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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#71

Post by logicprog »

josefresco wrote: post #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 a…

This is precisely it. If anything, AI gives me more freedom to think about more novel ideas, both on the implementation and the final design level, because I'm not stuck looking up APIs and dealing with already solved problems.

Re: AI makes you boring

#72

Post by JohnMakin »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #63
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

> 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?

I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding.

The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one account, then exported it all to another account for reasons that didn't make any sense at all. These are already solved problems (in multiple ways) and it seemed like the person just didn't realize terraformer was already an existing, proven tool.

I am not trying to say these things don't allow you to prototype quickly or get tedious, easy stuff out of the way. I'm saying that if you try to solve a problem in a domain that you have no expertise in with these tools and show other experts your work, they may chuckle at what you tried to do because it sometimes does look very silly.

Re: AI makes you boring

#73

Post by WolfeReader »

Oarch wrote: post #39

Just earlier I received a spew of LLM slop from my manager as "requirements". He clearly hadn't even spent two minutes reviewing whether any of it made sense, was achievable or even desirable. I ignored it. We're all fed up with this productivity theatre.

"productivity theatre" is a brilliant phrase. Thank you!

Re: AI makes you boring

#74

Post by latexr »

Sol- wrote: post #25

The headline should be qualified: Maybe it makes you boring compared to the counterfactual world where you somehow would have developed into an interesting auteur or craftsman instead, which few people in practice would do. As someone who is fairly boring, conversing with AI models and thinking things through with them certainly decreased my blandness and made me tackle more interesting thoughts or projects. To have…

> As someone who is fairly boring

As determined by whom?

> conversing with AI models and thinking things through with them certainly decreased my blandness

Again, determined by whom?

I’m being genuine. Are those self-assessments? Because those specific judgement are something for other people to decide.

Re: AI makes you boring

#75

Post by hnlmorg »

I’ve been bashing my head against the wall with AI this week because they’ve utterly failed to even get close to solving my novel problems.

And that’s when it dawned on me just how much of AI hype has been around boring, seen-many-times-before, technologies.

This, for me, has been the biggest real problem with AI. It’s become so easy to churn out run-of-the-mill software that I just cannot filter any signal from all the noise of generic side-projects that clearly won’t be around in 6 months time.

Our attention is finite. Yet everyone seems to think their dull project is uniquely more interesting than the next persons dull project. Even though those authors spent next to zero effort themselves in creating it.

It’s so dumb.

Re: AI makes you boring

#76

Post by crawshaw »

It is a good theory, but does it hold up in practice? I was able to prototype and thus argue for and justify building exe.dev with a lot of help from agents. Without agents helping me prove out ideas I would be doing far more boring work.

Re: AI makes you boring

#77

Post by solarisos »

This resonates with what I’m seeing in B2B outreach right now. AI has lowered the cost of production so much that 'polished' has become a synonym for 'generic.' We’ve reached a point where a slightly messy, hand-written note has more value than a perfectly structured AI essay because the messiness is the only remaining signal of actual human effort.

Re: AI makes you boring

#78

Post by guywithahat »

stuckinhell wrote: post #5

I mean, can't you just… prompt engineer your way out of this? A writer friend of mine literally just vibes with the model differently and gets genuinely interesting output.

I think the point of the article is that on sites like HN, people used to need domain expertise to answer questions. Their answer was based on unique experience, and even if maybe it wasn't optimal it was unique. Now a lot of people just check chatgpt and answer the question without actually knowing what they're talking about. Worse the bar to submit something to Show HN has gotten lower, and people are vibe coding projects in an afternoon nobody wants or cares about. I don't think the article is really about writing style

Re: AI makes you boring

#79

Post by saalweachter »

wsowens wrote: post #46
wagwang wrote: post #7

Isnt this just flat out untrue since bots can pass turing tests

People are often boring in conversation. Therefore, an AI agent doesn't need to be interesting to seem human enough in a Turing test.

"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

Re: AI makes you boring

#80

Post by recursive »

wagwang wrote: post #7

Isnt this just flat out untrue since bots can pass turing tests

The turing test isn't designed to select for the most interesting individuals. Some people are less interesting than other people. If the machine is acting similar to a boring human, it can make you more boring, and still pass the test.
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