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ai;dr

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Re: ai;dr

#151

Post by kjkjadksj »

comboy wrote: post #131
kjkjadksj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a mountain of difference between photography and Ai

This argument works against any new thing. Yes it is totally different than the thing that happened before and perhaps something that has never happened before, I don't deny that at all. Perception of new things stays relatively constant over the years though.

I get that to an extent but ai is actually different than just some iteration on existing practice. It is going to put a lot of people out of work and devalue a lot of previously valuable skills. I mean new tech never really threatened jobs like scientists or lawyers but that is who is on the block as well. Not just low skilled labor. High skilled. Any skilled. Why do we even need labor? Why have 8 billion people? Just need the minimum number to do whatever work is left yet to be automated.

And the thought that we’d all be prancing playing guitars by the river on UBI when that happens. No, we just won’t be born anymore.

Re: ai;dr

#152

Post by dgxyz »

raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

My perspective as an eng lead is it’s all shit. Words, code, the lot. It’s literally an enabler for the worst characteristics of humanity: laziness and disinterested incompetence.

People are happy to shovel shit if they can get away with it.

Re: ai;dr

#153

Post by gordonhart »

threetonesun wrote: post #127
gordonhart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, a lot of people seem to disagree with this, and believe that humans reading code is only necessary at the margins, similarly to debugging compiler outputs. Personally I don't believe we're there yet (and may not get there for some time) but this is where comments like GP's come from: human legibility is a secondary or tertiary concern and it's fine to give it up if the code meets its requirements…

I rarely see LLMs generate code that is less readable than the rest of the codebase it's been created for. I've seen humans who are short on time or economic incentive produce some truly unreadable code. Of more concern to me is that when it's unleashed on the ephemera of coding (Jira tickets, bug reports, update logs) it generates so much noise you need another AI to summarize it for you.

The main coding agent failure modes I've seen:

- Proliferation of utils/helpers when there are already ones defined in the codebase. Particularly a problem for larger codebases

- Tests with bad mocks and bail-outs due to missing things in the agent's runtime environment ("I see that X isn't available, let me just stub around that...")

- Overly defensive off-happy-path handling, returning null or the semantic "empty" response when the correct behavior is to throw an exception that will be properly handled somewhere up the call chain

- Locally optimal design choices with very little "thought" given to ownership or separation of concerns

All of these can pretty quickly turn into a maintainability problem if you aren't keeping a close eye on things. But broadly I agree that line-per-line frontier LLM code is generally better than what humans write and miles better than what a stressed-out human developer with a short deadline usually produces.

Re: ai;dr

#154

Post by smithza »

woopwoop wrote: post #55
losvedir wrote: post #6

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an exp…

I like the idea that various communications media have implicit social contracts that can be broken. In my opinion, power point presentations break an implicit social contract that is held in handwritten talks: if it's worth you displaying a piece of information, so that I the listener feel the need to take it in or even copy it down, it has to be worth your time to actually physically write it on the board. With pow…

Go thee to the land of government contracting and see thou how well thine ideas hold up.

Re: ai;dr

#155

Post by ginsider_oaks »

joshuaissac wrote: post #19
raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

AI-generated code is meant for the machine, or for the author/prompter. AI-generated text is typically meant for other people. I think that makes a meaningful difference.

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

from the preface of SICP.

Re: ai;dr

#156

Post by mystifyingpoi »

fmbb wrote: post #74
dematz wrote: post #36

>I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. Doesn't ai;dr kind of contradict ai generated documentation? If I want to know what claude thinks about your code I can just ask it. Imo documentation is the least amenable thing to ai. As the article itself says, I want to read some intention and see how you shape whatever you're documenting. (AI adding tests seems li…

The article is definitely contradicting itself. There are only two sentences between > Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? and > I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. So they expect nobody to read their documentation.

> So they expect nobody to read their documentation.

Yes, exactly. Because AI will read it and learn from it, it's not for humans.

Re: ai;dr

#157

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Does anyone remember the Cluetrain Manifesto? They complained about corporate-speak, saying that it sounded "literally inhuman". Well, AIs are at least that bad. AIs trained on all those corporate statements, and learned to write that way, and we hate it just like we hate corporate PR-speak.

Re: ai;dr

#158

Post by smithza »

Please read through this incredible book review (book is All Things Are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart). It is the kind of philosophy that everyone is looking past. Syntactic vs informational determinacy. LLMs is designed to create copy that is syntactically determinate (it is a complex set of statistics functions). Whereas the best human prose actually is the opposite--it does not converge on syntactic determinacy (see quote below) but instead converges on informational determinacy. The plot resolves as the reader's knowledge grows from abstraction and ignorance to empathy, insight and anticipation.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/one-to-zero

  Semantic information, you see, obeys a contrary calculus to that of physical bits. As it increases in determinacy, so its syntactical form increases in indeterminacy; the more exact and intentionally informed semantic information is, the more aperiodic and syntactically random its physical transmission becomes, and the more it eludes compression. I mean, the text of Anna Karenina is, from a purely quantitative vantage of its alphabetic sequences, utterly random; no algorithm could possibly be generated — at least, none that’s conceivable — that could reproduce it. And yet, at the semantic level, the richness and determinacy of the content of the book increases with each aperiodic arrangement of letters and words into coherent meaning.
Edit: add-on

In other words, it is impossible for an LLM (or monkeys at keyboards [0]) to recreate Tolstoy because of the unique role our minds play in writing. The verb writing hardly appears to apply to an LLM when we consider the function it is actually doing.

[0] https://libraryofbabel.info

Re: ai;dr

#159

Post by mrisoli »

raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

Wehad a junior engineer do some research on a handful of different solutions for a technical design and present the team, he came up with a 27-page document with 70+ references(2/3 of which were reddit threads), no more than a few hours later after the task was assigned.

I would have been more okay with AI generated code, it would likely have been more objective and less verbose, I refused to review something that he obviously didn't put enough effort himself to do a POC on. When I asked for his own opinion on the different solutions evaluated he didn't have one

It's not about the document per se, but the actual value of these verbose AI-generated slop, code that is executable, even if poorly reviewed, it's still executable and likely to produce the output that satisfies functional requirements.

Our PM is now evaluating tools to generate documentation for our platform based on interpreting source code, it includes description of things such as what is the title and what the back button is for but wouldn't inform valid inputs for the creation of a new artefact. This AI-generated doc is in addition to our human made Confluence docs, which is likely to add to spam and reduce quality of search results for useful information.

Re: ai;dr

#160

Post by b2ccb2 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #46
petetnt wrote: post #34

I agree with the general statement, if you didn’t spend time on writing it, I am not going to spend time reading it. That includes situations where the writer decides to strip all personality by letting AI format the end product. There’s irony in not wanting to read AI content, but still using it for code and especially documentation though, where the same principle should apply.

I find AI is great at documenting code. It's a description of what the code does and how to use it - all that matters is that it's correct and easy to read, which it almost certainly will be in my experience.

I have quite a different take on that. As much as most people view documentation as a chore, there is value in it.

See it as code review, reflection, getting a birds eye view.

When I document my code, I often stop in between, and think: That implementation detail doesn't make sense/is over convoluted/can be simplified/seems to be lacking sanity check etc…

There is also the art of subtly injecting humor in it, with, e.g. code examples.

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