4 ms·

My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderf

by jchw 13d ago

My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't. It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you. Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice. I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.

tim-projects 13d ago
I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.
- canelonesdeverd 13d ago
  Really sad to reduce ourselves to meat-proxies.
- UpsideDownRide 13d ago
  If people can't adapt then they will get left behind. There is little value in providing a username for LLM to speak instead of you.
- wolrah 13d ago
  > You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
- peder 13d ago
  Hacker News is so annoying about this. It really feels like sour grapes that people are shipping cool projects without one of the Y Combinator-type software engineers blessing the project with their handwritten code.
  - Sharlin 13d ago
    Use AI all you want but don’t imply that the work was done by you in any sense.
tarkin2 13d ago
Also, to congratulate the author feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager for a project rather than the skills and knowledge of a programmer It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so
- rbanffy 13d ago
  > feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.
musha68k 13d ago
FWIW by this point, many of us are in deep symbiosis. Useful or not, another Amiga / Unix fan probably had fun and some learnings too. At the very least, the real-world impact is that tokens have been spent, the outputs open sourced. It would be nice to hear their voice survive the loops of agentic abstraction of course but I don't know if that is even possible at that higha level. Maybe it's that, maybe it's "just another issue of alignment"? Potentially serious in aggregate and over time.. I personally don't mind the imo little "neuralese" (is that what we call it now?) here specifically. In any case it's good for you that you can (still?) tell? Why not applaud the playground time/energy/token budget directed? Especially as a decades long NetBSD (and Amiga:) fan I do appreciate multitudes; maybe here not exactly the case in tone of writing but in relatively cheap, fun experiments / projects during the agentic take-off of 2026. The whole trend reminds me a bit of remix/DJ culture; the "producing DJ"?
- Brian_K_White 13d ago
  They can have all the fun they want however they want, but it's not interesting or valuable to anyone else. It's annoying how many people think they have discovered the cheat code to collect Manhattens for trinkets.
jonathanstrange 13d ago
It's not important at all and I wish people would stop mentioning AI. If you have criticisms on the docs or code, by all means make them but they shouldn't concern "AI vs human" considerations. Humans have written plenty of bad and documentations, too, it really doesn't matter who wrote what to what extent, what matters is whether it's the right quality.
- steve1977 13d ago
  Since we cannot address criticism on the docs or code to the author, we have to address our criticism to the middleman and what he did.
  - jonathanstrange 13d ago
    That attitude unfortunately leads to people criticizing something without having enough evidence about it in the first place, like criticizing a book and later admitting you've only seen the cover and read the summary on the back. Criticisms should have substance.
    - steve1977 12d ago
      I can criticize the cover of a book though, without having read the book.
  - kdjdkcneixj 13d ago
    People really need to learn that using AI to build something doesn’t automatically mean you just left every plan, spec and decision up to the AI. Can you do that? You absolutely can. Does everyone do that? No, absolutely not. It’s not a black and white issue. And, honestly, it’s quite narrow sighted and narrow minded to think so. The dev is not the middleman because Claude is not the author. Claude is the tool.
    - steve1977 12d ago
      This is unfortunately not the reality I'm seeing at my workplace. If this is still different for you, be happy and enjoy it while it lasts.
ilt 13d ago
This is the 3rd time I am reading such a comment on HN within a day and I absolutely agree. It comes off as instantly disingenuous and a ‘turn off’ for someone to use an LLM for basic writing stuff. Not to mention it ends up being distracting in a meta sort of way.
- seba_dos1 13d ago
  It's simply a pretty good proxy for lack of quality and care.
Sharlin 13d ago
As I’ve also repetitively said, it’s simply dishonest and plagiarizing to offload most of the work you (explicitly or lying by omission) claim as "yours". I can’t understand people who think it’s just fine.
shagie 13d ago
(concurring opinion) LLM generated text lacks a certain "soul" to it, and it becomes more and more empty the more places one reads it. It has a certain quality to it that, when read again and again, feels hollow. That hollowness comes not only from the text itself and the same sentence structures and turns of a phrase, but also (and yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#Not_just_X,_but_also_Y https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) that it suggests that the author didn't do more than massage the text with their eyeballs (as my high school Latin teacher accused me of doing). And so, why should I (a human mind running on wet stuff and fueled with caffeine and various sugars from my morning soda and breakfast roll) pay any significant amount of my limited attention during a day on something that shows no indication that it was ever had its human co-author think about a single word that was put into the page? And sometimes, the text belies that it wasn't written by a human as it misses things that are part of the human experience (or adds things that are not). "Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out." No human would write that. No human proofread it. There is a deluge of content out there. Far too much for me to read everything that might be interesting. Text that looks like it's written entirely by an AI is more likely to be uninteresting than something that was crafted by a human. If the page itself hasn't shown indication of a few seconds or minutes of a human touch... how much time should I spend reading it to see if it might be interesting to read more or look into the project?

by jchw 13d ago

tim-projects 13d ago

I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.

canelonesdeverd 13d ago
Really sad to reduce ourselves to meat-proxies.
UpsideDownRide 13d ago
If people can't adapt then they will get left behind. There is little value in providing a username for LLM to speak instead of you.
wolrah 13d ago
> You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
peder 13d ago
Hacker News is so annoying about this. It really feels like sour grapes that people are shipping cool projects without one of the Y Combinator-type software engineers blessing the project with their handwritten code.
- Sharlin 13d ago
  Use AI all you want but don’t imply that the work was done by you in any sense.

tarkin2 13d ago

Also, to congratulate the author feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager for a project rather than the skills and knowledge of a programmer It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so

rbanffy 13d ago
> feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.

musha68k 13d ago

FWIW by this point, many of us are in deep symbiosis. Useful or not, another Amiga / Unix fan probably had fun and some learnings too. At the very least, the real-world impact is that tokens have been spent, the outputs open sourced. It would be nice to hear their voice survive the loops of agentic abstraction of course but I don't know if that is even possible at that higha level. Maybe it's that, maybe it's "just another issue of alignment"? Potentially serious in aggregate and over time.. I personally don't mind the imo little "neuralese" (is that what we call it now?) here specifically. In any case it's good for you that you can (still?) tell? Why not applaud the playground time/energy/token budget directed? Especially as a decades long NetBSD (and Amiga:) fan I do appreciate multitudes; maybe here not exactly the case in tone of writing but in relatively cheap, fun experiments / projects during the agentic take-off of 2026. The whole trend reminds me a bit of remix/DJ culture; the "producing DJ"?

Brian_K_White 13d ago
They can have all the fun they want however they want, but it's not interesting or valuable to anyone else. It's annoying how many people think they have discovered the cheat code to collect Manhattens for trinkets.

jonathanstrange 13d ago

It's not important at all and I wish people would stop mentioning AI. If you have criticisms on the docs or code, by all means make them but they shouldn't concern "AI vs human" considerations. Humans have written plenty of bad and documentations, too, it really doesn't matter who wrote what to what extent, what matters is whether it's the right quality.

steve1977 13d ago
Since we cannot address criticism on the docs or code to the author, we have to address our criticism to the middleman and what he did.
- jonathanstrange 13d ago
  That attitude unfortunately leads to people criticizing something without having enough evidence about it in the first place, like criticizing a book and later admitting you've only seen the cover and read the summary on the back. Criticisms should have substance.
  - steve1977 12d ago
    I can criticize the cover of a book though, without having read the book.
- kdjdkcneixj 13d ago
  People really need to learn that using AI to build something doesn’t automatically mean you just left every plan, spec and decision up to the AI. Can you do that? You absolutely can. Does everyone do that? No, absolutely not. It’s not a black and white issue. And, honestly, it’s quite narrow sighted and narrow minded to think so. The dev is not the middleman because Claude is not the author. Claude is the tool.
  - steve1977 12d ago
    This is unfortunately not the reality I'm seeing at my workplace. If this is still different for you, be happy and enjoy it while it lasts.

ilt 13d ago

This is the 3rd time I am reading such a comment on HN within a day and I absolutely agree. It comes off as instantly disingenuous and a ‘turn off’ for someone to use an LLM for basic writing stuff. Not to mention it ends up being distracting in a meta sort of way.

seba_dos1 13d ago
It's simply a pretty good proxy for lack of quality and care.

Sharlin 13d ago

As I’ve also repetitively said, it’s simply dishonest and plagiarizing to offload most of the work you (explicitly or lying by omission) claim as "yours". I can’t understand people who think it’s just fine.

shagie 13d ago

(concurring opinion) LLM generated text lacks a certain "soul" to it, and it becomes more and more empty the more places one reads it. It has a certain quality to it that, when read again and again, feels hollow. That hollowness comes not only from the text itself and the same sentence structures and turns of a phrase, but also (and yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#Not_just_X,_but_also_Y https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) that it suggests that the author didn't do more than massage the text with their eyeballs (as my high school Latin teacher accused me of doing). And so, why should I (a human mind running on wet stuff and fueled with caffeine and various sugars from my morning soda and breakfast roll) pay any significant amount of my limited attention during a day on something that shows no indication that it was ever had its human co-author think about a single word that was put into the page? And sometimes, the text belies that it wasn't written by a human as it misses things that are part of the human experience (or adds things that are not). "Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out." No human would write that. No human proofread it. There is a deluge of content out there. Far too much for me to read everything that might be interesting. Text that looks like it's written entirely by an AI is more likely to be uninteresting than something that was crafted by a human. If the page itself hasn't shown indication of a few seconds or minutes of a human touch... how much time should I spend reading it to see if it might be interesting to read more or look into the project?