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/Deslop

tahigichigi.substack.com

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Re: /Deslop

#11

Post by fxwin »

idop wrote: post #10
fxwin wrote: post #5

> The elephant in the room is that we’re all using AI to write but none of us wants to feel like we’re reading AI generated content. My initial reaction to the first half of this sentence was "Uhh, no?", but then i realized it's on substack, so probably more typical for that particular type of writer (writing to post, not writing to be read). I don't even let it write documentation or other technical things anymore b…

Indeed. I have never used an LLM to write. And coding agents are terrible at writing documentation, it's just bullet points with no context and unnecessary icons that are impossible to understand. There's no flow to the text, no actual reasoning (only confusing comments about changes made during the development that are absolutely irrelevant to the final work), and yet somehow too long. The elephant in the room is th…

I have tried using them, both for technical documentation (Think Readme.md) and for more expository material (Think wiki articles), and bounced off of them pretty quickly. They're too verbose and focus on the wrong things for the former, where output is intended to get people up to speed quickly, and suffer from the things i mentioned above for the latter, causing me to have to rewrite a lot, causing more frustration than just writing it myself in the first place.

That's without even mentioning the personal advantages you get from distilling notes, structuring and writing things yourself, which you get even if nobody ever reads what you write.

Re: /Deslop

#13

Post by Antibabelic »

fxwin wrote: post #5

> The elephant in the room is that we’re all using AI to write but none of us wants to feel like we’re reading AI generated content. My initial reaction to the first half of this sentence was "Uhh, no?", but then i realized it's on substack, so probably more typical for that particular type of writer (writing to post, not writing to be read). I don't even let it write documentation or other technical things anymore b…

Had the same thought reading this. I haven't found a place for LLMs in my writing and I'm sure many people have the same experience.

I'm sure it's great for pumping out SEO corporate blogposts. How many articles are out there already on the "hidden costs of micromanagement", to take an example from this post, and how many people actually read them? For original writing, if you don't have enough to say or can't [bother] putting your thoughts into coherent language, that's not something AI can truly help with in my experience. The result will be vague, wordy and inconsistent. No amount of patching-over, the kind of "deslopification" this post proposes, will help salvage something minimum work has been put into.

Re: /Deslop

#14

Post by jbstack »

idop wrote: post #10
fxwin wrote: post #5

> The elephant in the room is that we’re all using AI to write but none of us wants to feel like we’re reading AI generated content. My initial reaction to the first half of this sentence was "Uhh, no?", but then i realized it's on substack, so probably more typical for that particular type of writer (writing to post, not writing to be read). I don't even let it write documentation or other technical things anymore b…

Indeed. I have never used an LLM to write. And coding agents are terrible at writing documentation, it's just bullet points with no context and unnecessary icons that are impossible to understand. There's no flow to the text, no actual reasoning (only confusing comments about changes made during the development that are absolutely irrelevant to the final work), and yet somehow too long. The elephant in the room is th…

"Please write me some documentation for this code. Don't just give me a list of bullet points. Make sure you include some context. Don't include any icons. Make sure the text flows well and that there's actual reasoning. Don't include comments about changes made during development that are irrelevant to the final work. Try to keep it concise while respecting these rules."

I think many of the criticisms of LLMs come from shallow use of it. People just say "write some documentation" and then aren't happy with the result. But in many cases, you can fix the things you don't like with more precise prompting. You can also iterate a few rounds to improve the output instead of just accepting the first answer. I'm not saying LLMs are flawless. Just that there's a middle ground between "the documentation it produced was terrible" and "the documentation it produced was exactly how I would have written it".

Re: /Deslop

#15

Post by idop »

jbstack wrote: post #14
idop wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have never used an LLM to write. And coding agents are terrible at writing documentation, it's just bullet points with no context and unnecessary icons that are impossible to understand. There's no flow to the text, no actual reasoning (only confusing comments about changes made during the development that are absolutely irrelevant to the final work), and yet somehow too long. The elephant in the room is th…

" Please write me some documentation for this code. Don't just give me a list of bullet points. Make sure you include some context. Don't include any icons. Make sure the text flows well and that there's actual reasoning. Don't include comments about changes made during development that are irrelevant to the final work. Try to keep it concise while respecting these rules. " I think many of the criticisms of LLMs come…

Sure, but that's part of my point. It gives a facade of attention to detail (on the part of the dev) where there was none.

Re: /Deslop

#16

Post by fxwin »

jbstack wrote: post #14
idop wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have never used an LLM to write. And coding agents are terrible at writing documentation, it's just bullet points with no context and unnecessary icons that are impossible to understand. There's no flow to the text, no actual reasoning (only confusing comments about changes made during the development that are absolutely irrelevant to the final work), and yet somehow too long. The elephant in the room is th…

" Please write me some documentation for this code. Don't just give me a list of bullet points. Make sure you include some context. Don't include any icons. Make sure the text flows well and that there's actual reasoning. Don't include comments about changes made during development that are irrelevant to the final work. Try to keep it concise while respecting these rules. " I think many of the criticisms of LLMs come…

Believe me, I've tried. By the time i get the documentation to be the way I want it, I am no longer faster than if i had just written it myself, with a much more annoying process along the way. Models have a place (e.g. for fixing formatting or filling out say sample json returns), but for almost anything actually core content related I still find them lacking.

Re: /Deslop

#18

Post by oytis »

mold_aid wrote: post #12

Just seems like the author could have said "write the damn thing yourself" and been done with it.

It will definitely help, but also some people, especially in marketing/sales, were writing like that before LLMs. So you should not only write the thing yourself, but also learn some good writing style.

Re: /Deslop

#19

Post by fastasucan »

piker wrote: post #4

Just don't use LLMs to generate text you want other humans to read. Think and then write. If it isn't worth your effort, it certainly isn't worth your audience's.

It comes down to this for me as well. Just the same way I never open auto generated mails, I see no reason to read text other people have got an LLM to write for them.

Re: /Deslop

#20

Post by fastasucan »

jbstack wrote: post #14
idop wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have never used an LLM to write. And coding agents are terrible at writing documentation, it's just bullet points with no context and unnecessary icons that are impossible to understand. There's no flow to the text, no actual reasoning (only confusing comments about changes made during the development that are absolutely irrelevant to the final work), and yet somehow too long. The elephant in the room is th…

" Please write me some documentation for this code. Don't just give me a list of bullet points. Make sure you include some context. Don't include any icons. Make sure the text flows well and that there's actual reasoning. Don't include comments about changes made during development that are irrelevant to the final work. Try to keep it concise while respecting these rules. " I think many of the criticisms of LLMs come…

Why not write it yourself?
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