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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 p
by aeturnum 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo agoIt'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 8mo agoHonest conversation in the AI era is just sending your prompts straight to each other.
- multjoy 8mo agoI mean one thing we have learnt from Epstein is that the 'elite' don't spend much time crafting the perfect email!
- rurp 8mo agoVery true, and it's not just creepy elites either. Before I got into tech I worked a blue collar job that involved zero emailing. When I first started office work I was so incredibly nervous about how to write emails and would agonize over trivial details. Turns out just being clear and concise is all most people care about. There might be other professions where people get more hung up on formalities but my partner works in a non-tech field and it's the same way there. She's far more likely to get an email dashed off with a sentence fragment or two than a long formal message. She has learned that short emails are more likely to be read and acted on as well.
- insanewow 8mo ago[dead]
- cranberryturkey 8mo ago[flagged]
- dhdaadhd 8mo agooh the irony
- supriyo-biswas 8mo ago> the signal-to-noise ratio in AI-drafted comms is brutal This is also the case for AI generated projects btw, the backend projects that I’ve been looking at often contains reimplementations of common functionality that already exists elsewhere, such as in-memory LRU caches when they should have just used a library.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- enobrev 8mo agoI feel like dealing with robo-calls for the past couple years had led me to this conclusion a bit before this boom in ai-generated text. When I answer my phone, if I hear a recording or a bot of some sorts, I hang up immediately with the thought "if it were important, a human would have called". I've adjusted this slightly for my kid's school's automated notifications, but otherwise, I don't have the time to listen to robots.
- hananova 8mo agoRobocalls nowadays tend to wait for you to break dead air before they start playing the recording (I don't know why.) So I've recently started not speaking immediately when someone calls me, and if after 10 seconds the counterparty hasn't said something I hang up.
- Uehreka 8mo ago> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do). Really elegant code is cool to read, but many tools I use daily are closed source, so I have no idea if their code is elegant or not. I only care if it works.
- NuclearPM 8mo agoAI is excellent for helping to write things like tech specs, procedures and manuals.
- djeastm 8mo agoAs long as we're all aware that it'll probably mostly be AI reading them...
- JohnMakin 8mo agoSometimes (or often) things with horrible security flaws "work" but not in the way that they should and are exposing you to risk.
- rescripting 8mo agoIf you refuse to run AI generated code for this reason, then you should refuse to run closed source code for the same reason.
- JohnMakin 8mo agoI don't see how the two correlate - commercial, closed source software usually have teams of professionals behind them with a vested and shared interest in not shipping crap that will blow up in their customers' face. I don't think the motivations of "guy who vibe coded a shitty app in an afternoon" are the same. And to answer you more directly, generally, in my professional world, I don't use closed source software often for security reasons, and when I do, it's from major players with oodles of more resources and capital expenditure than "some guy with a credit card paid for a gemini subscription."
- madcaptenor 8mo agoThe short version of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" is "ai;dr"
- techblueberry 8mo agoWhat's interesting is how AI makes this problem worse but not actually "different", especially if you want to go deep on something. Like listicles were always plentiful, even before AI, but inferior to someone in substack going deep on a topic. AI generated music will be the same way, there's always been an excessive abundance of crap music, and now we'll just have more more of it. The weird thing is how it will hit the uncanny valley. Potentially "Better" than the crap that came before it, but significantly worse than what someone who cares will produce. DJing is an interesting example. Compared with like composition, Beatmatching is "relatively" easy to learn, but was solved with CD turntables that can beatmatch themselves, and yet has nothing to do with the taste you have to develop to be a good DJ.
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo agoIn other words, AI partially solves the technique problem, but not the taste problem. In the arts the differentiators have always been technical skill, technical inventiveness, original imagination, and taste - the indefinable factor that makes one creative work more resonant than another. AI automates some of those, often to a better-than-median extent. But so far taste remains elusive. It's the opposite of the "Throw everything in a bucket and fish out some interesting interpolation of it by poking around with some approximate sense of direction until you find something you like" that defines how LLMs work. The definition of slop is poor taste. By that definition a lot of human work is also slop. But that also means that in spite of the technical crudity, it's possible to produce interesting AI work if you have taste and a cultivated aesthetic, and aren't just telling the machine "make me something interesting based on this description."
- furyofantares 8mo ago> "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" At this point I'd settle if they bothered to read it themselves. There's a lot of stuff posted that feels to me like the author only skimmed it and expects the masses to read it in full.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoExcept its not. What's a programmer without a vision? Code needs vision. The model is taking your vision. With writing a blog post, comment or even book, I agree.
- doomslayer999 8mo agoExactly, I think perplexity had the right idea of where to go with AI (though obviously fumbled execution). Essentially creating more advanced primitives for information search and retrieval. So it can be great at things we have stored and need to perform second order operations on (writing boilerplate, summarizing text, retrieving information).
- CuriouslyC 8mo agoThe truth is now that nobody will bother to read anything you write AI or not mostly, creating things is like buying a lottery ticket in terms of audience. Creating something lovingly by hand and pouring countless hours into it is like a golden lottery ticket that has 20x odds, but if it took 50x longer to produce, you're getting significantly outperformed by people who just spam B+ content.
- UltraSane 8mo agoIt actually makes a lot more sense to share the LLM prompt you used than the output because it is less data in most cases and you can try the same prompt in other LLMs.
- popalchemist 8mo agoFor now.
- bandrami 8mo agoI keep hearing the "boilerplate" argument but it never made sense to me. Text editors have had snippets for half a century now and they're strictly better than an engine that generates plausible-enough boilerplate.
- drcxd 8mo agoYeah, and if there really is any boilerplate thing, can't we programmers come up with a more deterministic solution, like a framework? I don't know.
- bandrami 8mo agoWe have, haven't we? That was what was so nice about rails 20 years ago; you just said rails new app something and had a functioning web app that could even just read your database and generate all the model files.
- benreesman 8mo agoIt's not worth my time to read something that was not done to a high standard, where that standard has a definition with some basis in rigor rather than opinion, where even the notion of good taste is in some way attached to experience of the distribution from which examples of good and bad taste are drawn. It is not about the author and it is in not about the effort. It is about the quality.
- mrfumier 8mo ago> because it is not innovative itself. And what are you basing that claim on? What are your sources? Your arguments?
- theK 8mo ago> AI is great at allowing you not to write the dumb boiler plate we all could crank... I've actually started having a different view on this. After getting over the "glancing instead of reading llm suggestions" phase I started noticing that even for simple or boilerplate tasks, LLMs all too often produce quite wasteful results regardless the setting or your subscription. They are OK to get you going but in the last weeks I haven't accepted one Claude, devstral or gpt suggestion verbatim. Nevertheless, I often throw them boilerplate tasks even though I now know that typically I'll end up coding 6 out of 10 myself and only use the other four as skeletons. But just seeing the "naive" or "generic" implementation and deciding I don't like it is a plus as it seems to compress the time of thinking about it by a good part.