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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

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

#421

Post by ModernMech »

Calazon wrote: post #400
ModernMech wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that? If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

Is there something in particular I'm trying to glean from that information? If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it. If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.

> If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it.

Right, exactly, that's what you'd do whether he spend 10 hours on it or 10 minutes.

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

#422

Post by keithnz »

Not sure how others are using AI, but for us, an AI dump is actually much better than some human editing/writing it. What we've found is that people become gatekeepers of context due to their role in the company they have privileged access to certain context, so when some question is asked, the person who's AI has the right context can look at it and generate a response making sure not to leak anything important and making sure the question is not nefarious. Also important that your AI doesn't generate a wall of text but is super concise. This works incredibly well for us.

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

#423

Post by jmilloy »

supermatt wrote: post #162
cortesoft wrote: post #48

I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.

How is this? https://claude.ai/share/99bfee0f-bab9-4593-aabb-377e71f1151d

I read your entire jumbled stream joyfully and hated the llm article that was spit out.

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

#424

Post by fnord77 »

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…

I always as for CONCISE documentation.

still get walls of text sometimes

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

#425

Post by mrtesthah »

Terr_ wrote: post #6

> TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) was the solution for social media. > AI;DR (AI; didn’t read) is the solution for AI slop. Maybe I'm the odd one out here and didn't plumb the worse-depths of social media, but I feel I need to defend good old TLDR as a slightly different, and less-hostile animal. It can be a moral condemnation of the poster, where they're disrespecting everyone else's time by posting something big and…

I agree, likening it to "TL;DR" is much too charitable. At least when someone wrote a wall of text it was apparent they cared enough about the subject to think about and pay attention to it.

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

#426

Post by CuriouslyC »

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…

I'm looking forward to when AI labs focus more on conciseness of code and writing.

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

#427

Post by AloysB »

spelk wrote: post #144
rfgplk wrote: post #96

It's an ego issue for most people. For one, part of it comes from genuine intimidation or fear, the notion that a machine can be smarter than you, or at least produce answers that are more knowledgeable than you could. But I think the more striking issue is what LLMs do to the perceived value of expertise. Especially in engineering there's this weird pecking order hierarchy, where someone should be listened to just "…

Admittedly a controversial take, but I think some of the AI skepticism I see is driven by status anxiety, alongside the perfectly legitimate complaints about verbosity, low-effort output, lack of a human voice, etc. The bar for what counts as expertise is shifting. If someone with relatively little background can use an LLM to get to a reasonably informed answer much faster than before, then experience and credential…

Ironically, some of the AI 'trustism'[1] is very much driven by anxiety the fear of being left behind if one does not jump on the train.

I agree that it shifts the notion of what is expertise, but for the worst. It's very hard to tell who is actually an expert, and who is mimicking the expert.

The consequences vary from annoyance to downright catastrophe. e.g.: a confidently wrong medical advice

On the other side, sometimes the expertise is not a requirement for the user: "If it works and does what it says on the box, that's all I care".

I like the fact that you use the word "some", awesome to see some nuance. It's a tricky situation.

---

[1] I am being an idiot on purpose, I think the word skepticism was completely derailed from its origin and meaning.

A minimum amount of skepticism is very healthy, especially for software engineering. Most software engineers, and science-based professions for that matter, are skeptics at heart. And it's a good thing.

Skepticism is the base of science; science thrived when we admitted ignorance and became skeptic towards our own knowledge.

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

#428

Post by CuriouslyC »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #276
Insimwytim wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation. LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say. They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1] So now we are flooded…

Wow! that comment you linked speaks to me. I was watching a review video for a game yesterday that was so obviously written by AI it was actually painful to listen to. I started reading the comments and there were several people praising this Youtuber on their great use of metaphor. Literally "subbed because you're such an amazing writer." It actually shook me to my core. If those were real people making those commen…

You realize that when people aren't told an image or text is AI generated, on average they prefer it to human created content, and it's only when they know it's AI that they rate it lower than the human content? You shouldn't be shocked by this, the last 20 years of Hollywood and pop music clearly indicates the the mass market doesn't care about craft or art, it likes to ride the vibes of what's trending.

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

#429

Post by CuriouslyC »

cortesoft wrote: post #48

I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.

Would you prefer a 10k word discussion with an agent about a hypothesis with back and forth over data sources and such, analysis, etc, or a 2000 word AI essay condensate with the rough edges smoothed over manually?

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

#430

Post by foolserrandboy »

roarcher wrote: post #415
aaaronic wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

Oh god this has been driving me nuts since Opus 5 landed. Every docblock is filled with long-winded jargon explaining why this design is superior to some other design, which never existed as far as any dev who might read that comment is concerned.

Oh no, you said "landed"! It's dug into our brains!
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