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The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

techtrenches.substack.com

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Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#191

Post by jasonjayr »

8s2ngy wrote: post #68
ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

I've been seeing this pattern of text crop up in many places. On LinkedIn, much of my feed is filled with posts of short sentences that follow this exact pattern. What's more, even the replies are obviously AI-generated.

"Formulaic headlines considered harmful"

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#193

Post by compiler-guy »

SoftTalker wrote: post #145
ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

Numbered lists are an AI smell.

They weee always low effort, and therefore pretty bad even before AI. But now they are practically no effort and 100x worse.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#195

Post by mpalmer »

ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

I'm happy to go further, I think the majority of the post is slop that reads like a bunch of tweets stitched together.

And what's with that diagram at the start? What's the axis on that graph? The "symptoms" of the "collapse" are listed as "Calculator", "Replit AI" and "AI Code". What?

Later in the post, we see the phrase "our research found". Is the author referring to the credulous citations of other content mill pieces? Is that research?

Our collective standard for quality of writing should be higher. Just as experienced devs have the good "taste" to curate LLM output, inexperienced writers cannot expect LLMs to write well for them.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#196

Post by javcasas »

yojo wrote: post #86
ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

Yeah, I bounced hard off the article at #5. My AI detector was slow warming up but kicked on at: "Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways." Like, yes, those are all technologies, and I can imagine an app + service backend that might use all of them, but the "links" in the chain don't always make sense next to each other and I don't think a human would wri…

Every time I see a big chain of technologies as "bad", all I want to do is add more and see where the good/bad separation should be placed. So:

API gateways -> Java servers -> JVM -> C/C++ -> Assembly -> machine code -> microprocessors -> integrated circuits -> refined silicon -> electronics -> refined metals -> cast metallurgy -> iron tools -> copper tools -> stone tools

Anyway, my take is that everything after copper is evil and should be banished.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#197

Post by hangsi »

n8cpdx wrote: post #173
hodgesrm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like everyone is getting too worked up about AI generated text. Yes, it's bad, but bad writing has existed forever. We don't see most of the older stuff because it disappears (thankfully) into oblivion and you are left with the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

This isn’t just an insightful comment. It’s profound. I’d like to delve into the crucial topic of whether AI generated slop is respectful to the innovative entrepreneurs of Hacker News. If they won’t assert the value of their time, who will? In this digital age, can we not expect writers to just keep it brief? Or heck, just share the prompt, which is almost certainly shorter than the output and includes 100% of the i…

> can we not expect writers to just keep it brief?

In essentially every situation, you cannot expect readers to read.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#199

Post by x0x0 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #157
ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

It seems like everyone is getting too worked up about AI generated text. Yes, it's bad, but bad writing has existed forever. We don't see most of the older stuff because it disappears (thankfully) into oblivion and you are left with the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

The problem isn't the bad writing; it's that it's vapid slop trying to consume my very limited time and attention.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#200

Post by swed420 »

singleshot_ wrote: post #116
ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

It’s becoming exhausting to avoid all of these commonly used phrases! I don’t use LLMs.

> It’s becoming exhausting to avoid all of these commonly used phrases!

That's not the only price society pays. It makes sense for us to develop the heuristics to detect AI, but the implication of doing so has its own cost.

It started out as people avoiding the use of em-dash in order to avoid being mistaken for being AI, for example.

Now in the case of OP's observation, it will pressure real humans to not use the format that's normally used to fight against a previous form of coercion. A tactic of capital interests has been to get people arguing about the wrong question concerning ImportantIssueX in order to distract from the underlying issue. The way to call this out used to be to point out that, "it's not X1 we should be arguing about, but X2." Combined with OP's revelation, it is now harder to call out BS. That sure is convenient for capital interests.

I wonder what's next.

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