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Do your own writing

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Re: Do your own writing

#191

Post by zimpenfish »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #172
the-mitr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. perhaps because writing is a third order exercise. first order being in thinking in one's mind, one has to talk with oneself. second order is talking to someone else we are directing thoughts towards that person, but in writing we have…

I think writing is writing to an audience which includes yourself. When you're thinking you are speaking in your mind which means you can not really listen to yourself at that same time. You don't hear yourself from yourself. You are too busy talking (in your head to yourself) that you can not really think about what you just said to yourself. You are producing language, not consuming it But when you read what you ha…

> That makes it easier to understand what you are saying, and more easily see logical errors or omissions in it.

Rubber ducking with a pencil, kinda.

Re: Do your own writing

#194

Post by yoz-y »

esafak wrote: post #154
ori_b wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drop the premise of writing, drop the premise that you need something well written. Just give me the same information you would have given the LLM.

Do you really want to read the whole conversation between the author and computer? I don't use AI to write prose but if I did I'd treat it like a critical editor so reading all that would not save you time.

Any time I stumbled on AI writing; in comments, work or articles, it was painfully obvious that not a single person has read it, including the author.

Re: Do your own writing

#195

Post by yoz-y »

delusional wrote: post #76
roadside_picnic wrote: post #9

I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really co…

For your context, I'm an AI hater, so understand my assumptions as such. > The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context. Why is more AI the "obvious" best solution here? If nobody wants to read your release notes, then why write them? And if they're going to slim them down with their AI…

For release notes in particular, I think AI can have value. This is because more than a summary, release notes are a translation from code and more or less accurate summaries into prose.

AI is good at translation, and in this case it can have all the required context.

Plus it can be costly (time and tokens) to both “prompt it yourself” or read the code and all commit logs.

Re: Do your own writing

#196

Post by antonvs »

bandrami wrote: post #180
antonvs wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original comment was saying that the AI would be both the writer now and the reader, in future. That's how the toil is eliminated. Instead of reading or searching through a series of release notes, you can just ask questions about what you're specifically looking for. > If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader "If comprehending something is too tedious for you..." Seriou…

What's the point of the AI writer in that use case? Just send your prompt to my AI. And for that matter since prompting is in plain English, why not just send your prompt directly to me, and I'll choose to prettify it through an AI or not as I prefer.

The point is that it summarizes the context. It’s an important optimization, because context and tokens are both limited resources. I do something similar all the time when working with coding models. You’ve done a bunch of work, ask it to summarize it to the AGENTS.md file.

The more fully automated agents rely heavily on this approach internally. The best argument against it is that good harnesses will do something like this automatically, so you don’t need to explicitly do it.

Sending you the prompt wouldn’t help at all, because you’d have to reconstruct the context at the time the notes were written. Even just going back in version control history isn’t necessarily enough, if the features were developed with the help of an agent.

Re: Do your own writing

#197

Post by bandrami »

apsurd wrote: post #184
bandrami wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space Neither is the LLM

(Trying to find where you might still see this) I've read the thread and in my mind you're missing that LLMs increase the surface area of visibility of a thing. It's a probe. It adds known unknowns to your train of thought. It doesn't need to be "creative" about it. It doesn't need to be complete or even "right". You can validate the unknown unknown since it is now known. It doesn't need to have a measured opinion (e…

Because if that's it we've made a ludicrously expensive i-ching.

Re: Do your own writing

#198

Post by antonvs »

funnybeam wrote: post #179
antonvs wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original comment was saying that the AI would be both the writer now and the reader, in future. That's how the toil is eliminated. Instead of reading or searching through a series of release notes, you can just ask questions about what you're specifically looking for. > If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader "If comprehending something is too tedious for you..." Seriou…

In this scenario the ai _writer _ is redundant. You might as well publish the prompt you were going to give to the writer and have the ai reader consume that directly. Assuming you think any of this is a good idea of course. Personally I wouldn’t trust ai to interpret release notes for anything that i cared about

I responded to a similar point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584324

The original commenter was essentially describing something similar to what good agent harnesses already rely heavily on.

Re: Do your own writing

#199

Post by bandrami »

antonvs wrote: post #196
bandrami wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of the AI writer in that use case? Just send your prompt to my AI. And for that matter since prompting is in plain English, why not just send your prompt directly to me, and I'll choose to prettify it through an AI or not as I prefer.

The point is that it summarizes the context. It’s an important optimization, because context and tokens are both limited resources. I do something similar all the time when working with coding models. You’ve done a bunch of work, ask it to summarize it to the AGENTS.md file. The more fully automated agents rely heavily on this approach internally. The best argument against it is that good harnesses will do something…

But I also have access to an AI that can summarize content. So why not just send me the content and the prompt you used? Or just the content, so I can summarize it however I want?

Re: Do your own writing

#200

Post by teddyh »

nine_k wrote: post #164
chrismorgan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So often have I started writing a commit message about why I’d done something this way, and realised a problem or thought of another approach, and ended up throwing away the entire change and starting from scratch. (Aside: you should probably write longer commit messages.)

Corollary: write the commit message first , implement things later! Not a joke, this is almost like TDD works. (TDD writes formal tests, which is much more involved.)

Documentation-driven development.
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