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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

471–480 of 729 posts

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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to come across as the baddie. There are plenty of neutral ways to start the conversation. E.g., "I notice that there's a lot more generated comments lately. How much are people finding those useful?" If you really want to save your career, learning how to have real conversations is a vital skill.

Have you worked in corporate recently or at a particularly toxic one? Asking because when I was at capital one, certain comments or questions about topics like this, would actually get you noticed negatively by your manager and being disruptive to what leadership wants hurts your career. In fact being the one to ask and point out questions like yours ultimately got me PIP'ed and removed from the company. So, like, ye…

Capital One is a particularly toxic work environment, and I'm not sure that your experiences there apply to other companies.

I started my first post-Capital One job a few months ago, and I'm still not used to the fact that this company expects everybody working here to still be working here in two years. Most employers are not going through everybody with a fine tooth comb every 6 months hunting for any hint of an excuse to PIP them.

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

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commi…

... Poor branch names?

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

#473
I dunno, not a huge fan of TL;DR (even though it definitely has its place for long-winded walls of text) -- I feel like TL;DR is a cause or a symptom or both of our dwindling attention spans. I think this inability to read anything longer than a tweet, and the resulting loss of nuance, has been pretty bad for discourse, online or off.

AI-writing is definitely very annoying to read, but I don't know if it's ideal to start dismissing interesting content before we even get to its substance just because we don't like its form.

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

#474
post #473

I dunno, not a huge fan of TL;DR (even though it definitely has its place for long-winded walls of text) -- I feel like TL;DR is a cause or a symptom or both of our dwindling attention spans. I think this inability to read anything longer than a tweet, and the resulting loss of nuance, has been pretty bad for discourse, online or off. AI-writing is definitely very annoying to read, but I don't know if it's ideal to s…

but our dwindling attention spans are caused by a deluge of material sapping our energy before we can devote it to something worthwhile. developing a fast and frugal mental filter for insubstantial walls of slop is a new prerequisite for not being so exhausted that you default to saying tl;dr to the real, good stuff.

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

#475
What I dislike is people who say they don’t know something when it’s easy to just Google it, with Gemini looking up fairly trivial factoids and comparisons is especially easy now. I know this was a stronger meme a few years ago, “just Google it dammit!” But now it’s even more so. People who don’t know these things at this point just don’t want to know, and they still get offended when someone throws an AI answer at them, not understanding that they already offended other people first by being willfully ignorant.

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

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable. Actually, rejecting them is precisely what will make them easy. "Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review." You're giving everybody (including yourself) more work by: 1. Reviewing the code (even if you skip the documentation). 2. Letting too many abstruse comments in wh…

> "Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review."

This is also how I do code review of AI work on my projects. If the work is offensive to the point I can't complete the review, I simply reject the code and tell the AI why. Then it goes off and fixes it. This repeats until the issues are either gone or are small enough that I can just fix them myself and move on.

There is no need to be upset. Just iterate until it's right. If it's cheap to write, it's equally cheap to rewrite.

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

#479

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 asked claude 4.5 : """ Please, with an absolute minimum of content modification, edit this text with proper paragraph-formatting, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Do not alter vocabulary, language, or tone. """

And then fed it your input.

And the output was a very easily readable, enjoyable plain-ascii-text, with no Ai-ick, except for an em-dash or two.

Tried pasting it here, but that removed paragraph formatting

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

#480
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the tests. Oh god the tests. Personal recent favorite: I asked for some changes to a Dockerfile, which it did ably, and then promptly tested by writing a pytest module that traversed up to the root, read the Dockerfile, and checked that the added lines were present.

Try property based testing perhaps.

I’ve heard of this, but I’m not really sure at all how to even get started. Are there any good guides out there?
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