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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#91

Post by notahacker »

nickysielicki wrote: post #35

> AI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not very original, even if they’re very good at treating your inputs to the discussion as amazing genius level insights. This is repeated all the time now, but it's not true. It's not particularly difficult to pose a question to an LLM and to get it to genuinely evaluate the pros and cons of your idea…

Have to admit I'm really struggling with the idea that the Wright brothers didn't do much thinking because they were self taught, never mind the idea that figuring out aeronautics from reading every publication they could get their hands on, intuiting wing warping and experimenting by hand-building mechanical devices looks much like asking Claude to make a CRUD app...

Re: AI makes you boring

#92

Post by matthewowen »

tptacek wrote: 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…

I think that having some difficulty and having to "bloody your forehead" acts as a filter that you cared enough to put a lot of effort into it. From a consumer side, someone having spent a lot of time on something certainly isn't a guarantee that it is good, but it provides _some_ signal about the sincerity of the producer's belief in it. IMO it's not gatekeeping to only want to pay attention to things that care went into: it's just normal human behavior to avoid unreasonable asymmetries of effort.

Re: AI makes you boring

#93

Post by fredliu »

We are in this transition period where we'll see a lot of these, because of the effort of creating "something impressive" is dramatically reduced. But once it stabilizes (which I think is already starting to happen, and this post is an example), and people are "trained" to recognize the real effort, even with AI help, behind creating something, the value of that final work will shine through. In the end, anything that is valuable is measured by the human effort needed to create it.

Re: AI makes you boring

#94

Post by lapetitejort »

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…

Yesterday I had two hours to work on a side project I've been dreaming about for a week. I knew I had to build some libraries and that it would be a major pain. I started with AI first, which created a script to download, extract, and build what needed. Even with the script I indeed encountered problems. But I blitzed through each problem until the libraries were built and I could focus on my actual project, which was not building libraries! I actually reached a satisfying conclusion instead of half-way through compiling something I do not care about.

Re: AI makes you boring

#95

Post by madcaptenor »

aeturnum wrote: post #21

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)…

The short version of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" is "ai;dr"

Re: AI makes you boring

#96

Post by AstroBen »

tptacek wrote: 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…

> what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together

Wouldn't the masses of Show HN posts that have gotten no interest pre-AI refute that?

Re: AI makes you boring

#97

Post by tonymet »

When apps were expensive to build , developers at least had the excuse that they were too busy to build something appealing. Now they can cope by pretending to be an artisanal hand-built software engineer, and still fail at making anything appealing.

If you want to build something beautiful, nothing is stopping you, except your own cynicism.

"AI doesn't build anything original". Then why aren't you proving everyone wrong? Go out there and have it build whatever you want.

AI has not yet rejected any of my prompts by saying I was being too creative. In fact, because I'm spending way less time on mundane tasks, I can focus way more time on creativity , performance, security and the areas that I am embarrassed to have overlooked on previous projects.

Re: AI makes you boring

#98

Post by ryandrake »

logicprog wrote: post #71
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.

It's kind of freeing to put a software project together and not have to sweat the boilerplate and rote algorithm work. Boring things that used to dissuade me. Now, I no longer have that voice in my head saying things like: "Ugh, I'm going to have to write yet another ring buffer, for the 14th time in my career."

Re: AI makes you boring

#99

Post by jtr1 »

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…

I tend to agree, this has been my experience with LLM-powered coding, especially more recently with the advent of new harnesses around context management and planning. I’ve been building software for over ten years so I feel comfortable looking under the hood, but it’s been less of that lately and more talking with users and trying to understand and effectively shape the experience, which I guess means I’m being pushed toward product work.

Re: AI makes you boring

#100

Post by apexalpha »

Meh.

Being 'anti AI' is just hot right now and lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon.

I'm sure some of them will actually hold out. Just like those people still buying Vinyl because Spotify is 'not art' or whatever.

Have fun all, meanwhile I built 2 apps this weekend purely for myself. Would've taken me weeks a few years ago.

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