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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

201–210 of 729 posts

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#202

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

Have you considered talking about it? You're in a professional environment collectively working in a new way with a group of people. It's up to somebody to have opinions about what does and doesn't suck. If you silently go along and don't say anything you're dooming yourself and all of us to a lifetime of this garbage.

Yes, talking about it repeatedly has been my process. Individual PRs have been changed but the 4 the next day look the same. The typical response is that they did change the (massive and wordy) PR overview from what AI said, even if it was obviously a minimal change at best. I can’t really argue against lying and going through and picking out every LLMism is not so productive in my opinion.

I don’t have time to go through and flag everything or even read the thousands of lines of code changes that are happening.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#203
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the original prompt is 10000% better than the AI output, because it shows me exactly how much the author (you?) cares about this topic and how much effort they're willing to put into communication, which is barely any at all.

> which is barely any at all Clearly you either didn't read it, misunderstood it, disbelieved it, or just DGAF :)

What I read is that you're self-conscious about your writing style and that you find the LLM processed version of your own stream of thoughts to be helpful to you yourself.

Which is fine for you, but doesn't change that many people can get more insight out of your original text than they can out of the generated adaptation, and can do so with more interest and less fatigue.

And indeed, you don't have to care about that. But one would think that in publishing or sharing your writing at all, you do in fact have some investment in whether people receive those insights that you have. Otherwise, you could just keep the AI writings to yourself in the first place.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#204

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

Honestly, if you saved a ton of hours with the model coding for you, at least give me 30 minutes of your own words, show me you know what you're shipping, if you can't do that, then I don't know if I want to approve the PR. My first job we always did peer review in a meeting room when a PR looked a little too much, you can't exactly bring in GPT into a meeting so its a good time to ask simple questions about the chan…

> you can't exactly bring in GPT into a meeting

They totally gotta be doing that at OpenAI. Meeting invitees: You, co-workers, GPT 5.6.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#205
post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating…

I think you're right, and we've been training ourselves for the shortest path of least resistance for quite a while while kidding ourselves that we're able to somehow preserve the result as worthwhile. Before I ever tried using LLMs for search I had already been training myself for years to offload my thinking to a quick web search and a skim of some plausible result served up.

Arguably things like Cliff's Notes and "for dummies" books were sating this impulse before that, I wouldn't be surprised if the line can be traced back further.

Since dropping LLMs altogether I've made the connection to the impulse for a superficial jump to the conclusion just by noticing how I use web search, or feverishly scan some text to get to the point.

Theoretically I studied critical thinking and have learned decades ago how to recognize when this is OK and when it's a superficial placation of some addiction to closing the book on a subject or micro-subject... but boy whatever good instincts I might have developed back then have significantly eroded over time. Trying to reclaim that again is pretty humbling.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#206
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have five enforcement mechanisms: 1000 line max edit, PR comment character limits (get to the point of your description), ISO 24495 conformance check, and enforced code line citation that must exist, be a function declaration for the start of all paragraphs and inline commentary must be three lines or less and inline comments contribute max 10% of the PR. Fail any of these, automatic PR denial with no human interve…

This sound pretty good, but every single attempt to put an actual character limit meets incredible resistance on my team. ISO 24495 looks interesting, how do you enforce that? Do you have some agent?

Table of words LLM generated, Binary Searched on the output going forward and local skill/CLAUDE.md line with instruction to conform. The comparison then is pretty fast due to the word limitation rules. Also standardized PR format so a bunch of what a dev would usually communicate is just a series of checkboxes and a place for adding an optional link for "additional discussion" on slack as the escape hatch for people who like to waffle.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#207

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

> perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass Yes, that's the entire point. And it is extremely useful. Why wouldn't I want this?

Is it really, or do you just think so and it could actually mislead you and your LLM the next time? In my experience, the information in the comments tends to be quite redundant, often even with other comments in the same file

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#208
post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.

I've seen it used as a newer evolution of trolling on Reddit. A user hops in to a somewhat nuanced discussion and gives a very curt and rude contradiction, and then just uses an LLM to generate walls of argumentative text after you respond with "What are you talking about and why are you being such a dick?"

Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#210
post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale. None of this is new. People who act l…

TL;DR: I want more effort posts/better SNR, so I guess I have to tolerate the human non-effort posts complaining about AI non-effort posts with the hope that it helps retard the rate of non-effort posts vs effort posts.

While I'm hoping the AI bubble pops sooner than later, as I still hold out hope that knowledge work will continue to require knowledgeable humans at the helm, I wanted to add on that I think you make a good point.

A lot of users online can't read[1], and between a lack of pure reading comprehension, poor media literacy habits draining one's brains and ability to focus, and finally the increase in AI-enabled content, I'm not surprised at how redditor-cultured netizens love to throw up their hands and say "AI;DR!", as if that makes them somehow morally superior.

These users won't read dense texts or try to elucidate meaning out of human-written works, they ask for AI summaries or manual "TL;DR" entries as it is, now the AI is use is being used as an excuse to enable mental laziness and lack of attempts to read information.

So while I get lost in wikipedia walks because I'm looking for written entertainment for 'learning', they are getting mind-melted by algorithms, therefore, an uncharitable part of me wants to let the meat-proxying continue.

And then the other part of me that gets annoyed by having to sift through AI-slop-infested text to see what if any meat there may be in there decides that perhaps that's not as helpful of an attitude as I should take after all, because if everybody decides to meat-proxy the world away, I'll be unhappier than letting lazy functionally-illiterate-users complain aloud, even as the latter is boring reading as well.

[1] in the https://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-compu... sense

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