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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

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

#621

Post by qarl2 »

duskdozer wrote: post #574
qarl2 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also be that this site has created its own hive-mind environment. Which is especially and bizzarely intolerant of AI at the moment. I don't want the prompt - I may not have access to an LLM to evaluate it. The entire argument here is misguided, and deeply angry about AI. It's equivalent to answering a question with "google it". Which is often times just plain rude.

>It could also be that this site has created its own hive-mind environment. Which is especially and bizzarely intolerant of AI at the moment. Really? I wonder where else you haunt because this is the most pro-AI place I'm around, both in fervor and number.

Well - as one example - today I found someone doing a "Show HN" about an AI system that will make an entire game for you via a chat interface.

The topmost comments were ugly attacks.

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

#623

Post by wpietri »

qarl2 wrote: post #397
wpietri wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're the one who decided to imagine that a reasonable discussion comment was an attack on your wife. You're also the one who started out calling things bizarre. As somebody not involved in this discussion, to me it looks like drama-seeking behavior.

I do think that the anti-AI mentality around here is bizarre. I do not think that forwarding a listing from Google is bizarre. These seem like reasonable positions to me. I am very sorry if my voicing these beliefs makes you uncomfortable.

I'm not uncomfortable or upset. I'm just a long-time HN denizen pointing out some behavior I think is toxic to a healthy community. You're vigorously trying to make reasonable people look bad.

I knew you wouldn't like me pointing it out, but the comment wasn't really for you. It's for the other reasonable people who are having to read or endure your bad behavior.

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

#624

Post by 27183 »

account42 wrote: post #580
27183 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bosses don't want you actually reviewing it anyway. They want you to approve the PR . Just give them what they want. I'm currently not working in tech, but I will again sometime within the next year or so, and I've been reflecting on my career in light of the recent AI madness. I think the biggest mistakes I've made over the last decade+ in tech as a software engineer have been caring . I've worked at small, med…

I think that's just too cynical when you apply it to the entire industry. I'm sure there are coding jobs where you are just a cog in a factory line but IME there are also those where a lot of things really are up to the individual contributor because either no one else has even given them any though or higher up defer to your judgement (which is part of what they are paying you for).

If you hold up the line by flagging quality issues, you will be seen as the root cause of the problem. I say this as someone who has been there and done that--I've tried to do something about code quality issues affecting my team's velocity. This resulted in a negative performance review. In another company I raised some concerns about a series of serious security issues that were not being handled. Again, management handled it in a retaliatory manner.

These things happened at companies that value their reputations as "good" places to work. Not Amazon. Not Google. I mistakenly thought fixing these problems would not only be possible, but also that it would be appreciated.

Maybe I'm tarring the industry with too broad a brush, but in my experience this is how it is: either you go along with the malfeasance or you're targeted. Being targeted fucking sucks. I'll never paint a target on my back again.

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

#625

Post by wpietri »

mannanj wrote: post #399
wpietri wrote: post #379

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…

I grant that sane behaviors may not always be successful at toxic companies. That seems true by definition. But I don't think general career advice should be based on what is (temporarily) safe at the bottom decile.

Also, if you go back you'll note that I didn't suggest that people "tell the truth". I suggested people ask a neutral question about an obvious phenomenon. If it's unsafe to give an honest answer, most people won't, so it'll be a short discussion. But if it's a topic with some room, it can be the start of a good conversation and possibly a useful change.

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

#626

Post by wpietri »

annzabelle wrote: post #471
mannanj wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

Oh wow, that sounds horrible. Do you have a sense of what motivates that behavior?

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

#627

Post by 27183 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #499
27183 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bosses don't want you actually reviewing it anyway. They want you to approve the PR . Just give them what they want. I'm currently not working in tech, but I will again sometime within the next year or so, and I've been reflecting on my career in light of the recent AI madness. I think the biggest mistakes I've made over the last decade+ in tech as a software engineer have been caring . I've worked at small, med…

>The industry wants to do away with code review, meaningful testing, computer security, and reliable services. Why swim upstream? You can't actually do anything about it so why try? Because habits beget habits, and in form imprint into your identity. I'm not the biggest fan of GPA fixation, but it does have the side effect of imprinting work habits (I won't say "ethics", because the extremes I saw peers go to to get…

You can probably still write your own code to a standard of quality you're comfortable with, while conforming to the wishes of your employer. At least until you can't anymore, then you'll have to make a decision.

But in this case, we're talking about reviewing a deluge of AI slop. Other employees have been incentivized to generate all that slop. It's not your job as an IC reviewing said slop to push back and try to make it better. It's your job to approve the PR and get out of the way. If you do something else it'll come back at you in a bad way.

And probably if you're not generating a comparable volume of code, your output will be labeled deficient.

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

#628

Post by SkyBelow »

kristjansson wrote: post #417
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…

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.

Silly AI, doesn't it know that you have to write the test first, see it fail, and only then can you justify making a change to the Dockerfile.

I do wonder if the idea of TDD has influenced AIs to be too prone to testing even when a human would never consider it. I've seen some really silly tests, especially when it starts writing tests for things that are setup to only allow testing. Normally a comment later and it agrees it was pointless, but unless you have something in context to force it, it simply defaults to "test all the things".

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

#629

Post by Marciplan »

This resonates. Had this in the start of the year with clients sending me their “research”, which, of course, was just a Deep Research result. Lead me to send this article when I work with folks: https://www.marcia.no/words/etiquette

I like to think it helped, but likely what helped was that nobody seems to use Deep Research anymore, haha.

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

#630

Post by DuperPower »

andreyf wrote: post #525
koyote wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity. I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by makin…

It's not that it fundamentally isn't able to produce something concise, it's that the business model of the companies developing these models rests on selling tokens...

because human writing IS not just producing the Next token, sometimes you write shit and then go back and find ways to improve and try to play tricks inside the structures only you or your coauthors understand. AI doesnt do this
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