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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

61–70 of 397 posts

Re: AI makes you boring

#61
post #8

The more interesting question is whether AI use causes the shallowness, or whether shallow people simply reach for AI more readily because deep engagement was never their thing to begin with.

More interesting question than what ? And also, say you have an answer to that question, what insight do you have now that you didn't have before?

Well the claim was that AI makes you boring. The counter is that interesting people remain interesting, it's just that a flood of previously already boring people are pouring into tech. We could make some predictions that depend on how you model this. For instance, the absolute number of interesting projects posted to HN could increase or decrease, and likewise for the relative number vs total projects. You might expect different outcomes

Re: AI makes you boring

#62
While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.

Re: AI makes you boring

#63

> The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it…

Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too?

I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?

Re: AI makes you boring

#64
post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

While at first glance LLMs do help expose and even circumvent gatekeeping, often it turns out that gatekeeping might have been there for a reason.

We have always relied on superficial cues to tell us about some deeper quality (good faith, willingness to comply with code of conduct, and so on). This is useful and is a necessary shortcut, as if we had to assess everyone and everything from first principles every time things would grind to a halt. Once a cue becomes unviable, the “gate” is not eliminated (except if briefly); the cue is just replaced with something else that is more difficult to circumvent.

I think that brief time after Internet enabled global communication and before LLMs devalued communication signals was pretty cool; now it seems like there’s more and more closed, private or paid communities.

Re: AI makes you boring

#65
post #58

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)…

> 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…

It's bad enough they didn't bother to actually write it, but often it seems like they also didn't bother to read it either.

Re: AI makes you boring

#66
post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

It's not about having to put in effort for the sake of it, the point is that building something by hand you will gain insight into the problem, which insight then becomes a valuable contribution.

Re: AI makes you boring

#67
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the point of a "Show HN" is to showcase your valuable learning experience?

What the article is saying is: "the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had. The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective."

Right, so it's about the person and how they've qualified themselves, and not about what they've built.

I feel like I've been around these parts for a while, and that is not my experience of what Show HN was originally about, though I'm sure there was always an undercurrent of status hierarchy and approval-seeking, like you suggest.

Re: AI makes you boring

#68
post #8

The more interesting question is whether AI use causes the shallowness, or whether shallow people simply reach for AI more readily because deep engagement was never their thing to begin with.

I'm going to guess the same way Money makes rich people turn into morons, AI will turn idiots into...oh...no

Re: AI makes you boring

#69
I think this is generally a good point if you're using an AI to come up with a project idea and elaborate it.

However, I've spent years sometimes thinking through interesting software architectures and technical approaches and designs for various things, including window managers, editors, game engines, programming languages, and so on, reading relevant books and guides and technical manuals, sketching out architecture diagrams in my notebooks and writing long handwritten design documents in markdown files or in messages to friends. I've even, in some cases, gotten as far as 10,000 lines or so of code sketching out some of the architectural approaches or things I want to try to get a better feel for the problem and the underlying technologies. But I've never had the energy to do the raw code shoveling and debug looping necessary to get out a prototype of my ideas — AI now makes that possible.

Once that prototype is out, I can look at it, inspect it from all angles, tweak it and understand the pros and cons, the limitations and blind spots of my idea, and iterate again. Also, through pair programming with the AI, I can learn about the technologies I'm using through demonstration and see what their limitations and affordances are by seeing what things are easy and concise for the AI to implement and what requires brute forcing it with hacks and huge reams of code and what's performant and what isn't, what leads to confusing architectures and what leads to clean architectures, and all of those things.

I'm still spending my time reading things like Game Engine Architecture, Computer Systems, A Philosophy of Software Design, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Thinking in Systems, Data-Oriented Design, articles in CSP, fibers, compilers, type systems, ECS, writing down notes and ideas.

So really it seems more to me like boring people who aren't really deeply interested in a subject use AI to do all of the design and ideation for them. And so, of course, it ends up boring and you're just seeing more of it because it lowered the barrier to entry. I think if you're an interesting person with strong opinions about what you want to build and how you want to build it, that is actually interested in exploring the literature with or with out AI help and then pair programming with it in order to explore the problem space, it still ends up interesting.

Most of my recent AI projects have just been small tools for my own usage, but that's because I was kicking the tires. I have some bigger things planned, executing on ideas I have pages and pages, dozens of them, in my notebooks about.

Re: AI makes you boring

#70
> Original ideas are the result of the very work you’re offloading on LLMs. Having humans in the loop doesn’t make the AI think more like people, it makes the human thought more like AI output.

There was also a comment [1] here recently that "I think people get the sense that 'getting better at prompting' is purely a one-way issue of training the robot to give better outputs. But you are also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!"

Both of them reminded me of Picasso saying in 1968 that " Computers are useless. They can only give you answers,"

Of course computers are useful. But he meant that they have are useless for a creative. That's still true.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059206

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