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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#141

Post by cranberryturkey »

uean wrote: post #58
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)…

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: AI makes you boring

#142

Post by tptacek »

fhd2 wrote: post #136
Uehreka wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do. If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code. Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested. I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far. But I guess as opp…

Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor would I ever want to (the worst thing I could learn about that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings about it). This "developers read code" thing is just special pleading.

Re: AI makes you boring

#143

Post by serf »

AI doesn't make people boring, boring people use AI to make projects they otherwise never would have.

Non-boring people are using AI to make things that are ... not boring.

It's a tool.

Other things we wouldn't say because they're ridiculous at face value:

"Cars make you run over people." "Buzzsaws make you cut your fingers off." "Propane torches make you explode."

An exercise left to the reader : is a non-participant in Show HN less boring than a participant with a vibe coded project?

Re: AI makes you boring

#144

Post by minimaxir »

> Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable. It’s the work that matters.

This is reductive to the point of being incorrect. One of the misconceptions of working with agents is that the prompts are typically simple: it's more romantic to think that someone gave Claude Code "Create a fun Pokemon clone in the web browser, make no mistakes" and then just ship the one-shot output.

As some counterexamples, here are two sets of prompts I used for my projects which very much articulate an idea in the first prompt with very intentional constraints/specs, and then iterating on those results:

https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/P... (41 prompts)

https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md (14 prompts)

It's the iteration that is the true engineering work as it requires enough knowledge to a) know what's wrong and b) know if the solution actually fixes it. Those projects are what I call super-Pareto: the first prompt got 95% of the work done...but 95% of the effort was spent afterwards improving it, with manual human testing being the bulk of that work instead of watching the agent generated code.

Re: AI makes you boring

#145

Post by adverbly »

Whoa there. Let's not oversimplify in either direction here.

My take:

1. AI workflows are faster - saving people time

2. Faster workflows involve people using their brain less

3. Some people use their time savings to use their brain more, some don't

4. People who don't use their brain are boring

The end effect here is that people who use AI as a tool to help them think more will end up being more interesting, but those who use AI as a tool to help them think less will end up being more boring.

Re: AI makes you boring

#146

Post by JohnMakin »

rescripting wrote: post #127
JohnMakin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes (or often) things with horrible security flaws "work" but not in the way that they should and are exposing you to risk.

If you refuse to run AI generated code for this reason, then you should refuse to run closed source code for the same reason.

I don't see how the two correlate - commercial, closed source software usually have teams of professionals behind them with a vested and shared interest in not shipping crap that will blow up in their customers' face. I don't think the motivations of "guy who vibe coded a shitty app in an afternoon" are the same.

And to answer you more directly, generally, in my professional world, I don't use closed source software often for security reasons, and when I do, it's from major players with oodles of more resources and capital expenditure than "some guy with a credit card paid for a gemini subscription."

Re: AI makes you boring

#147

Post by arscan »

Uehreka wrote: post #89
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)…

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

> But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do).

It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how hard it is to get people to use software they aren’t effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain access to something or ‘network effects’ or whatever).

Most people’s time and attention is precious, their habits are ingrained, and they are fundamentally pretty lazy.

And people that don’t fall into the ‘most people’ I just described, probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need. UNLESS it’s something very novel that came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of. But that bit isn’t what we are talking about here, I don’t think.

Re: AI makes you boring

#148

Post by overgard »

Totally agree with this. Smart creators know that inspiration comes from doing the work, not the other way around. IE, you don't wait for inspiration and then go do the work, you start doing the work and eventually you become inspired. You rarely just "have a great idea", it comes from immersing yourself in a problem, being surrounded with constraints, and finding a way to solve it. AI completely short circuits that process. Constraints are a huge part of creativity, and removing them doesn't mean you become some unstoppable creative force, it probably just means you run out of ideas or your ideas kind of suck.

Re: AI makes you boring

#149

Post by overgard »

tptacek wrote: post #6
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a hazing ritual, it's a valuable learning experience. Yes, it's nice to have the option of foregoing it, but it's a tradeoff.

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

I think the valuable learning experience can be what makes a Show HN worth viewing, if it's worth viewing. (I don't feel precious about it though.. I didn't think Show HN was particularly engaging before AI either)

Re: AI makes you boring

#150

Post by jen729w »

doublerabbit wrote: post #125
ryandrake wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

The boring parts where you learn. "Oh, I did that, this is now not that and it does this! But it was so boring building a template parser" - You've learnt. Boring is suppose to be boring for the sake of learning. If you're bored then you're not learning. Take a look back at your code in a weeks time and see if you still understand what's going on. Top level maybe, but the deep down cog of the engine of the applicatio…

I think this is a terrible argument.

I assume you use JavaScript? TypeScript or Go perhaps?

Pfft, amateur. I only code in Assembly. Must be boring for you using such a high-level language. How do you learn anything? I bet you don't even know what the cog of the engine is doing.

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