Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 397 posts

Re: AI makes you boring

#161

Post by CuriouslyC »

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)…

The truth is now that nobody will bother to read anything you write AI or not mostly, creating things is like buying a lottery ticket in terms of audience. Creating something lovingly by hand and pouring countless hours into it is like a golden lottery ticket that has 20x odds, but if it took 50x longer to produce, you're getting significantly outperformed by people who just spam B+ content.

Re: AI makes you boring

#162

Post by rickandmorty99 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #72
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too? I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?

I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding. The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one…

I'm building an education platform. 95% is vibe coded. What isn't vibe coded though is the content. AI is really uninspiring with how to teach technical subjects. Also, the full UX? I do that. Marketing plan? 90% is me.

But AI does the code. Well... usually.

People call my project creative. Some are actually using it.

I feel many technical things aren't really technical things they are simply a problem where "have a web app" is part of the solution but the real part of the solution is in the content and the interaction design of it, not in how you solved the challenge technically.

Re: AI makes you boring

#163

Post by max8539 »

Before vibe coding, I was always interested in trying different new things. I’d spend a few days researching and building some prototypes, but very few of them survived and were actually finished, at least in a beta state. Most of them I left non-working, just enough to satisfy my curiosity about the topic before moving on to the next interesting one.

Now, these days, it’s basically enough to use agent programming to handle all the boring parts and deliver a finished project to the public.

LLMs have essentially broken the natural selection of pet projects and allow even bad or not very interesting ideas to survive, ideas that would never have been shown to anyone under the pre-agent development cycle.

So it’s not that LLMs make programming boring, they’ve allowed boring projects to survive. They’ve also boosted the production of non-boring ones, but they’re just rarer in the overall amount of products

Re: AI makes you boring

#165

Post by ossa-ma »

imiric wrote: post #151
ossa-ma wrote: post #135

Sorry to hijack this thread to promote but I believe it's for a good and relevant cause: directly identifying and calling out AI writing. I was literally just working on a directory of the most common tropes/tics/structures that LLMs use in their writing and thought it would be relevant to post here: https://tropes.fyi/ Very much inspired by Wikipedia's own efforts to curb AI contributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

The obvious question is: was it vibe coded? :) As much as I'd like to know whether a text was written by a human or not, I'm saddened by the fact that some of these writing patterns have been poisoned by these tools. I enjoy, use, and find many of them to be an elegant way to get a point across. And I refuse to give up the em dash! So if that flags any of my writing—so be it.

Absolutely vibe coded, I'm sure I disclosed it somewhere on the site. As much as I hate using AI for creative endeavours I have to agree that it excels as nextjs/vercel/quick projects like this. I was mostly focused on the curation of the tropes and examples.

Believe me I've had to adjust my writing a lot to avoid these tells, even academics I know are second guessing everything they've ever been taught. It's quite sad but I think it will result in a more personable internet as people try to distinguish themselves from the bots.

Re: AI makes you boring

#166

Post by UltraSane »

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)…

It actually makes a lot more sense to share the LLM prompt you used than the output because it is less data in most cases and you can try the same prompt in other LLMs.

Re: AI makes you boring

#167

Post by dormento »

JohnMakin wrote: post #72
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too? I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?

I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding. The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one…

> or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding

You might be on to something. Maybe its self-selection (as in people who want to engage deeply with a certain topic but lack domain expertise might be more likely to go for "vibecodable" solutions).

Re: AI makes you boring

#168

Post by pseudosavant »

taude wrote: post #11

AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. It'll also make people who write better than average, worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use wisely. EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. Don't…

A table saw doesn’t make you a better carpenter. It makes you faster - for better or worse.

LLMs and agents work the same way. They’re power tools. Skill and judgment determine whether you build more, or lose fingers faster.

Re: AI makes you boring

#169

Post by xenadu02 »

logicprog wrote: post #71
josefresco wrote: post #62

While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience a…

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.

Like any tool it can be put to productive use or it can be used to crank out absolute garbage.

Re: AI makes you boring

#170

Post by logicprog »

doublerabbit wrote: post #125
ryandrake wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 applicatio…

If learning about individual cogs is what's important, and once you've done that it's okay to move on and let AI do it, than you can build the specific thing you want to learn about in detail in isolation, as a learning project — like many programmers already do, and many CS courses already require — perhaps on your own, or perhaps following along with a substantial book on the matter; then once you've gained that understanding, you can move on to other things in projects that aren't focused on learning about that thing.
Post reply on HN