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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

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Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#111

Post by toomuchtodo »

Telemakhos wrote: post #90
Jensson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will help if your wall of text cost less tokens than theirs, they will run out before you do if you have the same company quota per person.

I'm not sure what the right vocabulary would be to describe this, but this sounds more like the calculations behind nuclear war than a healthy collegiality or cooperative work relationship. This sets up a competition to determine a loser based on resource scarcity, not a way to achieve mutual goals to advance the organization's goals.

“Token Standoff.” The most efficient token consumer wins. This mutually assured time efficiency destruction is driven by management support of aggressive use of AI in an attempt to, in some combination, increase productive and constrain labor costs.

AI isn’t making developers more productive – it’s making them busier - https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-isnt-making-developers-more-produc... - June 11th, 2026

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#112

Post by moomoo11 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #107
moomoo11 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having worked in tech and now running my own company.. the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are “good”. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll probably relate. the rest kind of suck. i’ve never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in my career so I’ve seen how awful some engineers were. i’ve seen how amazing a tiny minority were and i made them my mentors. these days i ha…

It's the Pareto principle of course, as well as the normal distribution. Many firms have been able to succeed in the market just by hiring only good engineers over average ones.

yeah but these days it is even more important to filter out bads

and even at "good" companies you have people who can game the system to get in, and then they struggle to get anything done on time or be responsible for taking on and completing any initiatives bigger than a single task on a bigger scope.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#113

Post by satvikpendem »

analog8374 wrote: post #68

Maybe this is why generative art never really took off. That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.

It did in many corners, there are some interesting designs on r/stablediffusion, and regular people too are using them to make posters and invitation cards for example.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#114

Post by denismi »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #51
niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

Fight fire with fire. Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. If there are excessive defects, ask them in standup if they actually reviewed the PR themselves before sending it. If there aren’t maybe they are on to something. I think like in law, the human submitting the work is responsible for its quality, not the AI.

> Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them.

Not necessary. Use Haiku.

The response doesn't need to be good, it just needs to be substantial. Presumably the goal here is basically DoS of the problematic colleague through token limits.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#115

Post by satvikpendem »

moomoo11 wrote: post #112
satvikpendem wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Pareto principle of course, as well as the normal distribution. Many firms have been able to succeed in the market just by hiring only good engineers over average ones.

yeah but these days it is even more important to filter out bads and even at "good" companies you have people who can game the system to get in, and then they struggle to get anything done on time or be responsible for taking on and completing any initiatives bigger than a single task on a bigger scope.

Indeed. You really need to find people who don't want to play politics and instead get stuff done. I'm still not sure how to hire for these sorts of people in the age of AI, where people even cheat in interviews. Maybe probation programs? Have multiple people work for a month or two and cut those who don't succeed.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#117

Post by moomoo11 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #115
moomoo11 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but these days it is even more important to filter out bads and even at "good" companies you have people who can game the system to get in, and then they struggle to get anything done on time or be responsible for taking on and completing any initiatives bigger than a single task on a bigger scope.

Indeed. You really need to find people who don't want to play politics and instead get stuff done. I'm still not sure how to hire for these sorts of people in the age of AI, where people even cheat in interviews. Maybe probation programs? Have multiple people work for a month or two and cut those who don't succeed.

this is what I've been doing, and obviously I have a startup so I need to double-ensure that I don't onboard any bads. you can start people off as contractors too.

I still think a single in person LC style (doesn't have to be LC per se, could be domain specific) logical thinking/reasoning exercise is useful. I want to ensure the person can actually put 2 and 2 together and think. This is just a fast filter.

If they seem like they can think, then I like to do 2-3 systems design interviews. I'll try to give them something related to things I like, such as graph structures, writing a complex query that needs to be dynamically generated, or something related to infrastructure or how they'd do something that I've already done. After all, this is MY project they're joining.

So far that has worked well.

Few more things -

I like to test if they are a humble type (they can work on a team putting ego on the side - the mission is our number 1 priority). if they say they know something that i know and asked, then they can be sure I'm going to drill them on it. if it turns out they lied, i'm not wasting more time. Thanks for your time, take care. This is very important to me. Just say you don't know, it isn't a big deal because ever since like 1994 that has not been an issue. You can just learn things online, and AI makes that even faster. I am never afraid to say I don't know something, and I've asked plenty of "dumb" questions (while doing some due diligence first) so I don't really mind.

Can they handle information overload? I am the type of person who has multiple branches in my head of actions I can take next, so while I may appear stressed I'm really not. Can they keep up? Our goal as software engineers should be to come up with solutions that solve the problem in a way that makes building on it simpler in the future. My goal is simplicity and effectiveness. So I'll see if they can keep up, and eventually reduce the work to be done into atomic pieces. This is a fun exercise because it is collaborative and we get to bounce ideas fast back and forth.

Finally, I like to let them use their favorite tools, including AI tools (codex, claude, some ppl have esoteric custom stuff which is cool), to solve a problem together. It might be code related, it might not. Really depends on my mood. I like to see how they work and what sort of output they can come up with. This filters out people who only ask AI stuff, instead of having some framework they've already developed to be effective.

Honestly I don't know how to scale this process. I'm not really going to feel bad either about firing fast, ultimately this is a business and I don't want customers to suffer because we have some issues internally.

At the same time, I wonder if I even need to build out an org with 100s of people. That was an inefficiency (look at all the layoffs), and it is traumatic.

If I can find a few great people who can be supercharged and turbocharged and electrified with AI, then they can take on & own bigger responsibilities. My number 1 goal is to ensure they're with me on the mission, and after that all things seem to sort of fit into place.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#118

Post by Aurornis »

vermilingua wrote: post #106
Aurornis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit, and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else. Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now that AI appeared…

I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life. On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sor…

I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.

The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with the review effort. They found an asymmetry to abuse (they generate text easily, coworkers get a lot of extra work to review it). They don't care what it costs their coworkers. They just like that it makes them look good.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#119

Post by patcon »

edot wrote: post #11
solfox wrote: post #6

I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.

For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each…

Love this. Thanks :)

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#120

Post by carlosjobim »

zetanor wrote: post #56

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the…

For your next prompt, tell it to end with a hateful and offensive tangent to prove its humanity, since LLMs have those "safe guards".
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