12 ms·

AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

• gnarlouse 2mo ago
  YO (AIDR)IAN!
• jedberg 2mo ago
  Every time this comes up I have to ask, how do you know it is AI? Sure, sometimes there are strong tells, like if they forget to take off the "Do you want me to change anything" at the end. But AI was trained on good writing. Good writing looks like AI. I've had to reduce my use of em dashes for example because they are an "AI tell". I used to like using the term "load bearing". And the list gets longer every day. Eventually every mark of a good writer will be an AI tell. I don't know how to resolve this. But I've been accused multiple times of copy/pasting AI when I did no such thing, and it's getting equally frustrating.
  • Gigachad 2mo ago
    I know it's AI because the laziest coworker you know just posted 400 paragraphs of text on a minor topic.
    • jedberg 2mo ago
      Sure, that's one of those obvious tells. But when I sit and spend 10 minutes making a well thought out and researched comment, and then properly format it in markdown, and then the first response is "this is AI", it's really frustrating.
      • asadotzler 2mo ago
        If you read more literature you will get better at writing and your writing should stop being as similar to the banal mess that AI spits out. This is on you to differentiate.
        • jedberg 2mo ago
          I’ve read plenty of literature. So has the AI training. That won’t help. In fact, it will make it worse. I even studied writing in college. I’ve written published books and articles. I can write well. But thanks for the tip!
  • bastawhiz 2mo ago
    Can you read something and tell when an author you like wrote it without seeing the attribution? I can. I think most of us could, because people use certain phrases or have a particular style. That doesn't make it bad. AI writing isn't actually all that bad. But it has a very specific style, and there are MANY tells. I use Claude every single day, and it's immediately obvious to me when I'm reading something Claude wrote. "It's not X, it's Y" "That's the reframe" "The gap is" I could go on. I too like using em dashes, and have been since I learned the keyboard shortcut over a decade ago. I've never been accused of posting ai-written text because of it. AI is indeed trained on good writing, but it's also trained on bad writing. And it's post trained on specific things that are writing that aren't good or bad for reasons unrelated to style. What you're left with is a one-size-fits-all writing style. Doing math? Doing medicine? Doing anime waifu role play? It all starts from the same generic milquetoast style until you tell it not to. And to me (and apparently many other people) that's super easy to pick out.
  • twoodfin 2mo ago
    The problem with AI writing isn’t the tics and the tells. The problem with AI writing is that it’s bad. The typical highly voted HN AI-written post has an annoying clickbait title, then jumps into a meandering chain of “so there I was” scene-setting, assertions of dubious reliability & relevance, and supposed supporting examples. All punctuated by short, unhelpfully dramatic sentences that would interrupt the high-level narrative, if only there were one. I’m really curious what “good AI writing” you had in mind. My personal intuition is that for almost any topic, the HN LLM-generated post du jour has a far superior cousin sitting in the archive pre-2021.
  • mc3301 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  • nunez 2mo ago
    It has that feel to it. Hard to describe. It has a very consistent way of writing that gives it away, even if it's rephrase from text that was previously written by a human. Beyond that, most AI content is WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY longer than it needs to be to get its point across and is oversaturated with unneeded "mic drop" phrases
• blobbers 2mo ago
  (such as giant automated meeting summaries we all get after an hour long slog).
• nunez 2mo ago
  > Customer support would be a perfect example. We’re not looking for artisanal “did you make sure to reset your phone” style dialogue. Yeah...I'm probably dropping whatever services do this. If the company can't invest the capital to hire humans that help humans, then what does that say about their products?
• arm32 2mo ago
  This is HW;DR: human-written, did read
  • sermah 2mo ago
    TA;DU: Too ambiguous, didn’t understand
    • hinkley 2mo ago
      did understand?
    • em-bee 2mo ago
      yeah, how about HW;WR? human written, worth reading.
  • spudlyo 2mo ago
    This is LE;DU: low-effort, didn't upvote.
• pavon 2mo ago
  AI—DR
  • sethops1 2mo ago
    Google Gemini is experiencing high load at the moment.
  • incognito124 2mo ago
    genuinely amazing
  • hidelooktropic 2mo ago
    I get this reference
  • r_lee 2mo ago
    that's load-bearing
  • bratr 2mo ago
    here's a honest take
  • cobolexpert 2mo ago
    You closed the gap
  • mock-possum 2mo ago
    That’s the shape of it
  • armanj 2mo ago
    You're absolutely right
  • hamdingers 2mo ago
    Now I have the full picture
  • Gecko4072 2mo ago
    You hit the nail on the head.
• sega_sai 2mo ago
  If some text is AI written as a response to a much shorter prompt, then the prompt and/or sources used to make the text should be published instead (or at the very least together with the text).
  • add-sub-mul-div 2mo ago
    I think of a prompt more like a tweet. The medium does matter. If someone was only willing or able to put an abbreviated amount of thought and effort into something, it's not worth a disproportionate amount my time or attention.
    • JoshTriplett 2mo ago
      Exactly. And I think the information theory matters here: it's worth putting in information proportional to the human-supplied input, not proportional to the AI-expanded output.
    • paulpauper 2mo ago
      It's like "inverse twitter "
  • perching_aix 2mo ago
    "please walk our observability stacks, our IaC code and config, our cloud account, and our application codebases to gather an RCA for for any errored out request responses we've been producing this week. include a tabulated breakdown." ~actual prompt i sent in to claude last week. doing what you propose would be basically impossible / nonsensical, and further undo the entire exercise, sending all the money spent on the tokens down the toilet. put differently, if you use agents in any actually useful manner, the principle you describe erases whatever value they did end up providing. though since the whole underlying premise is that ai never provides any value, maybe that's the intended result and is as expected. in which case, i'd argue such a desire is more than a bit demagogue.
  • al_borland 2mo ago
    I had to do this with my boss. He sent an email saying he asked AI about an assignment he gave us, then sent us the reply from the LLM. It was verbose and lacked any and all awareness of the constraints we have within the company. The assignment was poorly defined from the outset, and I asked for the prompt he used, because I thought that would be far more useful to understand what he was looking for rather than what AI decided to spit back. It turned out his prompt was equally uninspired... 1 or 2 sentences. That was the thought he put into it, which then had us spending hours trying to figure out the AI reply. He could have saved the whole team a full day by just sending the prompt... or nothing at all.
• krona 2mo ago
  A similar metaphor (I think I came up with but can't remember) is the slop sandwich. You can deliver slop to me but only when wrapped in a thick layer of human intervention (which usually also means removing 50% of the slop)
• Terr_ 2mo ago
  > TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) was the solution for social media. > AI;DR (AI; didn’t read) is the solution for AI slop. Maybe I'm the odd one out here and didn't plumb the worse-depths of social media, but I feel I need to defend good old TLDR as a slightly different, and less-hostile animal. It can be a moral condemnation of the poster, where they're disrespecting everyone else's time by posting something big and vague... But it usually isn't. At least half the time TLDR is someone providing a summary because they think it'd be useful (even of it's sometimes a hostile interpretation.)
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Jare 2mo ago
    tl;dr as the sole reply to someone IS a condemnation of what they wrote. tl;dr at the front of your message with a short summary, is an admission that the long version may not be for everyone and there's a core point for quick consumption. I'd say that sounds about the same for ai;dr. I could see myself posting a prompt like that in front of the generated report.
  • mrtesthah 2mo ago
    I agree, likening it to "TL;DR" is much too charitable. At least when someone wrote a wall of text it was apparent they cared enough about the subject to think about and pay attention to it.
• pixelesque 2mo ago
  Too sloppy, didn't read.
  • nik282000 2mo ago
    Big fan of "slop-jockies" as a collective term for AI spammers.
• Gecko4072 2mo ago
  I thought this was: I summarized with AI; didn't read.
  • adroitboss 2mo ago
    I thought the exact same. There is also a growing problem with people using AI to summarize everything instead of reading the actual text. I thought this addressed that issue by having a section for the AI to help summarize or something similar.
• eddieroger 2mo ago
  >However, I have a new policy. >If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it... >...then I’m not going to bother reading it. Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but we've had copywriters and editors for generations now. Not reading something because AI did the post-writing work feels kinda weak. Skip stuff started from AI, fine, but this is just because it's AI, not because the author didn't do the task. And I do get the point is that if an AI did /most/ of the work, ok to that, too, but not post-write processing alone.
  • nancyminusone 2mo ago
    >But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output did you formerly hire copywriters for this task?
  • het25 2mo ago
    that is load bearing information, and i won't tiptoe around it.
  • jere 2mo ago
    And how could you possibly distinguish those scenarios without wasting all your time?
  • AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
    The problem with copywriters is that they wrote "copy" - which turns out to be writing that I don't want to read. And the problem with AI is that much of what it trained on is copy, so it trained to write stuff that I don't want to read. So in the end, I don't care if a human wrote it or an AI, I don't want to read it either way. What's wrong with copyrighters? They write like corporations, not like humans (see the Cluetrain Manifesto for more on this). They sound like nobody - literally inhuman. I don't want to read that. I want to hear a human voice. If I can't hear that in your writing, I don't need to read it.
  • afr0ck 2mo ago
    I think the main reason many people (including me), very often, lack the motivation to read content that is likely generated by AI is the suspicion that it comes from a place of intellectual laziness. Another reason, based on personal experience, is that AI content may suffer from too much verbosity, too much jargon and over-confidence, which makes the reading experience feel fake and border-line irritating. In many cases the content may have very little to no nuance, which is ultimately a waste of time. As an anecdote, someone posted a blogpost on Linkedin on using agents to implement a driver to access PCIe devices over TCP/IP. I was intrigued because that's not an easy task for several reasons, like handling PCIe interrupts and DMA. For exmaple, how does the remote machine map the device's PCIe BARs? And when it issues I/O to the devices registers, how are these reads and writes transferred to the remote device. In the end, this is just some virtual memory. In a local machine, this is either directly mapped to the PCIe physical addresses or some IOMMU virtual address space which is then translated by the hardware upon CPU/device/VM access. After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc. Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.
• ygjb 2mo ago
  [dead]
• jannyfer 2mo ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=2&prefix=false&query=%22ai%3BDR%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=2&prefix=false&qu... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991394
  • Fantosism 2mo ago
    Thank you. Felt like I was stuck in a time loop.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• CyberMacGyver 2mo ago
  Don’t be a meat proxy [0] is another one I like [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933
• matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• ademup 2mo ago
  I'll probably be downvoted to the bottom of the ocean, but I feel this needs to be said: - Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing? And how would you know if the /content/ is worthwhile, unless you read it... - The ability to "detect AI" is imperfect at best. 90% AI written? 5%? How would you know, unless you read it.... - If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"? - If you are wrong, and you announce it to the world, how would it feel to someone who spent a lot of time and energy writing?
  • VeninVidiaVicii 2mo ago
    Maybe you haven’t seen enough coworkers send you pages and pages of slop.
  • jastanton 2mo ago
    Because my time is valuable and if the person who sent me something didn't care enough to write it, then I don't care enough to read it. Bragging about it is weird, but I will use it like I use 'RTFM'. And detectability - My AI-DAR (radar), is fairly fined tuned but not perfect, so if I make a mistake, oh well, the point is I'm protecting my time.
    • ModernMech 2mo ago
      So how much time do you deem a minimum amount for someone to spend on some unit of work before you're willing to read it? And what technologies are allowed -- are word processors allowed or does it have to be done with a writing instrument like a pencil? What about spell check? Do you care if they had done their research with a Wikipedia or do you prefer card catalog for the really important work?
      • robrtsql 2mo ago
        I'm not sure. Another way to think about it: how _little_ time is someone able to spend on something where you will still be interested in reading it? If someone tells their unattended LLM agent to create a blog, write whatever content will maximize banner ad revenue, and then share each post on Hacker News, would you read it? What if the content is actually interesting in your opinion?
• whstl 2mo ago
  There is a light at the end of the tunnel for all the minds burned out by AI slop. I already saw someone getting fired for only producing AI text as part of their entire output, after being unable to explain what they “wrote” in multiple situations. And recently my company enacted a mandate that text made for humans should not be AI generated. Sooner or later every company will start realizing that this is just people too lazy to actually work and coasting on a paycheck, at the expense of every other worker.
  • rfff2 2mo ago
    Yup sooner or later the new heuristic will be quality of comms measured by how short a thing is rather than how long. Much how like essay's have a word limit - and people think you should max it out. We will go in the opposite direction - which I'll be glad about!
  • ModernMech 2mo ago
    But they got fired for not being able to explain it, not for using it.
    • whstl 2mo ago
      It’s not as if he was advertising to the world that he wasn’t really working.
  • LPisGood 2mo ago
    This makes me happy to hear that someone got fired for that, but I just cannot picture that happening at my organization. Perhaps standards are too low. What sort of thing did they get fired for? Was there some warning etc?
    • whstl 2mo ago
      Product Manager using Jira AI to hallucinate tickets, epics, metrics and roadmap. Even the numbers were completely made up. There were too many incidents of “this doesn’t look right” in the same week, so when their boss did a thorough check a couple days after, it was all fake, everything. Eventually they admitted and got canned.
• montroser 2mo ago
  I am pro AI, and also deeply share this sentiment. I think sometimes people have a big long thread with Claude where they feel enthusiastic about the back and forth being very productive -- and then they genuinely want to share the summary of the conversation with their colleagues so that they can feel it too. It's not just typing a short prompt and copy/pasting the response. But, Claude, especially Opus is so unnecessarily flowery, and smug -- and it's so identifiably characteristic. It somehow rubs salt in the wound: "I didn't take the time to write this out in my own words, so now you get to listen to this petulant asshole mansplain it to you". If it would get to the point, and with some humility, it would be a much different proposition.
  • matheusmoreira 2mo ago
    Only after switching to Sol did I notice how verbose and smug Claude was. Now I wonder if Claude's at least partly responsible for the AI hate.
• gortok 2mo ago
  The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?
  • coderatlarge 2mo ago
    i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc
    • otterley 2mo ago
      The benefit and promise of social media, at least early on, was that it was supposed to be authentic - that when someone posted, it was really coming from them. Engagement was truly personal, at least for a little while. It still is for most. In the book-publishing context, ghost writers have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.
    • account42 2mo ago
      Are you implying that one should not be offended by that? It's commonly mocked when it becomes apparent.
      • coderatlarge 2mo ago
        well it’s widely understood that any large scale social media account is managed by a team and not the individual being represented and we seem broadly ok with that. what those teams produce is often vapid manipulative corporate bs which i don’t find any less offensive for it being typed by humans earning a salary as compared to tensors assembling copy via gpu. the current anti AI sentiment strikes me as a bit of a high-minded pose when the actual underlying behaviors have been in place for a while.
• supermatt 2mo ago
  I submit pretty much the opposite of this, but it didn't gain any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49332291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49332291
  • meindnoch 2mo ago
    Yeah, I wonder why! /s
    • supermatt 2mo ago
      Because some people are just ignorant and downvote anything they either aren't willing or able to understand :)
  • Planktonne 2mo ago
    You submitted thoughtless pap; of course it didn't get any traction. Why would you think it would?
    • supermatt 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      • Planktonne 2mo ago
        > What was thoughtless about it? You didn't put any meaningful thought into it.
        • supermatt 2mo ago
          Yes, I did. That was the whole point of the post.
          • Planktonne 2mo ago
            I believe you believe you did, but the post makes more of a point through its conception than it does through its prose.
• pranav_tech26 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• classictraffic 2mo ago
  This blog post also feels AI written (I can tell it’s human written, just sloppy)
• a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  Eventually, AI will be a far better writer than a human is, and then nobody will want to read the human generated subpar writing. AI writing is rapidly improving. Human writing, on average not so much.
  • platevoltage 2mo ago
    I'll take "subpar" human writing, music, art, or whatever any day of the week.
    • a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
      People say this, but AI artists keep getting listens on music platforms, doing at least as well as human artists if the listener is making a blind choice. https://www.promarket.org/2026/05/04/consumers-prefer-ai-music-until-theyre-told-its-ai/ https://www.promarket.org/2026/05/04/consumers-prefer-ai-mus...
      • platevoltage 2mo ago
        Sure. Kid Rock also sold more records than the Pixies.
      • sdellis 2mo ago
        Expressing a preference between two choices is not how I would measure what listeners want. What they should have been testing is whether the listener ends up playing the track over and over and singing along to every word of the track. I think you would end up with a very different conclusion if you measured passion and not preference. This study merely reflects what the companies want to measure.
        • platevoltage 2mo ago
          It's like how the Pepsi challenge predicted everyone's preference for Pepsi.
• slybot 2mo ago
  3 years ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35638229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35638229
• thm 2mo ago
  Eternal September already?
  • nik282000 2mo ago
    There's been a few. The last one was 2007 when the iPhone changed the internet from a place you went because you wanted to be there and had a reason to engage, into an app meant to entertain you for 5min at a time between text messages and flushing.
• cortesoft 2mo ago
  I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.
  • paulpauper 2mo ago
    Many people use many prompts and revisions or prompts or combinations or human and AI writing. Its not a simple as just making a single prompt and copying the output as the blog post.
    • rsalus 2mo ago
      Yeah, by the time my thought is fully formed I've gone through an entire conversation.
    • pelotron 2mo ago
      They could prompt the AI to scroll up and copy their previous prompts for them.
  • snmx999 2mo ago
    Not all AI content was created with one prompt.
  • onion2k 2mo ago
    That implies you think the output of an LLM is only a rewording of the prompt, and that it doesn't add anything from it's corpus of training data. That's obviously untrue.
    • Alpha3031 2mo ago
      I'm in the "post both and let your readers figure out which, if any, they prefer" camp but even if you didn't (and unless you were using one of those super special models that can't be released according to the companies) I would hope that any literate adult that thought it valuable would be capable of consulting something with comparable knowledge and experience. Of course, given that posting one is not mutually exclusive with posting the other, I would still think that posting both is the easiest way to satisfy both people who prefer to read the prompt and those who prefer the read the output.
• hankbond 2mo ago
  Whenever I see a massive project README all I can think is if you didn't write it, ME won't READ it.
• dbspin 2mo ago
  "Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.)." Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?
  • yoz-y 2mo ago
    Sourcing ideas just seems so weird… if you don’t have an idea about what to make, then just don’t ?
• neilv 2mo ago
  > Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.). Sounds like this isn't everyone, but rather, it's people who have nothing to say, and -- even after they've "sourced ideas" -- they don't know how to reason about it, nor how to communicate it. This isn't everyone. This is people engaged in generating noise, for the sake of noise.
• LPisGood 2mo ago
  My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name. I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed. I certainly don’t read the long-winded AI comments or the AI documentation, but perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass.
  • mawadev 2mo ago
    Just wait until you see vibe contracts, vibe requirements and vibe legal documents
    • RealityVoid 2mo ago
      I'm... Actually fine with that. In one direction. I use AI to fill in forma and usually it has really good pointers. I do not trust it to do it itself, but it does simplify things quite a bit.
  • EastSmith 2mo ago
    I dump AI output in PRs, because it ads context for the AI reviewer.
  • moltar 2mo ago
    I address it with AI. Write REVIEW.md. I have CC check itself pretty well. I also put into agent/claude/review instructions to write using simple English skill and humanizer skill. Then not to write redundant comments. It’s not perfect but definitely catches lots of slop.
    • rfgplk 2mo ago
      It's actually insanely difficult to get LLMs not to produce comments. Even with explicit "NEVER LEAVE ANY COMMENTS WHATSOEVER", they still do, across basically all providers.
• jr3592 2mo ago
  The irony here is that his very own post reads (to me) as AI slop. Take this line: > I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Why? Because there is growing grumbling among everyone about AI writing. And it’s not just others; it’s me! Classic AI "its not just, its..."
• ramdump 2mo ago
  The fear I have is that I accuse of AI without being 100% certain. I've not found a good way around this except to talk to the person.
  • LPisGood 2mo ago
    I left a comment on some of my interns, clearly AI generated code and response asking for him to please not respond with AI generated output — the response was talking about things I had known he was unfamiliar with because I had worked with him. The response itself had some particular formatting/content decisions that were generally a very odd way for anyone to write, but certainly not an intern. He responded that he did write this himself and that he was upset I would accuse him, etc. I, of course, had no choice but to apologize. I hope I was right, but clearly there is some chance I was wrong.
  • Alien1Being 2mo ago
    Pangram does a decent job of AI detection.
• techpression 2mo ago
  This hurts particularly much when it comes to software changelogs/release notes, most recently for me was the solidjs 2 beta, reading the announcement post was painful, even the headers are LLM:isms.
• brunoborges 2mo ago
  If a coworker sends me an AI generated report to help on my task, I am more likely to ask them to just send me the prompt and model they used. Let me own the session and steer it however I want.
  • paulpauper 2mo ago
    Then put the report in AI and have it read it . that is the only appropriate response
    • brunoborges 2mo ago
      I believe I have better context data in my session than someone simply prompting based on hearsay of what they think they know about the task I have at hand. Also, I may have already started looking into it, but now this other person just wasted money.
• river_otter 2mo ago
  It's now faster to write than to read. A first in human history
• quantum_state 2mo ago
  Very good shorthand
• darrelld 2mo ago
  We have a junior research student who does this on slack. Before I think he was using AI and other tools to translate his messages since english isn't his first language. His own words, then AI translated it. Sounded kinda clunky, but I could sense the human behind the words and I gave grace since I can only imagine how hard it is to properly communicate your ideas when English isn't your first language. But now it's gotten to a point where I can tell he's not using it for just translation. I'm gonna need to chat with him. Redacted example below ```Hey @PERSON_WHO_ASKED_QUESTION Both good, and the retrieval one isn't written down anywhere. In order. One corpus or four. My lean is one. Same chunks and embeddings tables, source_type column to tell them apart. Values I'd propose, flat rather than nested: paper, dataset_description, dataset_readme, dataset_contributors, dataset_records, dataset_files. Description and readme split because their units already differ, one row versus one row per paragraph. A discriminator that can't separate those isn't doing much. The existing 440 rows would need backfilling to paper. Chunk id in the same spirit: dataset doi, source type, ord. So EXAMPLE_DOI. Worth checking before any of this matters: does chunks.doi carry a foreign key to papers.doi in 0001_init.sql? If it does, a metadata chunk with a dataset doi can't go in that table at all, and separate storage stops being a choice. Ten second read, I haven't done it. Shout if you get there first. Retrieval is the one that's bigger than it looks. Search once across everything and nothing guarantees a paper chunk and a metadata chunk both land in the top k. The facts we want relate the two, and the generator can only write those if it sees both sides in the same window. So if one type systematically wins the ranking, that class of fact doesn't get worse. It becomes impossible. Which way it goes I don't know. Two mechanisms pull opposite ways. Metadata chunks are short, tens of tokens against roughly 450 for a paper chunk, so they may just lose. But we embed context header plus text, and on a short chunk the header is most of the vector. The header is the dataset name, which is also most of the query. That points the other way. Cheaper to measure than argue. Load one dataset's metadata, run a normal dataset level query, record the rank of the first chunk of each source type. Runnable as soon as any one of our four subtasks lands. After that it's one pool, per source with quotas, or one pool with a floor per source type. I'd rather not pick before there's a measurement. ```
• boogieknite 2mo ago
  > But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output, then I’m afraid I received a different message than you intended. i have what ill call a "condition" where i fear assuming someone did something stupid is insulting. i try not to patronize people because i also assume that would be insulting. this leads to issues where sometimes people really want to be lead to water rather than make an implied connection themselves this is a roundabout way of saying, is there a genuinely polite way to tell colleagues posting ai copypasta makes them seem ignorant? i dont think ai:dr is workplace appropriate. id like to tell people gently and avoid patronizing if possible
• themgt 2mo ago
  But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output Claude, post that wall of output to Slack yourself. Make no mistakes.
• therepanic 2mo ago
  You don't have to preface every criticism by saying you're a huge AI proponent. EVERYONE overdoes this.
• layer8 2mo ago
  Not to be confused with Aider.
• rfgplk 2mo ago
  It's an ego issue for most people. For one, part of it comes from genuine intimidation or fear, the notion that a machine can be smarter than you, or at least produce answers that are more knowledgeable than you could. But I think the more striking issue is what LLMs do to the perceived value of expertise. Especially in engineering there's this weird pecking order hierarchy, where someone should be listened to just "because they have the YOE/Experience/Other meaningless metrics" under their belt. Now all of a sudden, someone with relatively little (or no) background in a given subject is capable of just entering a prompt and within seconds obtaining an answer that is expert or near expert level. (You can see the results of this with engineers just hopping between different fields with ease) The implication is that expertise is being devalued in real time, and in a sense it really is, but I think that most people really do need to face the reality of their emotions and where it comes from. For myself personally, I have no qualms about reading or even engaging with AI content, as long as the content itself is of quality and truthful.
  • jeremyjh 2mo ago
    No, that’s not it. Its easy as competent engineers for us to forget how terrible most people are at prompting AI, or reviewing and correcting AI output. Raw output from typical prompts is garbage. If I start reading something that no one even bothered to edit well enough to tone down the AI speak, odds are its garbage and I don't need to spend more time engaging with it than the author did.
    • rfgplk 2mo ago
      But the point is that it's garbage because of the low quality of the information, and not necessarily because an LLM made it. I do agree that most people don't know how to prompt.
      • jeremyjh 2mo ago
        Right, and I’m not going to spend the time trying to gauge the information quality when I already know the person who sent it didn’t think it was important enough to edit - or isn’t capable of it.
• uygar 2mo ago
  I'm not particularly interested in who wrote the first draft. What matters is whether someone took responsibility for the final version.
• afr0ck 2mo ago
  I think the main reason many people (including me), very often, lack the motivation to read content that is likely generated by AI is the suspicion that it comes from a place of intellectual laziness. Another reason, based on personal experience, is that AI content may suffer from too much verbosity, too much jargon and over-confidence, which makes the reading experience feel fake and border-line irritating. In many cases the content may have very little to no nuance, which is ultimately a waste of time. As an anecdote, someone posted a blogpost on Linkedin on using agents to implement a driver to access PCIe devices over TCP/IP. I was intrigued because that's not an easy task for several reasons, like handling PCIe interrupts and DMA. For exmaple, how does the remote machine map the device's PCIe BARs? And when it issues I/O to the devices registers, how are these reads and writes transferred to the remote device. In the end, this is just some virtual memory. In a local machine, this is either directly mapped to the PCIe physical addresses or some IOMMU virtual address space which is then translated by the hardware upon CPU/device/VM access. After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc. Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.
  • hinkley 2mo ago
    My question is always, "Am I willing to maintain this code?" Sometimes that's a yes, even if AI generated it and I can tell despite someone making half an effort to be a human for a minute during the PR process. But sometimes it's not. It gets really dicey when you've kept an architecture a certain shape because there's a difficult feature you intend to slot into the negative space. There are two or three ways to implement that feature, and the one they chose just stomps all through your potential. But that's why we have code reviews. You don't have to read my mind if I just tell you. But it can be frustrating if someone asks you to do it a different way, and then has comments on how you accomplished that, and then comments on the fixes for your other comments.
• ronbenton 2mo ago
  Anyone else have coworkers responding to your human PR review comments with AI? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, how can anyone find this socially acceptable?
• Sha1rholder 2mo ago
  I personally don't care whether a piece of writing was AI-generated as long as it's useful or insightful. However there's only 10% of AI-generated writing that is worth reading. If some articles convince me that there's somebody behind it contributing valuable understanding, I'm willing to overlook the telltale AI mannerisms. It's understandable that some domain experts aren't very proficient in English. That said, statistically speaking 90% AI-generated pieces are a waste of readers' time. It's a good strategy to simply skip them. I know this looks like a bot comment. It's not. It's a much older style of writing known as Chinglish. That's why as a non-native English speaker, I can totally understand why someone would want to use AI to help with their writing.
• kmeisthax 2mo ago
  > Yes, there are certain situations in which we should expect 100% AI-generated copy. Customer support would be a perfect example. We’re not looking for artisanal “did you make sure to reset your phone” style dialogue. No, no, no, no - the whole point of customer support is that I am having a problem that requires attention from a representative of the business I am dealing with. Businesses really don't like doing this; they call it a cost center to have to talk to their own customers, so they staff their call centers with increasingly useless script-readers designed specifically to shield the people with knowledge of the matter you're facing against customers like you. This is a great solution for dealing with technically illiterate people who don't do basic troubleshooting and terrible for literally anyone else who actually tries to be a good customer.
• ProCodeSoftware 2mo ago
  I have been feeling the same way for the past few months. I just want to say I will never read a paragraph that has signs of AI, because most of the time, the people didn't put much effort in it. I don't care if it is factually correct or not.
• Razengan 2mo ago
  By the way, just want to say, AI can be good for some bedtime stories while trying to fall asleep lol After you've exhausted your favorite audiobooks, I mean Like, I love The Wind in the Willows, but I wish the part where Toad and the gang go on the road in the cart lasted for longer. I asked ChatGPT to invent some fill-in chapters matching the same style and speak it out loud, and it kinda did OK actually.
• hatthew 2mo ago
  One of the ways I think about this is to treat AI as if it were another person. If I want to give information to Bob but I think Alice might do a better job of writing something, I'm not going to ask Alice and then copy-paste her response to Bob. I'd either tell Bob to ask Alice, or loop Alice into the conversation. Me being the middleman between Alice and Bob can cause several issues including delayed communication, miscommunication, and obscured provenance. Alice being AI or a real person doesn't change those factors much.
  • CuriouslyC 2mo ago
    I think this is a reasonable position, I prefer when people separate their words from their agent's words clearly, but I don't have a problem with reading stuff other people's agents wrote if the input to the writing was really good. I don't need to see the prompt, not having your agent Cyrano me is enough.
• purplethreads 2mo ago
  Impossible to know unless you did read. TL;DR works because I can see the length at a glance And you cannot tell all AI. Only mainstream crap like ChatGPT and Gemini which is full of cached tropes and boilerplate formats so it all sounds the same. My custom invoicing software automates notes based on years of my previous notes and tasks I did - looks nothing like AI. Use a real library and local model, mess with settings, there is a lot more to this than the mainstream consumer apps.
  • trelbutate 2mo ago
    So? This is about ovious stuff where you notice the typical annoying AI style directly in the first paragraph. After all, 99% of "regular" people use the mainstream models, and anyone who uses a local model probably knows enough about AI that they don't dump raw output on you.
• VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
  The irony of making such a bold progressive statement while still being on X and not Mastodon....
• runjake 2mo ago
  I guess I'm in the minority. I don't mind an AI response if it's informative, concise and well-crafted. The problem is that those kinds of responses are rare in the tech world. But when you have someone competent at the helm, it's much better than reading human slop.
• Alien1Being 2mo ago
  AI generated text should be treated as spam and automatically filtered out.
• redrix 2mo ago
  If you didn’t take the time to write it, why should anyone take the time to read it?
  • CuriouslyC 2mo ago
    I hope you posted this ironically.
• jumploops 2mo ago
  > I’m SUPER jealous that I didn’t think of this first... Not to toot my own horn, but...[0] On a more serious note, we're planning a trip with family, and my mother-in-law asked if I'd read "the planning doc" yet. It was a shared ChatGPT thread. Thankfully I read enough LLM output to skim it easily and avoid offending her (: [0]https://x.com/jumploops/status/2031936768023638069 https://x.com/jumploops/status/2031936768023638069
• atleastoptimal 2mo ago
  The problem is that in most domains we reward effort sometimes even more than results, especially in fields where results are hard to verify. A wall of text is the classic way to signal effort and delay feedback, a signal which was costly pre-AI, but now is not costly. However norms have not shifted.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• elendilm 2mo ago
  Its a bit lame in 2026, to attack the messenger instead of the content of the message. Its awfully similiar to bitching about reading mails on a computer and attacking the sender. The virtue signaling is beyond me. I dont care about AI;DR or TL;DR. Give me good content. And I will read it.
• chasing 2mo ago
  So what you're saying is: You no longer visit LinkedIn.
• firefoxd 2mo ago
  I've asked questions to people who wrote interesting articles where I didn't know it was AI generated. But then, they couldn't really answer me because most examples in the article wasn't something they experienced themselves. So basically, we were both reading the article for the first time, with made up scenarios.
• frogperson 2mo ago
  I don't think AI is ever fully going away, but I can't wait for the bubble to pop and customers are forced to pay the actual cost of tokens. i think that's the only way we see a meaningful reduction in slop.
  • CuriouslyC 2mo ago
    DeepSeek v4 flash blew the doors off that fantasy. Even if we switched to tokenomics, models are getting good enough and cheap enough that there's no stopping this train.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• friarpuck 2mo ago
  Overall, I agree. My only problem with the idea is that I'm seeing more and more people just use "AI;DR" to deride an opinion that they don't agree with. It's becoming the new "paid shill".
• foobar1962 2mo ago
  "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
• stevenhubertron 2mo ago
  Seem's reasonable and what I hold myself and my team to.
• dkersten 2mo ago
  If you can’t be bothered to write it, then I can’t be bothered reading it.
• ilaksh 2mo ago
  Valid and fair especially in the 95% of cases where the AI added a lot of unnecessary detail. On the other hand, I suspect that we are pretty quickly going to get to the point within a few years where we realize that the best AIs are not just being overly verbose. But rather their communication is just more compressed and thorough. So even though we still see a lot of jaggedness and weird failures in some places，in other ways I think this is actually an aspect of intelligence where AI has surpassed humans. Just in terms of being able to deal with a certain density of information.
• bicepjai 2mo ago
  Totally agree with the core argument. I understand there must be some etiquette in the space of llm-writing where writers must respect the readers enough to edit and review. Also, pages and pages of LLM content is not something anyone should be proud about sharing. But we are in this world where condensing an argument is so easy that in the busy lives we live, sometimes some arguments are made with LLMs online. If those arguments are pages, I understand the backlash, but if it’s a terse argument, then I would urge others to address the argument made rather than categorizing them under AI;DR, it’s like ad-llminem in my view.
• waynecochran 2mo ago
  Fight fire w fire. Have AI read it and decide what to do w it.
• kevinbaiv 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• Lerc 2mo ago
  For me the bar is still quality. Sure it bothers me if I search for something and find a crappy AI written tutorial that answers none of my questions, but if I found a high quality well written, insightful, and informative tutorial, I would not care if it were AI written. I guess the same thing goes for articles written by humans. I don't really read the articles that are "Shower thoughts that I think are profound" or "The way I do things is the way everyone should do things" There is a fairly common wisdom that the way you get good at writing is by writing a lot, I'm prepared to cut people a lot of leeway at people putting all of the stuff out there before they are good at writing. It's just the path you have to take. That's OK, because I don't have to read it. And I'm fine with people making crappy AI generated tutorials while they figure out how to make better AI generated tutorials. I am not fond of people who are creating bulk content by volume without any regard to quality or improvement. Some may be doing this to make money, and maybe that works, I suspect for the most part it doesn't. I don't appreciate it though, whether it be AI or human produced bulk content. I'd spare a thought for those who feel that they are producing high quality content when they are not. Everyone has a poor perspective on something sometimes. Usually the harshest punishment they will face is the feelings their future selves experience when they look upon their work with a more balanced perspective.
  • jappgar 2mo ago
    I agree, but a lot of people don't. I have coworkers who say they will stop reading something if they believe it is AI. For them, it's not about quality, it's laziness disguised as righteousness.
• LogicFailsMe 2mo ago
  I suspect the free market of information content will ultimately sort this all out. I feel similarly about AI art, but to get to that point I had to go to my city's art museum and experience artwork in person. There's just no comparison between being in the same room with a Michelangelo sculpture and peering at a Stable Diffusion/Midjourney/Whatever image on one's screen, there just isn't. What AI can do though is create endless content and too many are content with that, see linkedin. TLDR: Content != Art
• anotherevan 2mo ago
  While I don't always agree with everything Drew writes, the title of his blog post[1], "Please stop externalising your costs directly into my face," really resonated with me. At the end of the day I don't care how much of what you're presenting is your own words vs AI generated, as long as I can see evidence that you have reviewed and understood what you've passed to me. My resentment and ire is raised when the onus is pushed on me to be the first real human reviewer, having to do all the weighing of merit, practicality and in some cases plausibility that the quote un-quote author should have done before ever hitting send. It's passing the buck and an abdication of responsibility. It is lazy and makes more work for those you foist it upon when your role should be making the effort in your communications to make it easier for the recipient. Not wasting their time having to spend orders of magnitude more effort refuting bullshit you shouldn't have put out there in the first place. It is something that has always pissed me off, however AI has made it fair easier for lazy people to think they sound smart and externalise their costs into my face. [1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Stop-externalizing-your-costs-o...
• dfee 2mo ago
  that's fine. doesn't absolve you from responsibilities of recipientship - as you'll inevitably find out (if you haven't already).
• devrob 2mo ago
  I used to have a rolling product satire I called "Claude Handshake" which basically explained how cold-email is dead today as people feed email contents into Claude and Claude responds with a draft, that usually comes from another person doing the same thing. The idea was to just avoid sending email altogether and just simulate the interaction entirely using Claude.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• mikhmha 2mo ago
  Recently I've gotten lots of DM's from boutique marketing firms offering to promote the game i'm working on. I'm pretty sure they all find leads via scraping the Steam API. Many of these small firms are people in developing countries. It's frustrating dealing with them since they all use AI in communications. Everything is written so flowery and with so much extra words. Any feedback I give is met with overwhelming praise about "how right I am". Its exhausting. I understand many of them are in developing countries and aren't confident in their English skills. But I always tell them I'd rather they write in broken English to communicate their own ideas. I want to hear what they have to say, directly from their brain. I don't have issues with parsing bad english. Usually its straight and to the point. They always end up defaulting back to AI messaging. Even when I tell them to be genuine. I'd love to give one of these firms a chance, but they fail this basic step. I think they think everyone in the developed world likes AI or something.
  • yuye 2mo ago
    >But I always tell them I'd rather they write in broken English to communicate their own ideas. I want to hear what they have to say, directly from their brain. I don't have issues with parsing bad english. Usually its straight and to the point. I work in FAANG at a non-US office, and this is what I tell my colleagues. I always get pushback: "They're too shy to speak English". They'll often write messages in their native language, then ask AI to translate. This is in a developed country, by the way. Engineers working for a US-based company refusing to speak English while getting paid handsomely.
• hinkley 2mo ago
  This has really started to hit my radar because people are filing PRs with AI generated commit messages that read like a bill being presented to congress. Holy shit, give me a summary. I don't know if the contributors are writing any of the code they're submitting or just using AI to hop on every 'help wanted' tagged ticket in every product database but if it looks mostly like a smart human wrote it, which usually takes two rounds of reviews, then it can probably go in. But if you make me work for it more than you did I'm just going to close the PR and do it myself.
• verdverm 2mo ago
  Not the first time this has been used, despite what author wants to claim, not the first time any of this has been said or commented about on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ai%3Bdr https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ai%3Bdr This piece is still slop, human or ai created fwiw, I'm partial to ns;nt (https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/ https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/), but it is different in nuance
• sportsracersss 2mo ago
  I love the notion, but I'm too conflict-averse to assert it. Really hate it when I send a tricky spec out for review and people respond a couple minutes later with a Claude summary. Way to add value bro.
• protocolture 2mo ago
  Engagement Bait; Didnt Read.
• deathanatos 2mo ago
  The problem is merely determining to "AI; DR" itself is not free. Reading an article takes effort, effort that one hopes will result in something intellectually stimulating. By the time you sample enough of the content to make the determination that the article is AI, you've already invested effort, and now found out the rug has been pulled. Sure, before, there was always the possibility that the article wouldn't deliver. Sturgeon's Law. But now it's like 10× more, and the amount of slop out there means its even harder to find that (human-written) gem amongst all the chaff. This last month especially, I've started to wonder "what even is the point of HN?" as more and more of the frontpage ends up dominated by slop. The thing that made HN worth it in the beginning is that it had a high gem:chaff ratio — at least compared to other corners of the Internet at the time I joined.
• illusive4080 2mo ago
  What do you think of AI generated infographics? Someone at my job is creating them on the daily and sending them around to leadership. I find it lazy and too busy.
• dktoao 2mo ago
  There is a sort of symmetry here with there also being things that everyone writes that no one reads. * Cover Letters * Most test reports * Lots of docs required by the government * I'm sure there are more you can think of So now we can have stuff written that no-one ever writes and no-one ever reads? Hmm...
  • teo_zero 2mo ago
    Even worse: cover letters, presentation letters, even CVs themselves are routinely read by AI, at least in the screening phase.
• mercurialsolo 2mo ago
  We just need better specialized models for these. Writing is as much a process of thinking as of communicating the idea. Current generation of outputs eliminate the process of thinking
• tim-projects 2mo ago
  NP;DR (Newsletter popup,. Didn't read)
• keithnz 2mo ago
  Not sure how others are using AI, but for us, an AI dump is actually much better than some human editing/writing it. What we've found is that people become gatekeepers of context due to their role in the company they have privileged access to certain context, so when some question is asked, the person who's AI has the right context can look at it and generate a response making sure not to leak anything important and making sure the question is not nefarious. Also important that your AI doesn't generate a wall of text but is super concise. This works incredibly well for us.
• heurist 2mo ago
  I find after 4 or 5 rounds of targeted feedback and requests to tighten the text AI can produce exceptionally readable documentation.
• rphv 2mo ago
  > ...then I’m afraid I received a different message than you intended Are you sure about that?
• scotty79 2mo ago
  Another use of this might be labeling yourself of the stuff you just pasted from your AI without reading so that the readers are aware where did the text come from.
• keeda 2mo ago
  I dunno, not a huge fan of TL;DR (even though it definitely has its place for long-winded walls of text) -- I feel like TL;DR is a cause or a symptom or both of our dwindling attention spans. I think this inability to read anything longer than a tweet, and the resulting loss of nuance, has been pretty bad for discourse, online or off. AI-writing is definitely very annoying to read, but I don't know if it's ideal to start dismissing interesting content before we even get to its substance just because we don't like its form.
  • 0x69420 2mo ago
    but our dwindling attention spans are caused by a deluge of material sapping our energy before we can devote it to something worthwhile. developing a fast and frugal mental filter for insubstantial walls of slop is a new prerequisite for not being so exhausted that you default to saying tl;dr to the real, good stuff.
    • keeda 2mo ago
      Kind of yeah, but I think more than just the deluge of material it is the nature of that material: even before AI slop, social media has inundated us with short-form content via their algorithmic firehose. Our attention span is dwindling because we have been trained to mentally switch off if we don't get a hook or a dopamine hit within the first few seconds, at which point we continue doomscrolling. (Indeed, studies suggest that attention spans in both kids and adults have reduced drastically in the last decade coinciding with the rise of social media.) A quick mental filter is absolutely needed though. But we should consider tuning that filter for signals other than AI writing. I've built one up where a quick skim through the post tells me if there is any substance there or just some shallow "it's not A, it's B" punchline. It took some work to tune that filter, but has let me find some very interesting articles that I otherwise might not have read.
• seanmcdirmid 2mo ago
  What I dislike is people who say they don’t know something when it’s easy to just Google it, with Gemini looking up fairly trivial factoids and comparisons is especially easy now. I know this was a stronger meme a few years ago, “just Google it dammit!” But now it’s even more so. People who don’t know these things at this point just don’t want to know, and they still get offended when someone throws an AI answer at them, not understanding that they already offended other people first by being willfully ignorant.
• agnishom 2mo ago
  Related: Don't Be a Meat Proxy: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ No Meat Proxy: https://nomeatproxy.com/ https://nomeatproxy.com/ How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly: https://joshmoody.org/blog/selfish-ai/ https://joshmoody.org/blog/selfish-ai/
• m12k 2mo ago
  Throwing unread AI output at others is the new version of “sitting on your phone, oblivious to those spending time with you”. Every new consumer technology comes with a new way of being rude.
• nektro 2mo ago
  > Yes, there are certain situations in which we should expect 100% AI-generated copy. Customer support would be a perfect example. hard disagree on this
• Alephinitesimal 2mo ago
  I once spent two days on a pr and got an obviously AI generated review that contradicted what we agreed one before. So I had AI respond to it. The next day he asked if I'd used AI. I used the same justification he'd used for his review. Fight magic with magic. He never reviewed my pr that way again.
• teo_zero 2mo ago
  Whenever I'm tempted to base my judgment on how something's been created rather than what the end result is, I think about the scene where Sheldon throws away the french toast Penny made for him, despite smelling good, just because "Monday is oatmeal day."
  • gavinsyancey 2mo ago
    Before LLMs came around, it took quite a bit more effort to write something than to read it. So the fact that someone had taken the time to create something was a signal that they thought it was worth that effort, and so it might be worth my (lesser) effort to read it. And even with that filter there was a lot of human-created crap out there. I value my time. With a LLM, it takes very little effort to create a vast mountain of crap that will take a lot of time and effort to read through. True, it is also possible to use LLMs as a tool while creating things that are not worthless. But the fact that someone has not taken the time to make their thing not sound obviously AI-generated is a strong signal that it will not be worth my time.
    • teo_zero 2mo ago
      Sure, it's your choice where to put your precious time. Exactly like Sheldon, you prefer not to dedicate any energy to question a judgment you have decided a priori. And like him, you might be missing out on some good stuff.
• Gepsens 2mo ago
  We could put comments in separate files with an annotation format. For example: ion.cpp.cmt And autoremove all comments from source files. Then use plug-ins to toggle comment files within the text editor.
• qqt 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• 7e 2mo ago
  The new modern workflow is to take a succinct idea and expand it into pages and pages of slop using AI. Nobody reads this slop, they ask another AI to summarize it back down to the original succinct core.
• runtime_lens 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• meerita 2mo ago
  I am writing excellent documentation with AI. The key success is to have rules to write documentation, PRs, commits, etc. I use ASD-STE100 and some constraints on what to write, how, and what it matters to my projects.
  • dominicq 2mo ago
    doubt
    • meerita 2mo ago
      Try it. If you don't like the output, adapt the rules until you get the consistency you're looking for.
• jobuildsstuff 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• bawana 2mo ago
  Verbosity and ‘helpfulness’ is by design to increase token use. ‘The elements of style’ by strunk and white is part of my system prompt
• hypertexthero 2mo ago
  > If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it? > This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice. From https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers Be careful not to [give up your own voice][1] to the [machine][2]. [1]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/you-are-not-a-gadget-jaron-lanier/45705114ad835402 https://bookshop.org/p/books/you-are-not-a-gadget-jaron-lani... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh20cMEgvqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh20cMEgvqc
  • jeremyjh 2mo ago
    Thank you for pointing to this. Instead of trying to constantly explain it to people, I'm going to link to that.
• TRiG_Ireland 2mo ago
  "It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process." No. Very much no.
• the_interloper 2mo ago
  > Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.) How do people not realize how up their own @$$ they sound when they say things like this
  • tripzilch 2mo ago
    One thing I don't understand here, isn't "refining prose" exactly the thing the author is calling out against?
• Marciplan 2mo ago
  This resonates. Had this in the start of the year with clients sending me their “research”, which, of course, was just a Deep Research result. Lead me to send this article when I work with folks: https://www.marcia.no/words/etiquette https://www.marcia.no/words/etiquette I like to think it helped, but likely what helped was that nobody seems to use Deep Research anymore, haha.
• smugtrain 2mo ago
  Must be an AI generated acronym: that semicolon looks like LLM signature to me
• smugtrain 2mo ago
  AI;R AI did read it for me
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago
  If people are comfortable reading output from their own use of "AI" then how do we explain why they are uncomfortable with output from someone's else's use of "AI" It would make sense, for example, if these people who are uncomfortable with output from others' use of "AI" are people who do not themselves use "AI"
  • queenkjuul 2mo ago
    I hate reading the output of "my AI," it's miserable verbose jargon laden slop. I tolerate reading it because if I prompted it, i either asked for code, pasted in a stack trace, or am looking for an answer to a question i failed to find via other means. The last thing in the world that I want is to read an entire article written by AI, nor am i happy when i ask a human a question and they don't answer but instead just copy paste to Claude and back as if that's comparable