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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#221

Post by ineedasername »

No, AI makes it easier to get boring ideas to more than an elevator pitch or "Wouldn't it be cool..". Countless people right now are able to get that initial bit of excitement over an idea and instead of a little groundwork on various aspects of it.

That process is often long enough to think things through a bit and even have "so what are you working on?" conversations with a friend or colleague that shakes out the mediocre or bad, and either refines things or makes you toss the idea.

Re: AI makes you boring

#222

Post by mrkramer »

I vibe code little productivity apps that would take me months to make and now I can make them in a few days. But tbh talking to Google's Gemini is like taking to a drunk programmer; while solving one bug it introduces another bug and we fight back and forth until it realizes what and how needs to be fixed.

Re: AI makes you boring

#223

Post by nicbou »

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…

It makes sense. A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job, just like some cheap Chinese-made widget. Not every task requires hand-crafted professional grade tools.

For example, I have a few letter generators on my website. The letters are often verified by a lawyer, but the generator could totally be vibe-coded. It's basically an HTML form that fills in the blanks in the template. Other tools are basically "take input, run calculation, show output". If I can plug in a well-tested calculation, AI could easily build the rest of the tool. I have been staunchly against using AI in my line of work, but this is an acceptable use of it.

Re: AI makes you boring

#224

Post by swiftcoder »

lywald wrote: post #215
swiftcoder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI enables the stereotypical "idea guy" to suddenly be a "builder". Of course, they are learning in realtime that having the idea was always the easy part...

I had found this rebuttal: Ideas are cheap only if you have cheap ideas. I would argue good ideas are not so easy to find. It is harder than it seems to fit the market, and that is why most of apps fail. At the end of the day, everyone is blinded by hubris and ignorance... I do include myself in that.

They may not be the easiest thing to find, but I'd submit that good ideas are way more common than the skill and resources needed to capitalise on them

Re: AI makes you boring

#225

Post by notahacker »

nickysielicki wrote: post #156
notahacker wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to admit I'm really struggling with the idea that the Wright brothers didn't do much thinking because they were self taught, never mind the idea that figuring out aeronautics from reading every publication they could get their hands on, intuiting wing warping and experimenting by hand-building mechanical devices looks much like asking Claude to make a CRUD app...

That's not what I'm saying. My point is that expertise, as in, credentials, institutional knowledge, accepted wisdom, was actively harmful to solving flight. The Wrights succeeded because they built a tool that made iteration cheap (the wind tunnel), tested 200 wing shapes without deference to what the existing literature said should work (Lilienthal's tables were wrong and everyone with "expertise" accepted them unc…

The Wright brothers were deeply immersed experts in flight like only a handful of other people other people at the time, and were obsessed with Lilenthal's tables to the point they figured out how aerodynamic errors killed Lilenthal.

The blog's actual point isn't some deference to credentials straw man you've invented, it's that stuff lazily hashed together that's got to "good enough" without effort is seldom as interesting as people's passion projects. And the Wright brothers' application of their hardware assembly skills and the scientific method to theory they'd gone to great lengths to get sent to Dayton Ohio is pretty much the antithesis of getting to "good enough" without effort. Probably nobody around the turn of the century devoted more thinking and doing time to powered flight

Using AI isn't necessary or sufficient for getting to "good enough" without much effort (and it's of course possible to expend lots of effort with AI), but it does act as a multiplier for creating passable stuff with little thought (to an even greater extent than templates and frameworks and stock photos). And sure, a founding tenet of online marketing (and YC) from long before Claude is that many small experiments to see if $market has any takers might be worth doing before investing thinking time in understanding and iterating, and some people have made millions from it, but that doesn't mean experiments stitched together in a weekend mostly from other people's parts aren't boring to look at or that their hit rate won't be low....

Re: AI makes you boring

#226

Post by nicbou »

I agree for writing, but not for coding.

An app can be like a home-cooked meal: made by an amateur for a small group of people.[0] There is nothing boring about knocking together hyperlocal software to solve a super niche problem. I love Maggie Appleton's idea of barefoot developers building situated software with the help of AI.[1, 2] This could cause a cambrian explosion of interesting software. It's also an iteration of Steve Jobs' computer as a bicycle for the mind. AI-assisted development makes the bicycle a lot easier to operate.

[0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

[2] https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situateds...

Re: AI makes you boring

#227

Post by Supermancho »

> I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN projects are overall pretty boring.

Ironically, good engineering is boring. In this context, I would hazard that interesting means risky.

Re: AI makes you boring

#228

Post by hananova »

enobrev wrote: post #84
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 feel like dealing with robo-calls for the past couple years had led me to this conclusion a bit before this boom in ai-generated text. When I answer my phone, if I hear a recording or a bot of some sorts, I hang up immediately with the thought "if it were important, a human would have called". I've adjusted this slightly for my kid's school's automated notifications, but otherwise, I don't have the time to listen t…

Robocalls nowadays tend to wait for you to break dead air before they start playing the recording (I don't know why.) So I've recently started not speaking immediately when someone calls me, and if after 10 seconds the counterparty hasn't said something I hang up.

Re: AI makes you boring

#229

Post by mindcrime »

arscan wrote: post #195
mindcrime wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need Sure... to a point. But realistically, the "use an LLM to write it yourself" approach still entails costs, both up-front and on-going, even if the cost may be much less than in the past. There's still reason to use software that's provided "off the shelf", and to some extent there's reason…

> There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together". Absolutely, but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human. I guess it’s usually just ongoing validation that the software is headed down a path of usefulness which is hard to specify up-front and by definition something only the user (or a very good proxy) can do (and even they are usually bad at it).

> but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human.

Agreed.

Re: AI makes you boring

#230

Post by mwigdahl »

taude wrote: post #173
AstroBen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my definition of good writing: it's efficient and communicates precisely what you want to convey in an easy to understand way AI is almost the exact opposite. It's verbose fluff that's only superficially structured well. It's worse than average (waiting for someone to reply that I can tell the AI to be concise and meaningful)

Here's AI responding to you: "You're describing the default output, and you're right — it's bad. But that's like judging a programming language by its tutorial examples. The actual skill is in the prompting, editing, and knowing when to throw the output away entirely. I use LLMs daily for technical writing and the first draft is almost never the final product. It's a starting point I can reshape faster than staring a…

This response provides the recommended daily allowance of irony.
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