Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After AI takes everything

ursb.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 121 posts

Re: After AI takes everything

#11

Post by citrin_ru »

pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.

Re: After AI takes everything

#13

Post by graypegg »

pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that.

Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I absolutely respect. I can look at a couple modules, and have a good idea what the other modules are going to be like, because the mental model of the author is clear from the code itself. Even teams with multiple authors with taste average out to one taste-profile and in a similar way, I’ve seen LLM output shaped by someone with taste and had the same feeling: “yeah I see the direction you’re going in”.

Someone without taste using an LLM writes slop. I can’t tell what you’re doing. Any question about what you’re doing results in “sorry that was Claude”. Entirely pointless that you’re even involved.

It’s a property of the author IMO. They were kind of owed an existential crisis as cruel as that is to say.

Re: After AI takes everything

#14

Post by rybosworld »

pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough".

One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one).

With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.

Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.

Re: After AI takes everything

#15

Post by hacker_homie »

pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

It was never about the code, all that really matters is does it work.

In that light I’m not happy about it, but the code always was just a means to an end.

Re: After AI takes everything

#16

Post by drudolph914 »

citrin_ru wrote: post #11
pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.

Yeah, I keep coming back to a point that the way people talk about AI is still entirely disconnected from what it can actually do. I think of the bell curve meme a lot when I see people talking about AI. the people most bullish to perpetuate that it's going to take over are people that have vested interested, or people that are fall on the bottom half of the bell curve. I mean ... come on, by design an AI is literally a statistical averaging of all the data it's seen. AI is extremely average at nearly everything it does. If you find yourself using AI and it's doing something amazing, that speaks more to your knowledge/ability about a subject more than it speaks about AIs ability

I mean, I guess if all you do is work on implementing CRUD endpoints ... sure I guess you're cooked. but we had tech to automate this already, this isn't anything new. But oh man, if you're doing real engineering, the tools are barely usable.

I hate when people don't give examples, so I am going to throw one here. just the other day, I asked the newest and most expensive claude model to write an LRU and to have a running tally of the capacity of bytes in the cache as the threshold to evict something from the cache. It wrongly implemented the threshold checks and just tracked how many elements were in the cache. this might sound small, but scale that mistake up to a real production system. this is literally unusable. and the expectation to sit there, have it generate 1000s of lines of code for you, and then spot check that small but huge error is not worth it. you have to move so slow to spot check everything - to the point that it's literally faster to type it. This is a model that costs $100s to run per hour and is advertised as "PHD level intelligence" making High school AP computer science to freshman computer science errors - like come on.

If you're reading this, are an expert in your field, and are actually worried about your job - you got be able to have some mental fortitude and not fall for this ...

Re: After AI takes everything

#17

Post by hurtigioll »

stavros wrote: post #10
no_multitudes wrote: post #5

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

I enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.

that fewer people will read because it spends pages saying what could be paragraphs

Re: After AI takes everything

#18

Post by SoftTalker »

graypegg wrote: post #13
pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that. Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I abso…

Was recognized long before AI came on the scene.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

Steve Jobs

Re: After AI takes everything

#19

Post by uludag »

no_multitudes wrote: post #5

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

Maybe you don't understand, if we didn't have LLMs expanding our ideas into longer form we wouldn't have anything to give to LLMs to summarize.

Re: After AI takes everything

#20

Post by hurtigioll »

drudolph914 wrote: post #16
citrin_ru wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.

Yeah, I keep coming back to a point that the way people talk about AI is still entirely disconnected from what it can actually do. I think of the bell curve meme a lot when I see people talking about AI. the people most bullish to perpetuate that it's going to take over are people that have vested interested, or people that are fall on the bottom half of the bell curve. I mean ... come on, by design an AI is literall…

after the implementation was done, have you asked the model again, in a fresh context window, to review the code against the specification?
Post reply on HN