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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

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

#211

Post by LPisGood »

BeetleB wrote: post #124
LPisGood wrote: post #56

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…

It's a code review, right? Give feedback that about the docs and block merging till the issue is resolved.

This sounds easy in principle, but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable. I’m not gonna read the hundreds of lines of added documentation to decide if they’re correct or not. The price of generating new words is just so much higher than the price of evaluating it that I can’t be bothered.

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

#212

Post by LPisGood »

whstl wrote: post #115
LPisGood wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me happy to hear that someone got fired for that, but I just cannot picture that happening at my organization. Perhaps standards are too low. What sort of thing did they get fired for? Was there some warning etc?

Product Manager using Jira AI to hallucinate tickets, epics, metrics and roadmap. Even the numbers were completely made up. There were too many incidents of “this doesn’t look right” in the same week, so when their boss did a thorough check a couple days after, it was all fake, everything. Eventually they admitted and got canned.

I don’t understand the level of incompetence that would lead someone to that state.

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

#213

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

jackjeff wrote: post #183
rockinghigh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.

There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.

I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander.

Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

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

#214

Post by minimaxir »

supermatt wrote: post #190
miyoji wrote: 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 :)

Many different people in this HN submission have given you similar feedback: given that, you should consider that your priors are not correct.

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

#215

Post by BeetleB »

sebastiennight wrote: post #186
BeetleB wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 would have said the opposite: I'd assume the link to be to a blog post, or Wikipedia page, that articulates the idea in a clearer more succint way than the person might be able of. This is, of course, before people started sending Instagram Reel or YouTube Short links. Or, maybe worse, links to 3-hour-long YouTube podcasts.

> I'd assume the link to be to a blog post, or Wikipedia page, that articulates the idea in a clearer more succint way than the person might be able of.

As with everything, it depends on who is sending it. For some people, yes. For the rest (majority), it's a case of

He: Makes some claim

Me: I question some aspect of it.

... Potential back and forth

He: Oh, just look at this video/article/book that explains and answers all your concerns.

Thing is, in the majority of the cases, it didn't address my concern. I'd write up something in detail, and get back either silence or yet another link. Took way too long for me to realize I shouldn't bother clicking the link to begin with.

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

#216

Post by Planktonne »

supermatt wrote: post #136
Planktonne wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you believe you did, but the post makes more of a point through its conception than it does through its prose.

> I believe you believe you did Wow, peak ableism. It is a post about how I use an LLM as an accessibility aid for reading and writing. We're not all out here faking creative writing you know...

I would a thousand times rather read your stream of consciousness, even though I disagree with it, than the bland pulp of the LLM output. In every way that matters, it's stronger and communicating far more.

I don't agree that it's ableism to believe that you are far more worth talking to than a machine regurgitating attenuated averages.

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

#217

Post by miyoji »

supermatt wrote: post #190
miyoji wrote: 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 :)

No, I did read it, and I think I understood it. My summary in my own words is that you find that LLMs can massage your writing and reduce the stress of communication. Did I believe it? Well...

You have an account on HN dating back to 2013 with over 6000 comment karma, you clearly didn't have trouble communicating like a normal person for a decade on this website before the advent of LLMs. Your spelling and grammar in posts predating LLMs are also far better than what you've produced in this prompt, so I'm tempted to think that you're exaggerating your inability to communicate normally to make a point.

But even so, the original wall of text communicates the point much more strongly and sincerely than the LLM trash.

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

#218

Post by aliasxneo »

sebastiennight wrote: post #186
BeetleB wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 would have said the opposite: I'd assume the link to be to a blog post, or Wikipedia page, that articulates the idea in a clearer more succint way than the person might be able of. This is, of course, before people started sending Instagram Reel or YouTube Short links. Or, maybe worse, links to 3-hour-long YouTube podcasts.

Eh, but it can become just as low-effort as AI slop. I've participated in a number of conversations here where it appears the person I was interacting with (this was pre-AI) was just googling off some keywords and pasting links with one or two sentences attached. Even in cases where they legitimately read the thing they posted, the static nature of the link leaves no room for actually responding to any nuance I might have added (i.e. the author missed something critical).

After a few years of this I also just stopped clicking thinks and refused to engage in conversations that seemed to be going that direction.

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

#219

Post by giancarlostoro »

fragmede wrote: post #204
giancarlostoro wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well yeah, they'll keep burning the VC bucks.

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

#220

Post by BeetleB »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #200
BeetleB wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"Because it wasn't ..." Not so. Posting links is not the same. If you were to copy+paste someone's blog post into the forum and post is as your own, without attribution, it would be seen as plagiarism. Everyone understands this; you're trying to pass another's work as your own. On X there's actually a good modern equivalent to "posting links" which is @grok, and letting Grok add to the thread. There is occasional tea…

So I take it you'll be fine with responses that begin with:

"ChatGPT says ... "?

> Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.

I guess the bulk of folks use ChatGPT as the preferred chatbot, but people like me have a completely different interface that doesn't use ChatGPT. I can't send someone links to my conversation.

(And as an aside, over 80% of ChatGPT conversation links I click on don't work - not sure if they clean them after some time, or I need to be logged in, etc).

And even if it did work, I really don't want to read the whole conversation. Just send me the relevant part that ChatGPT said!

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