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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

#261

Post by nedt »

keithnz wrote: post #29

More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have / APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways. Human -> Human (think we have this sorted) AI -> Human AI -> AI If you are doing AI -> H…

AI is able to read input from AI. Humans are able to read input from humans. Also AI is pretty good in reading input from humans. So we don't really need AI -> AI. Just output for humans and you are fine. You can still attach details and this is true for both AI and humans. So human output should be the goal for everyone and everything.

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

#262

Post by Sharlin »

In any human relationship, nobody wants to be the one who noticeably makes more effort to communicate, keep in touch, resolve conflicts, and so on. The idea of reciprocity and fairness are deeply entrenched in our minds, and that of many other social animals. If they don't care about me, why should I care about them? It's the iterated prisoner's dilemma again – freeriding is equivalent to defecting.

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

#263

Post by swiftcoder »

dust-jacket wrote: post #260
swiftcoder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

> I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

I run both infrastructure and security - that means a lot of relatively self-contained PRs to infrastructure-as-code and dependency management systems. I'm also the team lead, which makes me responsible for a lot of throwaway prototyping, as well as cleaning up anyone else's mess...

Yes, the prolific-but-damaging engineers are all too common in corporate. But particularly in startup land, you tend to find your high-performers wearing a lot of hats at once.

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

#264

Post by PaulKeeble »

swiftcoder wrote: post #248
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…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

I have always considered Kent Beck understood this the best, the scaling for code reviews as you go to reduced release timeframes is to pair program, that brings the number of people reviewing it down but also increases the understanding for the reviewer. Comprehensive end to end tests are more a replacement for manual quality assurance for regressions.

I am not sure there is a good analogue for reviews in the AI world. The human operating the AI should obviously review everything produced but that is clearly not as good as a second pair of human MK1 eye balls from pair programming.

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

#265

Post by samiv »

swiftcoder wrote: post #248
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…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

Either you were a head above the rest of the team and had the intellect to produce high quality value adding work, or then you were the "move fast break things" type of guy producing a lot of extra liability and work for others.

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

#266

Post by AJRF »

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…

I wonder if there is a tool that could equally waste their time. Like the worlds most pedantic code review bot that just gets the PR raising bot to spin wheels forever.

That might teach those people a lesson.

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

#268

Post by my-next-account »

dust-jacket wrote: post #260
swiftcoder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

There's also those that burn themselves out, and John Carmack!

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

#269

Post by mirekrusin »

treesknees wrote: post #22

This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to re…

Suggest to him to automate what he's doing.

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

#270

Post by jstummbillig »

barrell wrote: post #241
jstummbillig wrote: post #231

I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will increasingly stop caring. Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend. I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, gi…

I think it’s safe to say that this will not be consensus. Personally, I am getting increasingly (irrationally) angry at AI generated content. AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, and notice more and more people reporting the same. Several of my non-technical AI generated content is bland and soulles…

That is not how it will play out.

Everyday AI writing was not a thing with GPT 3.5. It happened more around GPT 4o. And now some people are entirely comfortable with using AI writing and not even trying to hide it (while, I would agree, it's obviously still fairly garbage and easily identifiable, which helps with triggering strong averse reactions).

However the models are getting better at everything, including writing for the past years. Why would that stop now? It's reasonable to assume that the makers also know about bad writing, dislike it, and thus the models will get trained to get even better at it.

Eventually how will you be able to tell? You won't. You can't. And that goes for the rest of us. And I suspect everything will just feel somewhat nicer.

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