I find after 4 or 5 rounds of targeted feedback and requests to tighten the text AI can produce exceptionally readable documentation.
AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
441–450 of 729 posts
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the ocean, it's the poster's own team. A simple "AI comments suck" in a sprint retro would be trivially easy and would at least start the conversation.
Doesn't matter. You'll come off as the baddie. It's the foreseeable future. Best just to learn how to interpret AI generated shit, or learn how to run it through AI and have it translate it to a more concise format without all the buzzwords. It'll take getting used to, but it'll save your career.
What is this defeatist attitude? I don't know where you work, but it is not my impression that AI has instantly turned all developers into mindless AI-pilled sheep. If you feel like a simple suggestion like that will cost you your career, then it doesn't sound like a place where any constructive criticism would have been accepted even before AI.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You say this, but it's likely a lie. Maybe not for you, but for every N people like you that say it, a high percentage of them are lying. There's research on people's preference for AI generated content over human content when the provenance of the content is blind, which flips on its head when provenance is not blind. The truth is the actual "art" never mattered, most people are living in Plato's cave and they're scraping and clawing for some shred of identity and sense of belonging, and being part of the anti-AI clique gives them that. That's how we get things like Jackson Pollock and bananas duct-taped to cardboard being held up as some kind of achievement.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#444My 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, I’ve stopped caring about code readability for a few months now. I want the code readable _to the agent_ not so much to me.
I don’t trust it with code anyway - every feature needs comprehensive test, and then a live deploy on a real working test system before it is approved - I mostly measure success with - after deployment is it doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s like “helping another team managing their work stream” experience rather than coding yourself.
Funny enough models seem to have personalities and the dis on each other - when I had an opus orchestrator dispatching fable workers, they would comment on how “unreliable” it was and it had “evidence to prove it” and fable thinks opus is too rigid and needs more hand holding… it really starts to feel like managing team egos and verifying work. And I code scan mostly to just spot check if it’s not doing anything super stupid. But my goal is to make sure anything shipped is easy to change and fix, and every mistake has a test behind it so it doesn’t happen again.
I ship more problems, but they get discovered and fixed quicker. Before they reach prod of course. And from time to time you do reorganisation and refactoring passes where I brainstorm how things could have been better with the help of evidence- chat sessions, tests, bugs etc.
It feels less like rigorous engineering and more like gentle gardening. Or like “project management” not “coding”.
Honestly given my age now I’m fine with that. Have enough “hard” projects under my belt (ORMs, sql parsers, etc) that I don’t feel I need to prove anything to anybody, but I don’t think that’s even relevant- the velocity change is … I guess around 5-10x for me - with provable metrics, so I try not to lent the good old days but figure out how I can now live in this brave new world and be happy with my work.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I’m trying to say is that they can generate many more hundreds of lines of code and comments than I can reasonably review. Maybe the comments do make sense they’re just five lines longer than they ought to be. Multiply that by 20 times and then add in 150 lines of documentation that is not technically incorrect. Not to mention that the response to each review will come with its own set of new comments and new do…
Sure - but the volume is a separate problem from the quality of comments. Even if the comments were the best possible your complaint would still stand.
Tbh if the AI just followed the prompt to not add the comments, that'd be sufficient. It feels maddening and burnout inducing to tell it not to only to have it ignore that and you deal with the same problem every time without things meaningfully improving.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just hit "deny." I've been training my co-workers that the AI-isms their "AI Assisted coding" do that some shit just isn't acceptable. I leave a comment and hit deny. It also helps that I control the policies on the repo and they can't merge in with a denial from anyone. So it's either a fix it, or explain why your work isn't getting done. My manager is also 100% with this.
I've denied for poor branch names and commits from AI. I've denied for too verbose of comments from AI. I've denied for parts of the code base being touched that are not relevant to the case they are working on (login isn't broken, your case is to add a check box in the settings pane, remove the changes made to login).
Pre-AI I wasn't fine with PRs with multiple features and touching irrelevant areas of the code base. Why would I be fine with it because my co-workers got new toys? You want AI to refactor a part of the codebase? Fine. Separate branch, new PR, and in the description, present an argument for it. Don't shoe horn it into something else. Also, I'm not obligated to hit approved on shit.
I may also be a bit privileged because I can be a pain in the ass to whole team. I may be slower, but I've got the numbers, my code is creating way less bugs then my "fast more efficient" co-workers.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not controversial that if left alone, most people will tend towards minimizing laborious work, and that the use of technology to do that ought to be expected. Consider, however: 1. This work was largely optional to begin with. Few people actually need to post on LinkedIn, write blogs, etc. It's arguably a mountain of content waste (which is why the term "slop" is so fitting). Not only does it waste the producer'…
1. This doesn't make any sense. On this reading, most any work is "optional" in that you had the option to do something else. But few people have the option to not work at all. If creating slop generates a decent enough ROI, and you have to work , then why is it waste? It may be waste to you , but for them it is an income. Just like there are entire industries or products I might personally think are a waste and yet…
What I meant by "optional" work is that it's not being performed for a buyer; it's volunteer labor. Nobody's paying for individuals' awful LinkedIn posts. I suppose it could be framed as self-promotion aimed at a potential future payoff, but if it repels buyers, then it's pointless.
Perhaps it's worth looking at this issue from the demand side instead. Who is the customer or buyer of the AI-generated work; and if there is one, how much do they value it? I contend that there are few actual buyers who are actually asking for the AI-generated output, and thus the value is low. These buyers are usually asking for some other outcome that flows downstream from the work, and AI slop is either being misperceived as the actual ask, or is a step in the middle somewhere.
Next, I wasn't talking about slop code. I was talking about slop narrative work--the work preceding the coding phase that gets teams and goals aligned, and reports results to management. In a world in which code is increasingly machine-written, the focus turns to the planning and decision stages, and that's where communication skills are most important. If you're outsourcing that work to an LLM, you're providing little added value, and that makes you replaceable. Not by a machine, but someone better than you at writing.
As for your last paragraph, I'm having trouble understanding whether you're in favor of AI-written content (not code, let's put that aside). That's the question I'm more interested in discussing than how economies evolve. I know how economic progress works ;-)
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't matter. You'll come off as the baddie. It's the foreseeable future. Best just to learn how to interpret AI generated shit, or learn how to run it through AI and have it translate it to a more concise format without all the buzzwords. It'll take getting used to, but it'll save your career.
What is this defeatist attitude? I don't know where you work, but it is not my impression that AI has instantly turned all developers into mindless AI-pilled sheep. If you feel like a simple suggestion like that will cost you your career, then it doesn't sound like a place where any constructive criticism would have been accepted even before AI.
AI is more or less a religion right now in the corporate world. Speaking against AI amounts to heresy.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.
Some people have an inner drive like a rat that likes pushing the reward button in the cell to dose them with opium. They want to see the YOU WIN screen and absolutely do not care what it takes to get them there. Hence the booming market for custom memory modding cheat devices and subscription cheat services. They don't want to improve their skills, they just want to be number one on the board.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#450> ...then I’m afraid I received a different message than you intended
Are you sure about that?