Why I am not going to buy a computer • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#101

Post by jjav » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:56 AM UTC

datakan wrote: post #3

The uncanny valley is happening with enterprise work. My boss is in love with Copilot writing documentation that we've sorely needed for many years. He and I can bang out tons of it in minutes that would have taken months before. We do this and then no one reads it. I've asked people about it and they seem disillusioned. It wasn't written by a human so they see no human value in it. They view it as AI writing documen…

> We do this and then no one reads it.

Yes, because if the whole doc is just AI slop, why bother reading?

This happens way too often at work. Someone generates a massive doc full of AI slop, unreviewed, they never even read it, and expect people to spend time reviewing it. Nope.

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#102

Post by maleldil » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 11:04 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #45

cogman10 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, IDK what to tell you then. Sometimes docs just go unread. There's a reason why "RTFM" is a meme. It might be that they are wordy. It might be that your readers are lazy. It also might just be they don't realize the effort has been put in to make sure the docs are of high quality.

In this case, effort has _not_ been put in to make sure the docs are of high quality, and the potential readers know that, which is surely relevant.

Did you skip the part where they describe the human pipeline the documentation goes through before publishing?

Re: Why I am not going to buy a computer

#103

Post by munchbunny » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #86

ink_13 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The step that a lot of people leave out is the revising : it is worth the human hours to go over the outputs of AI for this kind of thing with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it is usable, readable, accurate, etc.

I would then have to wonder if all the time saved in the first place at all. I have heard anecdotes of verifying AI output to be more time-consuming and generally even more painful/stressful than doing the whole work yourself perhaps. As an employee, I would prefer to not be stressed and as an employer, I would prefer to not additionally stress my employee on all times so that I can have them use the stress for the w…

> I would then have to wonder if all the time saved in the first place at all.

From my experiences using AI to write documentation, if your bar is high quality documentation, yes, you do save time, but it's on the order of a 1.5-2x efficiency boost, not 10x. The AI basically saves me one draft iteration and saves me the trouble of creating charts by hand, and that's substantial, but I still need to take a fine toothed comb to the output.

The biggest issue I run into is that AI is good at the tone to address an intended audience but is not good at framing and structuring the information for said audience.