keep us trapped in the slop zone, but when even mainstream labs like Anthropic speak a lot about AI for the betterment of humanity, I am still hopeful. (If you are a cynic who simply doesn't belief such statements by the firms, there's not much to say to convince you anyway.)
  • argee 9mo ago
    In other words, AI raises the floor. If you were already near the ceiling, relying on it can (and likely will) bring you down. In areas where raising the floor is exceptionally good value (such as bespoke tools for visualizing data, or assistants that intelligently write code boilerplate, or having someone to speak to in a foreign language as opposed to talking to the wall), AI is amazing. In areas where we expect a high bar, such as an editorial, a fast and reliable messaging library, or a classic novel, it's not nearly as useful and often turns out to be a detriment.
  • latexr 9mo ago
    > As someone who is fairly boring As determined by whom? > conversing with AI models and thinking things through with them certainly decreased my blandness Again, determined by whom? I’m being genuine. Are those self-assessments? Because those specific judgement are something for other people to decide.
    • Sol- 9mo ago
      I think I can observe the world and my relative state therein, no? I know I am unfortunately less ambitious, driven and outgoing than others, which are commonly associated with being interesting. And I don't complain about it, the word has a meaning after all and I'll not delude myself into changing its definition. Definitely at a certain threshold it is for others to decide what is boring and not, I agree with that. In any case, my simple point is that AI can definitely raise the floor, as the other comment more succinctly expressed. Irrelevant for people at the top, but good for the rest of us.
• JohnMakin 9mo ago
  > The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it.
  • ghostbrainalpha 9mo ago
    Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too? I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?
    • JohnMakin 9mo ago
      I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding. The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one account, then exported it all to another account for reasons that didn't make any sense at all. These are already solved problems (in multiple ways) and it seemed like the person just didn't realize terraformer was already an existing, proven tool. I am not trying to say these things don't allow you to prototype quickly or get tedious, easy stuff out of the way. I'm saying that if you try to solve a problem in a domain that you have no expertise in with these tools and show other experts your work, they may chuckle at what you tried to do because it sometimes does look very silly.
      • rickandmorty99 9mo ago
        I'm building an education platform. 95% is vibe coded. What isn't vibe coded though is the content. AI is really uninspiring with how to teach technical subjects. Also, the full UX? I do that. Marketing plan? 90% is me. But AI does the code. Well... usually. People call my project creative. Some are actually using it. I feel many technical things aren't really technical things they are simply a problem where "have a web app" is part of the solution but the real part of the solution is in the content and the interaction design of it, not in how you solved the challenge technically.
• glitchc 9mo ago
  It used to be that all bad writing was uniquely bad, in that a clear line could be drawn from the work to the author. Similarly, good writing has a unique style that typically identifies the author within a few lines of prose. Now all bad writing will look like something generated by an LLM, grammatically correct (hopefully!) but very generic, lacking all punch and personality. The silver lining is that good authors could also use LLMs to hide their identity while making controversial opinions. In an internet that's increasingly deanonymized, a potentially new privacy enhancing technique for public discourse is a welcome addition.
• TheDong 9mo ago
  We don't know if the causality flows that way. It could be that AI makes you boring, but it could also be that boring people were too lazy to make blogs and Show HNs and such before, and AI simply lets a new cohort of people produce boring content more lazily.
• elliotbnvl 9mo ago
  I was onboard with the author until this paragraph: > AI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not very original, even if they’re very good at treating your inputs to the discussion as amazing genius level insights. The author comes off as dismissive of the potential benefits of the interactions between users and LLMs rather than open-minded. This is a degree of myopia which causes me to retroactively question the rest of his conclusions. There's an argument to be made that rubber ducking and just having a mirror to help you navigate your thoughts is ultimately more productive and provides more useful thinking than just operating in a vacuum. LLMs are particularly good at telling you when your own ideas are un-original because they are good at doing research (and also have median of ideas already baked into their weights). They also strawman usage of LLMs: > The way human beings tend to have original ideas is to immerse in a problem for a long period of time, which is something that flat out doesn’t happen when LLMs do the thinking. You get shallow, surface-level ideas instead. Who says you aren't spending time thinking about a problem with LLMs? The same users that don't spend time thinking about problems before LLMs will not spend time thinking about problems after LLMs, and the inverse is similarly true. I think everybody is bad at original thinking, because most thinking is not original. And that's something LLMs actually help with.
• nickysielicki 9mo ago
  > AI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not very original, even if they’re very good at treating your inputs to the discussion as amazing genius level insights. This is repeated all the time now, but it's not true. It's not particularly difficult to pose a question to an LLM and to get it to genuinely evaluate the pros and cons of your ideas. I've used an LLM to convince myself that an idea I had was not very good. > The way human beings tend to have original ideas is to immerse in a problem for a long period of time, which is something that flat out doesn’t happen when LLMs do the thinking. You get shallow, surface-level ideas instead. Thinking about a problem for a long period of time doesn't bring you any closer to understanding the solution. Expertise is highly overrated. The Wright Brothers didn't have physics degrees. They did not even graduate from high school, let alone attend college. Their process for developing the first airplanes was much closer to vibe coding from a shallow surface-level understanding than from deeply contemplating the problem.
  • notahacker 9mo ago
    Have to admit I'm really struggling with the idea that the Wright brothers didn't do much thinking because they were self taught, never mind the idea that figuring out aeronautics from reading every publication they could get their hands on, intuiting wing warping and experimenting by hand-building mechanical devices looks much like asking Claude to make a CRUD app...
    • nickysielicki 9mo ago
      That's not what I'm saying. My point is that expertise, as in, credentials, institutional knowledge, accepted wisdom, was actively harmful to solving flight. The Wrights succeeded because they built a tool that made iteration cheap (the wind tunnel), tested 200 wing shapes without deference to what the existing literature said should work (Lilienthal's tables were wrong and everyone with "expertise" accepted them uncritically), and they closed the loop with reality by actually flying. That's the same approach as vibe coding. Not "asking Claude to make a CRUD app.", but using it to cheaply explore solution spaces that an expert's priors would tell you aren't worth trying. The wind tunnel didn't do the thinking for the Wrights, it just made thinking and iterating cheap. That's what LLMs do for code. The blog post's argument is that deep immersion is what produces original ideas. But what history shows is that deeply immersed experts are often totally wrong and the outsiders who iterate cheaply and empirically take the prize. The irony here is that LLM haters feel it falls victim to the Einstellung effect [1]. But the exact opposite is true: LLMs make it so cheap to iterate on what we thought in the past were suboptimal/broken solutions, which makes it possible to cheaply discover the more efficient and simpler methods, which means humans uniquely fall victim to the Einstellung effect whereas LLMs don't. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect
• turnsout 9mo ago
  I think it's simpler than that. AI, like the internet, just makes it easier to communicate boring thoughts. Boring thoughts always existed, but they generally stayed in your home or community. Then Facebook came along, and we were able to share them worldwide. And now AI makes it possible to quickly make and share your boring tools. Real creativity is out there, and plenty of people are doing incredibly creative things with AI. But AI is not making people boring—that was a preexisting condition.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• Oarch 9mo ago
  Just earlier I received a spew of LLM slop from my manager as "requirements". He clearly hadn't even spent two minutes reviewing whether any of it made sense, was achievable or even desirable. I ignored it. We're all fed up with this productivity theatre.
  • WolfeReader 9mo ago
    "productivity theatre" is a brilliant phrase. Thank you!
• daxfohl 9mo ago
  And the irony is it tries to make you feel like a genius while you're using it. No matter how dull your idea is, it's "absolutely the right next thing to be doing!"
  • tonymet 9mo ago
    you can prompt it to stop doing that, and to behave exactly how you need it. my prompts say "no flattery, no follow up questions, PhD level discourse, concise and succinct responses, include grounding, etc"
    • oytis 9mo ago
      > PhD level discourse What is that? Do you think PhDs have some special way of talking about things?
      • tonymet 9mo ago
        Yes
• iambateman 9mo ago
  We are going to have to find new ways to correct for low-effort work. I have a report that I made with AI on how customers leave our firm…The first pass looked great but was basically nonsense. After eight hours of iteration, the resulting report is better than I could’ve made on my own, by a lot. But it got there because I brought a lot of emotional energy to the AI party. As workers, we need to develop instincts for “plausible but incomplete” and as managers we need to find filters that get rid of the low-effort crap.
• jcalvinowens 9mo ago
  Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.
  • ryandrake 9mo ago
    > The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me. I remember in the early days of LLMs this was the joke meme. But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of compressing a payload over the wire: We're taking our output, expanding it, transmitting it over the wire, and then compressing it again for input. Why do we do this?
    • zahlman 9mo ago
      > But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of compressing a payload over the wire: We're taking our output, expanding it, transmitting it over the wire, and then compressing it again for input. Why do we do this? I assume this is satire.
    • Zopieux 9mo ago
      We do this because using AI makes you immediately lazy in a way that is difficult to put in words but that anyone who tried can relate to. We do this because we were impressed that one time the stars aligned and the output was decent. So we write just one more prompt bro in the hope it'll will be better than the latest 10, which ended up a waste of time. We do this because $boss has been successfully spitting out 7 PowerPoints a day with it, which nobody reads but makes them feel productive, therefore this must be the future, therefore AI use shall be mandated until team productivity improves.
    • 9mo ago
• Kalpaka 9mo ago
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  • minimaxir 9mo ago
    > Not more blog posts, more emails, more boilerplate — but something structurally new? This is a point that often results in bad faith arguments from both AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics. Enthusiasts will say "everything is a remix and the most creative works are built on previous works" while skeptics will say "LLMs are stochastic parrots and cannot create anything new by technical definition". The truth is somewhere in the middle, which unfortunately invokes the Golden Mean Fallacy that makes no one happy.
    • 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
      Funny thing is, LLMs can create novel ideas, they're just crap. Turn the temperature setting up or expand top_p and it'll come up with increasingly wacky responses, some of which might even be good. Creativity often requires reasoning in unusual ways, and evaluating those ideas requires learning. The first part we can probably get LLMs to do; the latter part we can't (RL is a separate process and not really scalable). Even without any of that, you can prompt your way into new things. I'm building a camper out of wood, and I've gotten older LLM models to make novel camper designs just by asking it questions and choosing things. You can make other AI models make novel music by prompting it to combine different aspects of music into a new song. Human creativity works that way too. Think of all the failed attempts at new things that humans come up with before a good one actually sticks.
    • Kalpaka 9mo ago
      [dead]
• acjohnson55 9mo ago
  This is too broad of a statement to possibly be true. I agree with aspects of the piece. But it's also true that not every aspect of the work offloaded to AI is some font of potential creativity. To take coding, to the extent that hand coding leads to creative thoughts, it is possible that some of those thoughts will be lost if I delegate this to agents. But it's also very possibly that I now have the opportunity to think creatively on other aspects of my work. We have to make strategic decisions on where we want our attention to linger, because those are the places where we likely experience inspiration. I do think this article is valuable in that we have to be conscious of this first before we can take agency.
• pelagicAustral 9mo ago
  I 100% agree with the sentiment, but as someone that have worked on Government systems for a good amount of time, I can tell you, boring can be just about right sometimes. In an industry that does not crave bells and whistles, having the ability to refactor, or bring old systems back to speed can make a whole lot of difference for an understaffed, underpaid, unamused, and otherwise cynic workforce, and I am all out for it.
• josefresco 9mo ago
  While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.
  • logicprog 9mo ago
    This is precisely it. If anything, AI gives me more freedom to think about more novel ideas, both on the implementation and the final design level, because I'm not stuck looking up APIs and dealing with already solved problems.
    • ryandrake 9mo ago
      It's kind of freeing to put a software project together and not have to sweat the boilerplate and rote algorithm work. Boring things that used to dissuade me. Now, I no longer have that voice in my head saying things like: "Ugh, I'm going to have to write yet another ring buffer, for the 14th time in my career."
      • doublerabbit 9mo ago
        The boring parts where you learn. "Oh, I did that, this is now not that and it does this! But it was so boring building a template parser" - You've learnt. Boring is suppose to be boring for the sake of learning. If you're bored then you're not learning. Take a look back at your code in a weeks time and see if you still understand what's going on. Top level maybe, but the deep down cog of the engine of the application, doubt so. Not to preach but that's what I've discovered. Unless you already have the knowledge, then fine. "here's my code make it better" but if it's the 14th time you've written the ring buffer, why are you not using one of the previous thirteen versions? Are you saying that the vibed code is more superior then your own coding?
        • 9mo ago
• logicprog 9mo ago
  I think this is generally a good point if you're using an AI to come up with a project idea and elaborate it. However, I've spent years sometimes thinking through interesting software architectures and technical approaches and designs for various things, including window managers, editors, game engines, programming languages, and so on, reading relevant books and guides and technical manuals, sketching out architecture diagrams in my notebooks and writing long handwritten design documents in markdown files or in messages to friends. I've even, in some cases, gotten as far as 10,000 lines or so of code sketching out some of the architectural approaches or things I want to try to get a better feel for the problem and the underlying technologies. But I've never had the energy to do the raw code shoveling and debug looping necessary to get out a prototype of my ideas — AI now makes that possible. Once that prototype is out, I can look at it, inspect it from all angles, tweak it and understand the pros and cons, the limitations and blind spots of my idea, and iterate again. Also, through pair programming with the AI, I can learn about the technologies I'm using through demonstration and see what their limitations and affordances are by seeing what things are easy and concise for the AI to implement and what requires brute forcing it with hacks and huge reams of code and what's performant and what isn't, what leads to confusing architectures and what leads to clean architectures, and all of those things. I'm still spending my time reading things like Game Engine Architecture, Computer Systems, A Philosophy of Software Design, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Thinking in Systems, Data-Oriented Design, articles in CSP, fibers, compilers, type systems, ECS, writing down notes and ideas. So really it seems more to me like boring people who aren't really deeply interested in a subject use AI to do all of the design and ideation for them. And so, of course, it ends up boring and you're just seeing more of it because it lowered the barrier to entry. I think if you're an interesting person with strong opinions about what you want to build and how you want to build it, that is actually interested in exploring the literature with or with out AI help and then pair programming with it in order to explore the problem space, it still ends up interesting. Most of my recent AI projects have just been small tools for my own usage, but that's because I was kicking the tires. I have some bigger things planned, executing on ideas I have pages and pages, dozens of them, in my notebooks about.
• discreteevent 9mo ago
  > Original ideas are the result of the very work you’re offloading on LLMs. Having humans in the loop doesn’t make the AI think more like people, it makes the human thought more like AI output. There was also a comment [1] here recently that "I think people get the sense that 'getting better at prompting' is purely a one-way issue of training the robot to give better outputs. But you are also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!" Both of them reminded me of Picasso saying in 1968 that " Computers are useless. They can only give you answers," Of course computers are useful. But he meant that they have are useless for a creative. That's still true. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059206
• hnlmorg 9mo ago
  I’ve been bashing my head against the wall with AI this week because they’ve utterly failed to even get close to solving my novel problems. And that’s when it dawned on me just how much of AI hype has been around boring, seen-many-times-before, technologies. This, for me, has been the biggest real problem with AI. It’s become so easy to churn out run-of-the-mill software that I just cannot filter any signal from all the noise of generic side-projects that clearly won’t be around in 6 months time. Our attention is finite. Yet everyone seems to think their dull project is uniquely more interesting than the next persons dull project. Even though those authors spent next to zero effort themselves in creating it. It’s so dumb.
• crawshaw 9mo ago
  It is a good theory, but does it hold up in practice? I was able to prototype and thus argue for and justify building exe.dev with a lot of help from agents. Without agents helping me prove out ideas I would be doing far more boring work.
• solarisos 9mo ago
  This resonates with what I’m seeing in B2B outreach right now. AI has lowered the cost of production so much that 'polished' has become a synonym for 'generic.' We’ve reached a point where a slightly messy, hand-written note has more value than a perfectly structured AI essay because the messiness is the only remaining signal of actual human effort.
• daxfohl 9mo ago
  I want to say this is even more true at the C-suite level. Great, you're all-in on racing to the lowest common denominator AI-generated most-likely-next-token as your corporate vision, and want your engineering teams to behave likewise. At least this CEO gets it. Hopefully more will start to follow.
• ai4prezident 9mo ago
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• jrmg 9mo ago
  The issue with the recent rise in Show HN submissions, from the perspective of someone on the ‘being shown’ side, is that they are from many different perspectives lower quality than they used to be. They’re solving small problems or problems that don’t really exist, usually in naive ways. The things being shown are ‘shallow’. And it’s patently obvious that the people behind them will likely not support them in any meaning full way as time goes on. The rise of Vibe Coding is definitely a ‘cause’ of this, but there’s also a social thing going on - the ‘bar’ for what a Show HN ‘is’ is lower, even if they’re mostly still meeting the letter of the guidelines.
• notatoad 9mo ago
  i think about this a lot wit respect to AI-generated art. calling something "derivative" used to be a damning criticism. now, we've got tools whose whole purpose is to make things that are very literally derivative of the work that has come before them. derivative work might be useful, but it's not interesting.
• nickjj 9mo ago
  Look at the world Google is molding. Here's a guy who has had an online business dependent on ranking well in organic searches for ~20 years and has 2.5 million subs on YouTube. Traffic to his site was fine to sustain his business this whole time up until about 2-3 years where AI took over search results and stopped ranking his site. He used Google's AI to rewrite a bunch of his articles to make them more friendly towards what ranks nowadays and he went from being ghosted to being back on the top of the first page of results. He told his story here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc. NOTE: I've never seen him in my YouTube feed until the other day but it resonated a lot with me because I have a technical blog for 11 years and was able to sustain an online business for a decade until the last 2 years or so. Traffic to my site nose dived. This translates to a very satisfying lifestyle business to almost $0. I haven't gone down the path of rewriting all of my posts with AI to remove my personality yet. Search engines want you to remove your personal take on things and write in a very machine oriented / keyword stuffed way.
  • deleted 9mo ago
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  • nicbou 9mo ago
    Same, same. It's just awful. A decade of very carefully choosing my words, and I'm competing against shittier AI summaries of my own work.
• Retr0id 9mo ago
  This aligns with an article I titled "AI can only solve boring problems"[0] Despite the title I'm a little more optimistic about agentic coding overall (but only a little). All projects require some combination of "big thinking" and tedious busywork. Too much busywork is bad, but reducing it to 0 doesn't necessarily help. I think AI can often reduce the tedious busywork part, but that's only net positive if there was an excess of it to begin with - so its value depends on the project / problem domain / etc. [0]: https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/boring-ai-problems.html https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/boring-ai-problems.htm...
• fredliu 9mo ago
  We are in this transition period where we'll see a lot of these, because of the effort of creating "something impressive" is dramatically reduced. But once it stabilizes (which I think is already starting to happen, and this post is an example), and people are "trained" to recognize the real effort, even with AI help, behind creating something, the value of that final work will shine through. In the end, anything that is valuable is measured by the human effort needed to create it.
• tonymet 9mo ago
  When apps were expensive to build , developers at least had the excuse that they were too busy to build something appealing. Now they can cope by pretending to be an artisanal hand-built software engineer, and still fail at making anything appealing. If you want to build something beautiful, nothing is stopping you, except your own cynicism. "AI doesn't build anything original". Then why aren't you proving everyone wrong? Go out there and have it build whatever you want. AI has not yet rejected any of my prompts by saying I was being too creative. In fact, because I'm spending way less time on mundane tasks, I can focus way more time on creativity , performance, security and the areas that I am embarrassed to have overlooked on previous projects.
• apexalpha 9mo ago
  Meh. Being 'anti AI' is just hot right now and lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon. I'm sure some of them will actually hold out. Just like those people still buying Vinyl because Spotify is 'not art' or whatever. Have fun all, meanwhile I built 2 apps this weekend purely for myself. Would've taken me weeks a few years ago.
  • WolfeReader 9mo ago
    People who agree with you are right-minded and sensible, and people who disagree with you are "jumping on the bandwagon".
  • erelong 9mo ago
    I feel similarly but if people want to hate on AI, they're free to do so I guess
• hhsuey 9mo ago
  Another click bait title produced by a human. Most of your premises could be easily be countered. Every comment is essentially an example.
• BurningFrog 9mo ago
  OK, but maybe we only notice the mediocre uses of AI, while the smart uses come across as brilliant people having interesting insights.
  • palmotea 9mo ago
    > OK, but maybe we only notice the mediocre uses of AI, while the smart uses come across as brilliant people having interesting insights. Then prove it. Otherwise, you're just assuming AI use must be good, and making up things to confirm your bias.
• clint 9mo ago
  Yet another boring, repetitive, unhelpful article about why AI is bad. Did the 385th iteration of this need to be written by yet another person? Why did this person think it was novel or relevant to write? Did they think it espouses some kind of unique point of view?
• jihadjihad 9mo ago
  > Ideas are then further refined when you try to articulate them. This is why we make students write essays. It’s also why we make professors teach undergraduates. Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. I agree, but the very act of writing out your intention/problem/goal/whatever can crystallize your thinking. Obviously if you are relying on the output spat out by the LLM, you're gonna have a bad time. But IMO one of the great things about these tools is that, at their best, they can facilitate helpful "rubber duck" sessions that can indeed get you further on a problem by getting stuff out of your own head.
• elif 9mo ago
  And AI denial makes you annoying. Your preference is no more substantial than people saying "I would never read a book on a screen! It's so much more interesting on paper" There's nothing wrong with having pretentious standards, but don't confuse your personal aversion with some kind of moral or intellectual high ground.
  • imiric 9mo ago
    I think there should be 10x more hardcore AI denialists and doomers to offset the obnoxiousness and absurdity of the other side. As usual, the reality is somewhere in the middle, perhaps slightly on the denialist side, but the pro-AI crowd has completely lost the plot.
    • elif 9mo ago
      I'm all for well founded arguments against premature AGI empowerment.. But what I'm replying to, and the vast majority of the AI denial I see, is rooted in a superficial, defensive, almost aesthetic knee jerk rejection of unimportant aspects of human taste and preference.
      • imiric 9mo ago
        The article does not fit the description of blind AI denialism, though. The author even acknowledges that the tool can be useful. It makes a well articulated case that by not putting any thought into your work and words, and allowing the tool to do the thinking for you, the end product is boring. You may agree or disagree with this opinion, but I think the knee jerk rejection is coming from you.
• grimgrin 9mo ago
  I land on this thread to ctrl-f "taste" and will refresh and repeat later That is for sure the word of the year, true or not. I agree with it, I think
  • grimgrin 9mo ago
    it was up to 3 when I first posted it's at 10 now. note: the article does not say "taste" once
    • grimgrin 9mo ago
      18, i'll stop. cheers
• ghostclaw-cso 9mo ago
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• BiraIgnacio 9mo ago
  One of the down sides of Vibe-Coded-Everything, that I am seeing, is reinforcing the "just make it look good" culture. Just create the feature that the user wants and move on. It doesn't matter if next time you need to fix a typo on that feature it will cost 10x as much as it should. That has always been a problem in software shops. Now it might be even more frequent because of LLMs' ubiquity. Maybe that's how it should be, maybe not. I don't really know. I was once told by people in the video game industry that games were usually buggy because they were short lived. Not sure if I truly buy that but if anything vibe coded becomes throw away, I wouldn't be surprised.
• gAI 9mo ago
  I'm self-aware enough to know that AI is not the reason I'm boring.
• pbmango 9mo ago
  Along these same lines, I have been trying to become better at knowing when my work could benefit from reversion to the "boring" and general mean and when outsourcing thought or planning would cause a reversion to the mean (downwards). This echos the comments here about enjoying not writing boilerplate. The there is that our minds are programmed to offload work when we can and redirecting all the saved boilerplate to going even deeper on parts of the problem that benefit from original hard thinking is rare. It is much easier to get sucked into creating more boilerplate, and all the gamification of Claude code and incentives of service providers increase this.
• dang 9mo ago
  Recent and related: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (422 comments)
• dabedee 9mo ago
  Anecdotally, I haven't been excited by anything published on show HN recently (with the exception being the barracuda compiler). I think it's a combination of what the author describes: surface-level solutions and projects mostly vibe-coded whose authors haven't actually thought that hard about what real problem they are solving.
• stopachka 9mo ago
  > Original ideas are the result of the very work you’re offloading on LLMs. I largely agree that if someone put less work in making a thing, than it takes you to use it, it's probably not going to be useful. But I disagree with the premise that using LLMs will make you boring. Consider the absurd version of the argument. Say you want to learn something you don't know: would using Google Search make you more boring? At some level, LLMs are like a curated Google Search. In fact if you use Deep Research et al, you can consume information that's more out of distribution than what you _would_ have consumed had you done only Google Searches.
• ryandrake 9mo ago
  Honestly, most people are boring. They have boring lives, write boring things, consume boring content, and, in the grand scheme of things, have little-to-no interesting impact on the world before they die. We don't need AI to make us boring, we're already there.
• ossa-ma 9mo ago
  Sorry to hijack this thread to promote but I believe it's for a good and relevant cause: directly identifying and calling out AI writing. I was literally just working on a directory of the most common tropes/tics/structures that LLMs use in their writing and thought it would be relevant to post here: https://tropes.fyi/ https://tropes.fyi/ Very much inspired by Wikipedia's own efforts to curb AI contributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing Lmk if you find it useful, will likely ShowHN it once polished.
  • imiric 9mo ago
    The obvious question is: was it vibe coded? :) As much as I'd like to know whether a text was written by a human or not, I'm saddened by the fact that some of these writing patterns have been poisoned by these tools. I enjoy, use, and find many of them to be an elegant way to get a point across. And I refuse to give up the em dash! So if that flags any of my writing—so be it.
    • ossa-ma 9mo ago
      Absolutely vibe coded, I'm sure I disclosed it somewhere on the site. As much as I hate using AI for creative endeavours I have to agree that it excels as nextjs/vercel/quick projects like this. I was mostly focused on the curation of the tropes and examples. Believe me I've had to adjust my writing a lot to avoid these tells, even academics I know are second guessing everything they've ever been taught. It's quite sad but I think it will result in a more personable internet as people try to distinguish themselves from the bots.
      • imiric 9mo ago
        > It's quite sad but I think it will result in a more personable internet as people try to distinguish themselves from the bots. I applaud your optimism, but I think the internet is a lost cause. Humans who value communicating with other humans will need to retreat into niche communities with zero tolerance for bots. Filtering out bot content will likely continue to be impossible, but we'll eventually settle on a good way to determine if someone is human. I just hope we won't have to give up our privacy and anonymity for it.
• serf 9mo ago
  AI doesn't make people boring, boring people use AI to make projects they otherwise never would have. Non-boring people are using AI to make things that are ... not boring. It's a tool. Other things we wouldn't say because they're ridiculous at face value: "Cars make you run over people." "Buzzsaws make you cut your fingers off." "Propane torches make you explode." An exercise left to the reader : is a non-participant in Show HN less boring than a participant with a vibe coded project?
  • themafia 9mo ago
    Buggy whips are a tool. No one in their right mind would use one. Using the wrong tool for the job results in disaster. It's like watching a guy bang rocks together to "vibe build" a house. Good luck.
• minimaxir 9mo ago
  > Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable. It’s the work that matters. This is reductive to the point of being incorrect. One of the misconceptions of working with agents is that the prompts are typically simple: it's more romantic to think that someone gave Claude Code "Create a fun Pokemon clone in the web browser, make no mistakes" and then just ship the one-shot output. As some counterexamples, here are two sets of prompts I used for my projects which very much articulate an idea in the first prompt with very intentional constraints/specs, and then iterating on those results: https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/PROMPTS.md https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/P... (41 prompts) https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md (14 prompts) It's the iteration that is the true engineering work as it requires enough knowledge to a) know what's wrong and b) know if the solution actually fixes it. Those projects are what I call super-Pareto: the first prompt got 95% of the work done...but 95% of the effort was spent afterwards improving it, with manual human testing being the bulk of that work instead of watching the agent generated code.
• adverbly 9mo ago
  Whoa there. Let's not oversimplify in either direction here. My take: 1. AI workflows are faster - saving people time 2. Faster workflows involve people using their brain less 3. Some people use their time savings to use their brain more, some don't 4. People who don't use their brain are boring The end effect here is that people who use AI as a tool to help them think more will end up being more interesting, but those who use AI as a tool to help them think less will end up being more boring.
• overgard 9mo ago
  Totally agree with this. Smart creators know that inspiration comes from doing the work, not the other way around. IE, you don't wait for inspiration and then go do the work, you start doing the work and eventually you become inspired. You rarely just "have a great idea", it comes from immersing yourself in a problem, being surrounded with constraints, and finding a way to solve it. AI completely short circuits that process. Constraints are a huge part of creativity, and removing them doesn't mean you become some unstoppable creative force, it probably just means you run out of ideas or your ideas kind of suck.
• deleted 9mo ago
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• fdefitte 9mo ago
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• max8539 9mo ago
  Before vibe coding, I was always interested in trying different new things. I’d spend a few days researching and building some prototypes, but very few of them survived and were actually finished, at least in a beta state. Most of them I left non-working, just enough to satisfy my curiosity about the topic before moving on to the next interesting one. Now, these days, it’s basically enough to use agent programming to handle all the boring parts and deliver a finished project to the public. LLMs have essentially broken the natural selection of pet projects and allow even bad or not very interesting ideas to survive, ideas that would never have been shown to anyone under the pre-agent development cycle. So it’s not that LLMs make programming boring, they’ve allowed boring projects to survive. They’ve also boosted the production of non-boring ones, but they’re just rarer in the overall amount of products
• sarmasamosarma 9mo ago
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• kouru225 9mo ago
  This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme example, but the more you learn about art the more you notice just how much art works via unintentional processes like this. This is why the Trickster Gods, Hermes for example, are both the Gods of art (lyre, communication, storytelling) and the Gods of randomness/fortune. We used to assume that we could trust the creative to make their own decisions about how much randomness/automation was needed. The quality of the result was proof of the value of a process: when Max Ernst used frottage (rubbing paper over textured surfaces) to create interesting surrealist art, we retroactively re-evaluated frottage as a tool with artistic value, despite its randomness/unintentionality. But now we’re in a time where people are doing the exact opposite: they find a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devalue it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic. Coincidentally, these same people think the most “artistic” process is the most intentional one. They’re rejecting any element of creativity that’s systemic, and therefore rejecting any element of creativity that has a complexity that rivals nature (nature being the most systemic and unintentional art.) The end result is that the creative has to hide their process. They lie about how they make their art, and gatekeep the most valuable secrets. Their audiences become prey for creative predators. They idolize the art because they see it as something they can’t make, but the truth is there’s always a method by which the creative is cheating. It’s accessible to everyone.
  • ThrowawayR2 9mo ago
    AI bros: "You're gatekeeping because you think the result isn't art!" Rest of the world: "No, we're gatekeeping because we think the result isn't good." If someone can cajole their LLM to emit something worthwhile, e.g. Terence Tao's LLM generated proofs, people will be happy to acknowledge it. Most people are incapable of that and no number of protestations of gatekeeping can cover up the unoriginality and poor quality of their LLM results.
    • 9mo ago
• darod 9mo ago
  "You don’t get build muscle using an excavator to lift weights. You don’t produce interesting thoughts using a GPU to think." Great line!
• zinodaur 9mo ago
  Using AI to write your code doesn't mean you have to let your code suck, or not think about the problem domain. I review all the code Claude writes and I don't accept it unless I'm happy with it. My coworkers review it too, so there is real social pressure to make sure it doesn't suck. I still make all the important decisions (IO, consistency, style) - the difference is I can try it out 5 different ways and pick whichever one I like best, rather than spending hours on my first thought, realizing I should have done it differently once I can see the finished product, but shipping it anyways because the tickets must flow. The vibe coding stuff still seems pretty niche to me though - AI is still too dumb to vibe code anything that has consequences, unless you can cheat with a massive externally defined test suite, or an oracle you know is correct
• redwood 9mo ago
  AI is group think. Group think makes you boring. But then the same can be said about mass culture. Why do we all know Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, etc? when there were countless others who came before them and after them? Because they happened to emerge at the right time in our mass culture. Imagine how dynamic the world was before radio, before tv, before movies, before the internet, before AI? I mean imagine a small town theater, musician, comedian, or anything else before we had all homogenized to mass culture? It's hard to know what it was like but I think it's what makes the great appeal of things like Burning Man or other contexts that encourage you to tune out the background and be in the moment. Maybe the world wasn't so dynamic and maybe the gaps were filled by other cultural memes like religion. But I don't know that we'll ever really know what we've lost either. How do we avoid group think in the AI age? The same way as in every other age. By making room for people to think and act different.
• 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
  > The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective. But you could learn these new perspectives from AI too. It already has all the thoughts and perspectives from all humans ever written down. At work, I still find people who try to put together a solution to a problem, without ever asking the AI if it's a good idea. One prompt could show them all the errors they're making and why they should choose something else. For some reason they don't think to ask this godlike brain for advice.
• PaulHoule 9mo ago
  Try the formulation "anything about AI is boring." Whether it is the guy reporting on his last year of agentic coding (did half-baked evals of 25 models that will be off the market in 2 years) or Steve Yegge smoking weed and gaslighting us with "Gas Town" or the self-appointed Marxist who rails against exploitation without clearly understanding what role Capitalism plays in all this, 99% of the "hot takes" you see about AI are by people who don't know anything valuable at all. You could sit down with your agent and enjoy having a coding buddy, or you could spend all day absorbed in FOMO reading long breathless posts by people who know about as much as you do. If you're going to accomplish something with AI assistants it's going to be on the strength of your product vision, domain expertise, knowledge of computing platforms, what good code looks like, what a good user experience feels like, insight into marketing, etc. Bloggers are going to try to convince you there is some secret language to write your prompts in, or some model which is so much better than what you're using but this is all seductive because it obscures the fact that the "AI skills" will be obsolete in 15 minutes but all of those other unique skills and attributes that make you you are the ones that AI can put on wheels.
• waldopat 9mo ago
  Slop is probably more accurate than boring. LLM assisted development enables output and speed. In the right hands, it can really bring improvements to code quality or execution. In the wrong hands, you get slop. Otherwise, AI definitely impacts learning and thinking. See Anthropic's own paper: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
• deleted 9mo ago
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• themafia 9mo ago
  Or.. Only boring people use AI.
• kazinator 9mo ago
  If actually making something with AI and showing it to people makes you boring ... imagine how boring you are when you blog about AI, where at most you only verbally describe some attributes of what AI made for you, if anything.
• aaroninsf 9mo ago
  Setting aside the marvelous murk in that use of "you," which parenthetically I would be happy to chat about ad nauseum, I would say this is a fine time to haul out: Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon. Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false. Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved; they're just unevenly distributed. I can never these days stop thinking about the XKCD the punchline of which is the alarmingly brief window between "can do at all" and "can do with superhuman capacity." I'm fully aware of the numerous dimensions upon which the advancement from one state to the other, in any specific domain, is unpredictable, Hard, or less likely to be quick... but this the rare case where absent black swan externalities ending the game, line goes up.
  • WolfeReader 9mo ago
    "every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon." They're token predictors. This is inherently a limited technology, which is optimized for making people feel good about interacting with it. There may be future AI technologies which are not just token predictors, and will have different capabilities. Or maybe there won't be. But when we talk about AI these days, we're talking about a technology with a skill ceiling.
• stack_framer 9mo ago
  AI also makes you bored.
• mhurron 9mo ago
  Jokes on you, I was boring before AI.
• ineedasername 9mo ago
  No, AI makes it easier to get boring ideas to more than an elevator pitch or "Wouldn't it be cool..". Countless people right now are able to get that initial bit of excitement over an idea and instead of a little groundwork on various aspects of it. That process is often long enough to think things through a bit and even have "so what are you working on?" conversations with a friend or colleague that shakes out the mediocre or bad, and either refines things or makes you toss the idea.
• mrkramer 9mo ago
  I vibe code little productivity apps that would take me months to make and now I can make them in a few days. But tbh talking to Google's Gemini is like taking to a drunk programmer; while solving one bug it introduces another bug and we fight back and forth until it realizes what and how needs to be fixed.
• nicbou 9mo ago
  I agree for writing, but not for coding. An app can be like a home-cooked meal: made by an amateur for a small group of people.[0] There is nothing boring about knocking together hyperlocal software to solve a super niche problem. I love Maggie Appleton's idea of barefoot developers building situated software with the help of AI.[1, 2] This could cause a cambrian explosion of interesting software. It's also an iteration of Steve Jobs' computer as a bicycle for the mind. AI-assisted development makes the bicycle a lot easier to operate. [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software [2] https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situateds...
• Supermancho 9mo ago
  > I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN projects are overall pretty boring. Ironically, good engineering is boring. In this context, I would hazard that interesting means risky.
• bcatanzaro 9mo ago
  AI is a mirror. If you are boring, you will use AI in a boring way.
• solaire_oa 9mo ago
  Additionally, the boredom atrophies any future collaboration. Why make a helpful library and share it when you can brute force the thing that it helps? Why make a library when the bots will just slurp it up as delicious corpus and barf it back out at us? Why refactor? Why share your thoughts, wasting time typing? Why collaborate at all when the machine does everything with less mental energy? There was a article recently about offloading/outsourcing your thoughts, i.e. your humanity, which is part of why it's all so unbelievably boring. Online ecosystem decay is on the horizon.
• maplethorpe 9mo ago
  Just this week I made a todo list app and a fitness tracking app and put them both on the App Store. What did you make?
• abalashov 9mo ago
  Brilliant. You put into words something that I've thought every time I've seen people flinging around slop, or ideating about ways to fling around slop to "accelerate productivity"...
• JimmaDaRustla 9mo ago
  Bro, I'm a software developer, it's not the fucking AI making me boring.
• MATTEHWHOU 9mo ago
  There's a version of this argument I agree with and one I don't. Agree: if you use AI as a replacement for thinking, your output converges to the mean. Everything sounds the same because it's all drawn from the same distribution. Disagree: if you use AI as a draft generator and then aggressively edit with your own voice and opinions, the output is better than what most people produce manually — because you're spending your cognitive budget on the high-value parts (ideas, structure, voice) instead of the low-value parts (typing, grammar, formatting). The tool isn't the problem. Using it as a crutch instead of a scaffold is the problem.
  • dogleash 9mo ago
    > if you use AI as a draft generator [...] you're spending your cognitive budget on the high-value parts (ideas, structure, voice I don't follow. If you have the ideas and a structure to give to an AI you already have a working draft. Just start revising that. What would an AI add other than turn into the replacement for thinking described in your negative example?
• artzev_ 9mo ago
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• artzev_ 9mo ago
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• amoorthy 9mo ago
  We built an editor for creating posts on LinkedIn where - to avoid the "all AI output is similar/boring" issue - it operates more like a muse than a writer. i.e. it asks questions, pushes you to have deeper insights, connects the dots with what others are writing about etc. Users appear to be happy but it's early. And while we do scrub the writing of typical AI writing patterns there's no denying that it all probably sounds somewhat similar, even as we apply a unique style guide for each user. I think this may be ok if the piece is actually insightful. Fingers crossed.
  • ge96 9mo ago
    A tangent, I wonder what kind of people actually stick around and read LinkedIn, the posts on there are so bad. I only go on there when I'm trying to get recruiters to find me for a new job. Instagram too I can't bear to use Instagram it has so many ads.
    • amoorthy 9mo ago
      Yeah, much of LinkedIn is performative nonsense. However, with such a large B2B audience there, it offers a sizable opportunity for people who actually publish useful information and are honest rather than posing. We have an "influencer" recommendation engine that is decent at finding such thoughtful folks, but it varies by industry. But yeah, it's not easy and I wish there were more thoughtful posters on LinkedIn.
• Lerc 9mo ago
  This is more about low effort than AI. It also seems like a natural result of all of the people challenging the usefulness of AI. It motivates people to show what they have done with it. It stands to reason that the things that take less effort will arrive sooner, and be more numerous. Much of that boringness, is people adjusting to what should be considered interesting to others. With a site like this, where user voting is supposed to facilitate visibility, I'm not even certain that the submitter should judge the worth of the submission to others. As long as they sincerely believe that what they have done might be of interest, it is perhaps sufficient. If people do not like it then it will be seen by few. There is an increase in things demanding attention, and you could make the case that this dilutes the visibility such that better things do not get seen, but I think that is a problem of too many voices wishing to be heard. Judging them on their merits seems fairer than placing pressure on the ability to express. This exists across the internet in many forms. People want to be heard, but we can't listen to everyone. Discoverability is still the unsolved problem of the mass media age. Sites like HN and Reddit seem to be the least-worst solution so far. Much like Democracy vs Benevolent Dictatorship an incredibly diligent curator can provide a better experience, but at the cost of placing control somewhere and hoping for the best.
• jason_oster 9mo ago
  Back in my day, boring code was celebrated.
• 5o1ecist 9mo ago
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• deleted 9mo ago
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• cal_dent 9mo ago
  Writing is thinking. If you outsource your writing then you're no longer really thinking. Some people keep trying to overcomplicate this but that is it in a nutshell.
• arjie 9mo ago
  Actually, I often enjoy the stuff that floats up from the muck. A lot of it is vibe-coded but it gives me inspiration to replicate on my own. As an example, I don't use OpenClaw. I use my own replicant version and it's been a lot of fun. The READMEs of various projects are far superior to the functionality. But I really appreciate the READMEs because people have lots of good ideas and I crib them all.
• h4kunamata 9mo ago
  As much as I have hate and love relationship with AI, I disagree. I use AI, mainly Perplexity AI, as a replacement for search engine because they all suck right now. AI makes homelab more fun and therefore I learn more. Homelab is my main hobby, using AI to ASSIST me with one thing or another, always end-up mentioning something else that I never heard before. I wish I could clone myself due to the amount of topics and projects I have noted down. AI is like money, money doesn't make you a bad or good person, money only enhance what you already are. AI doesn't automatically make things boring, they way how you use it is what make things boring or more exciting with you jumping from forum to forum, new topic to new topic.
• chrysoprace 9mo ago
  OP briefly touches on it, but vibe coding is (typically) absent of struggle, besides the usual frustrations with code flat out not working or the LLM not understanding the nuance of human language. Whenever I build a solution that a PM has asked for, I can typically make some predictions about what possible problems are going to be and potential solutions, but you don't know what you don't know. It's not until I immerse myself in a problem space that I actually understand what some of the roadblocks might be. The LLMs that I've tried are more than happy to keep hacking at a problem and implement workarounds, instead of taking a step back and wonder if the approach is wrong.
• lovetocode 9mo ago
  AI allows me to live my life more freely and focus on things that actually matter like family
• deleted 9mo ago
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• artzev_ 9mo ago
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• skeledrew 9mo ago
  The content of the article seems OK, but I'm still going to generally disagree with it. Maybe my take is just confirming the thesis, but I don't find the larger things I do with AI to be borifying (yes I just invented that word). I've been ramping my use since the start of this month, and have already made serious progress on a number of projects, many of which have been on ice for years, and have also built out a stable of supporting tools. And I've found it generally exhilarating; making good progress where there was none before is pretty heady. One of the more memorable experiences I have was a problem that I had to deal with for years, had thought hard about, and then in the end Claude resolved it cleanly with about 1/3 a screen of code (would share the link, but there's no "share" in the mobile app): =============== I often use [snoop](https://github.com/alexmojaki/snoop https://github.com/alexmojaki/snoop) because I like the features and output formatting, but it doesn't support async. I have found [ASnooper](https://github.com/LL-Ling/ASnooper https://github.com/LL-Ling/ASnooper), but it only supports async. I'd like to add ASnooper's async feature to snoop. I'm thinking of creating a project that imports both, and patches the relevant parts of snoop with the async functionality from ASnooper. I have some notes from looking into the snoop code: - A `ConfiguredTracer` object is exposed in `builtins` (configuration.py, line 142). - Whenever the `ConfiguredTracer` object is called with an async function, it raises (tracer.py, line 166). - The trace event is passed to a formatter, and then a writer (tracer.py, line 280-281). ... and in the ASnooper code: - An `ASnooper` object is exposed (__init__.py). - Whenever the `ASnooper` object is called on an async function, it creates formatter and writer objects (core.py, line 69-75). The approach I'm considering is to wrap `ConfiguredTracer.__call__` with a method that delegates async function tracing to `ASnooper`, and replace the `OutputFormatter` and `OutputWriter` classes with versions that delegate to `snoop`'s implementation. I've prepared a repo for the solution: """ . ./README.md ./pyproject.toml ./tests ./tests/__init__.py ./src ./src/async_patched_snoop ./src/async_patched_snoop/__init__.py """ I've also extracted excerpts from both projects, as unified diff contexts (attached). Any issues, questions or suggestions? Or a better approach that doesn't involve forking the targeted projects? =============== I prompted Claude with this along with a file containing the diffs (constructed with the help of another prompted tool), Claude informed me of the issues in my approach and suggested a couple alternate solutions, I selected the one 1 preferred, Claude asked for some more context and then did the implementation, and now I have async support in snoop. Probably took me over an hour to construct that initial prompt, and under 5 minutes of conversion to completed solution. I really don't think that that's boring.
• erelong 9mo ago
  Opposite of my experience, I think AI gives tools to expand thinking and creativity significantly, leading to much more interesting results
• sega_sai 9mo ago
  For many applications boring is good. If you are writing a novel, you don't want boring, but if you're working piece of code, I don't think you want "exciting".
• eboy 9mo ago
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• ai_tools_daily 9mo ago
  The article conflates two very different things: using AI to skip thinking vs using AI to think faster. When I write with AI assistance, I spend MORE time editing, questioning, and restructuring — not less. The AI gives me a faster first draft, but I'm pickier about the result because the baseline is higher. The thinking doesn't disappear; it shifts from "how do I phrase this" to "is this actually what I mean." The real risk isn't that AI makes you boring — it's that lazy usage of AI makes lazy people more visibly lazy. The same person who would have written a generic email before AI now writes a generic AI email. The tool didn't change the person. What I've noticed in practice: the people who produce the most interesting AI-assisted work are the ones who were already interesting thinkers. They use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter. They argue with it, redirect it, and use its output as raw material. The boring output people complain about is a prompting problem, not an AI problem.
• ianbutler 9mo ago
  I decided to respond to a lot of the replies I see in this thread with my own post. I spent a bunch of time writing and rewriting a reply and decided to extend it into a post since I seem to care a deal. https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/ https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/
• insin 9mo ago
  /me bunches blanket up next to chin, like Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense /me whispers They don't know they're boring I've had to unfollow multiple people I've followed for donkey's years since they pivoted to full-time AI* (LLM) posting, as they just don't know what's interesting and what isn't any more. A link to something you said you've vibe coded is now at about the level of a link to your dream journal, or Suno, in terms of clickability.
• carpe__diem 9mo ago
  I think a useful framing is: AI raises throughput but can lower taste if you skip deliberation. In my workflow the difference is whether I force a second pass where I delete half of the model output and rewrite the core argument in my own words. If I skip that pass, everything converges to the same polished-but-generic tone. So for me AI is best as a draft generator and counterexample machine, not the final author.
• uslic001 9mo ago
  AI turns you into a NPC.