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> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list fi
by ge96 5mo ago
> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve.
man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks
- smallmancontrov 5mo agoDoes anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mediaman 5mo agoI think it likely performed well in A/B preference tests with chat users. I've noticed Claude does far fewer listicles than ChatGPT. I suspect that they don't blindly follow supervised learning feedback from chats as much as ChatGPT. I get Apple vs Google design approach from those two companies, in that Apple tends not to obsess over interaction data, instead using design principles, while Google just tests everything and has very little "taste." In general I feel like the data approach really blinds people to the obvious problem that "a little" of something can be preferable while "a lot" of the same is not. I don't mind some bullet points here and there but when literally everything is in bullet points or pull quotes it's very annoying. I prefer Claude's paragraph style. I suppose the downside is that using "taste" like Apple does can potentially lead a product design far, far away from what people want (macOS 26), more so than a data approach, whereas a data approach will not get it so drastically wrong but will never feel great.
- rororournouh 5mo agoI’m given to understand that Anthropic uses something called Constitutional AI, where there is a central document of desirable and undesirable qualities (as well as reinforcement learning) whereas OpenAI relies more heavily on direct human feedback and rating with human trainers evaluating responses and the model conforming to those preferences. I also much prefer the output of Claude at present.
- kccqzy 5mo agoYeah and for much of the HN crowd, we aspire to have better tastes than the average. So if the supervised learning uses average human trainers it will most likely be seen as having poor taste for much of HN.
- vasco 5mo agoSpeak for yourself my taste is average and I aspire for it to remain so.
- tikhonj 5mo agoEh, Facebook today is farther from what anybody "wants" than macOS 26, and Facebook is about as blindly data-driven as they come. Turns out you can get away with a lot when you have a quasi-monopoly on an addictive product, and you buy out your realistic competitors...
- jimbokun 5mo agoI think the “taste” approach at Apple died with Steve Jobs.
- stefan_ 5mo agoThere was a time when also Claude would absolutely fill code with emojis, which is why now their system prompt has > Claude does not use emojis unless the person in the conversation asks it to
- tardedmeme 5mo agoI think it's funny how we are all tweaking LLM output by adding instructional tokens instead of, say, finding a vector that indicates "user asked for emojis", and forbidding emoji tokens in the sampling unless that vector passes a threshold.
- sevenseacat 5mo agoand it doesn't even follow its own instructions
- Aurornis 5mo agoI first noticed it when Notion became popular. All of the PMs I interacted with across companies started using Notion for everything at the same time. Filling Notion documents with emojis was the style of the time. This slightly pre-dated AI tools becoming entirely usable for me.
- ex-aws-dude 5mo agoWas going to say the same Notion-core
- mikestorrent 5mo agoInsert the grug IQ curve meme here. Some folks really like to hyper-optimize on tooling side quests.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hilariously 5mo agoFirst saw it in overly peppy Rails libraries and using gitmoji more than 10 years ago.
- mikestorrent 5mo agoImagine how much work that all took... carefully colourizing your CLI.... and now it just gets spat out
- dwedge 5mo agoIt was an annoying way of writing on places like LinkedIn and marketing copy for 3 or 4 years before LLMs appeared on the scene. I remember realising that I can't read them (my brain jumps between the words and the picture making it hard to focus on the content) before AI appeared.
- dspillett 5mo agoBoth predate common use of LLMs, unless my memory is even more shaky than usual on this. I'm sure I saw them appear a fair amount on GitHub and related project pages, but I couldn't tell you more specifically how they started & grew. Somehow they must have been over-represented in the training data (or something in the tokenising/training/other processes magnifies the effective presence of punctuation) because I don't remember them being that common and LLMs seem to love spewing them out. Or perhaps it is a sign of the Habsburg problem: people asked LLMs to produce README files like that because they'd seen the style elsewhere, it having spread more organically at first, and the timing was just right for lots of those early examples to get fed back into training data for subsequent models.
- xmcqdpt2 5mo agoIt's the style of "blazing fast library made with :heart: in rust :crab:" that was popular in github README.md. My guess is that because the models are told to use md they overfit to the style of md documents too.
- e28eta 5mo agoiirc, I saw it all over Stripe documents while I was there from 2017-2020. Lots of emoji use on Slack, and then it’d show up in requirements docs, shipped emails, etc. I don’t know where it came from, but that’s where I was exposed to it first.
- idle_zealot 5mo agoYou're not supposed to read the Jira ticket. You're supposed to paste the link along with instructions for your Claude agent to "do this ticket, no mistakes," then raise an MR for whatever it writes. The text is a wire protocol between agents. If a PM doesn't care enough about the requirements to write, or even read them, then would they even notice if the code works or not? Why would they care about that? What does "works" even mean if no human knows the spec? How quickly we become reverse centaurs.
- wutwutwat 5mo ago> then would they even notice if the code works or not? it's literally their job to ship functional product features...
- pocksuppet 5mo agoEveryone's job is to please their manager. Their job is shipping functional product features only if that's what their manager likes. In functional companies, that should be the case. There aren't many functional companies.
- tyg13 5mo ago> Everyone's job is to please their manager. Indeed. I've spent my professional career seeking out positions at companies of increasing prestige and technical renown, each with a higher reputation for professionalism and performance than the last. And yet this invariant has held in every position. As far as I can tell, the only difference between each company has been the quality of the manager I was supposed to please, which I have noticed (perhaps predictably) is not strongly correlated with the company's reputation or success.
- cm11 5mo agoDon't forget that they're also functionally structured. The managers don't own products or features, they manage functions (engineering, sales, design). And in practice, they usually only manage people, with little control over the function. So the managers aren't particularly interested or tied to shipping product features. The PM maybe, but they don't have reports or own much.
- InexSquirrel 5mo agoGod I hate the emoji and checkmark usage so much. It feels so try-hard cutesy. Just give me normal bulleted items, I can read.
- paodealho 5mo agoI like them. It tells very clearly how much effort went into someone's work. I like them even more on code comments. It tells _precisely_ how much effort went into the pull request, so I don't spend time reviewing lazy work.
- skirmish 5mo agoSo you just rubber-stamp the lazy work? What else can you do when this PR is assigned to you specifically for reviewing?
- biztos 5mo agoRecently I reviewed some vibe-coded stuff and sent a list of issues and suggestions to the “author,” figuring he’d read it and then go through each one with Claude until fixed. Instead he didn’t read it at all, and just threw the whole thing at Claude Code as a big prompt. The result was… interesting!
- ninkendo 5mo agoThis is happening with coworkers now. It’s honestly insulting. They put up a PR with all the obvious tells, the markdown table of files that changed, the description that basically parrots back things the human obviously wanted them to stress in the task (“this implements a secure, tested (no regressions) implementation of a Foo…”), and the code is an absolute mess of one-off functions placed in any random file with no thought to the way the codebase is actually organized. Then I give feedback after spending like an hour going through their 2000 line change, and then here comes back an update with a very literal interpretation of my feedback that clearly doesn’t really understand what I was even saying. Complete with code comments that parrot back what I said (“// Use the expected platform abstractions for conversion (not bespoke methods”). Reviewing coworkers PR’s feels like I’m just talking to the LLM directly at this point, but with more steps and I have less control over the output.
- banboosy 5mo ago[dead]