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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#121

Post by enraged_camel »

c22 wrote: post #13
tptacek wrote: post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

Most ideas aren't interesting. Implementations are interesting. I don't care if you worked hard on your implementation or not, but I do care if it solves the problem in a novel or especially efficient way. These are not the hallmarks of AI solutions.

In the vast majority of contexts I don’t want “novel” and “interesting” implementations, I want boring and proven ones.

Re: AI makes you boring

#122

Post by JohnMakin »

Uehreka wrote: post #89
aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

Sometimes (or often) things with horrible security flaws "work" but not in the way that they should and are exposing you to risk.

Re: AI makes you boring

#123

Post by overtone1000 »

uean wrote: post #58
aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

> I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Amen to that. I am currently cc'd on a thread between two third-parties, each hucking LLM generated emails at each other that are getting longer and longer. I don't think either of them are reading or thinking about the responses they…

Honest conversation in the AI era is just sending your prompts straight to each other.

Re: AI makes you boring

#124

Post by ryandrake »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

> The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

I remember in the early days of LLMs this was the joke meme. But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of compressing a payload over the wire: We're taking our output, expanding it, transmitting it over the wire, and then compressing it again for input. Why do we do this?

Re: AI makes you boring

#125

Post by doublerabbit »

ryandrake wrote: post #98
logicprog wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely it. If anything, AI gives me more freedom to think about more novel ideas, both on the implementation and the final design level, because I'm not stuck looking up APIs and dealing with already solved problems.

It's kind of freeing to put a software project together and not have to sweat the boilerplate and rote algorithm work. Boring things that used to dissuade me. Now, I no longer have that voice in my head saying things like: "Ugh, I'm going to have to write yet another ring buffer, for the 14th time in my career."

The boring parts where you learn. "Oh, I did that, this is now not that and it does this! But it was so boring building a template parser" - You've learnt.

Boring is suppose to be boring for the sake of learning. If you're bored then you're not learning. Take a look back at your code in a weeks time and see if you still understand what's going on. Top level maybe, but the deep down cog of the engine of the application, doubt so. Not to preach but that's what I've discovered.

Unless you already have the knowledge, then fine. "here's my code make it better" but if it's the 14th time you've written the ring buffer, why are you not using one of the previous thirteen versions? Are you saying that the vibed code is more superior then your own coding?

Re: AI makes you boring

#126

Post by pbmango »

Along these same lines, I have been trying to become better at knowing when my work could benefit from reversion to the "boring" and general mean and when outsourcing thought or planning would cause a reversion to the mean (downwards).

This echos the comments here about enjoying not writing boilerplate. The there is that our minds are programmed to offload work when we can and redirecting all the saved boilerplate to going even deeper on parts of the problem that benefit from original hard thinking is rare. It is much easier to get sucked into creating more boilerplate, and all the gamification of Claude code and incentives of service providers increase this.

Re: AI makes you boring

#127

Post by rescripting »

JohnMakin wrote: post #122
Uehreka wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

Sometimes (or often) things with horrible security flaws "work" but not in the way that they should and are exposing you to risk.

If you refuse to run AI generated code for this reason, then you should refuse to run closed source code for the same reason.

Re: AI makes you boring

#129

Post by pixl97 »

Uehreka wrote: post #89
aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

Hell, I'd read an instruction manual that AI wrote as long as it accurately describes.

I see a lot of these discussions where a person gets feelings/feels mad about something and suddenly a lot of black and white thinking starts happening. I guess that's just part of being human.

Re: AI makes you boring

#130

Post by dabedee »

Anecdotally, I haven't been excited by anything published on show HN recently (with the exception being the barracuda compiler). I think it's a combination of what the author describes: surface-level solutions and projects mostly vibe-coded whose authors haven't actually thought that hard about what real problem they are solving.
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