Bro, I'm a software developer, it's not the fucking AI making me boring.
AI makes you boring
241–250 of 397 posts
Re: AI makes you boring
#242There's a version of this argument I agree with and one I don't.
Agree: if you use AI as a replacement for thinking, your output converges to the mean. Everything sounds the same because it's all drawn from the same distribution.
Disagree: if you use AI as a draft generator and then aggressively edit with your own voice and opinions, the output is better than what most people produce manually — because you're spending your cognitive budget on the high-value parts (ideas, structure, voice) instead of the low-value parts (typing, grammar, formatting).
The tool isn't the problem. Using it as a crutch instead of a scaffold is the problem.
Re: AI makes you boring
#243[dead]
Re: AI makes you boring
#244[dead]
Re: AI makes you boring
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do. If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code. Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested. I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far. But I guess as opp…
Key part is *where reliability matters*, there are not that many cases where it matters.
We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much.
E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be delivered.
Re: AI makes you boring
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest conversation in the AI era is just sending your prompts straight to each other.
I mean one thing we have learnt from Epstein is that the 'elite' don't spend much time crafting the perfect email!
Very true, and it's not just creepy elites either. Before I got into tech I worked a blue collar job that involved zero emailing. When I first started office work I was so incredibly nervous about how to write emails and would agonize over trivial details. Turns out just being clear and concise is all most people care about.
There might be other professions where people get more hung up on formalities but my partner works in a non-tech field and it's the same way there. She's far more likely to get an email dashed off with a sentence fragment or two than a long formal message. She has learned that short emails are more likely to be read and acted on as well.
Re: AI makes you boring
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do. If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code. Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested. I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far. But I guess as opp…
Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor would I ever want to (the worst thing I could learn about that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings about it). This "developers read code" thing is just special pleading.
But you read your coworkers PRs. I decided this week I wouldn't read/correct the AIgen doc and unit tests from 3 of my coworkers today, because else I would never be able to work. They produce twice as much poor output in 10 time the number of line change, that's too much.
Re: AI makes you boring
#248I'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)…
What's interesting is how AI makes this problem worse but not actually "different", especially if you want to go deep on something. Like listicles were always plentiful, even before AI, but inferior to someone in substack going deep on a topic. AI generated music will be the same way, there's always been an excessive abundance of crap music, and now we'll just have more more of it. The weird thing is how it will hit…
In other words, AI partially solves the technique problem, but not the taste problem.
In the arts the differentiators have always been technical skill, technical inventiveness, original imagination, and taste - the indefinable factor that makes one creative work more resonant than another.
AI automates some of those, often to a better-than-median extent. But so far taste remains elusive. It's the opposite of the "Throw everything in a bucket and fish out some interesting interpolation of it by poking around with some approximate sense of direction until you find something you like" that defines how LLMs work.
The definition of slop is poor taste. By that definition a lot of human work is also slop.
But that also means that in spite of the technical crudity, it's possible to produce interesting AI work if you have taste and a cultivated aesthetic, and aren't just telling the machine "make me something interesting based on this description."
Re: AI makes you boring
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor would I ever want to (the worst thing I could learn about that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings about it). This "developers read code" thing is just special pleading.
But you read your coworkers PRs. I decided this week I wouldn't read/correct the AIgen doc and unit tests from 3 of my coworkers today, because else I would never be able to work. They produce twice as much poor output in 10 time the number of line change, that's too much.
Right, I'm not arguing developers don't read their own code or their teammates code or anything that merges to main in a repo they're responsible for. Just that the "it's only worth reading if someone took the time to actually write it" objection doesn't meaningfully apply to code in Show HN's --- there's no expectation that code gets read at all. That's why moderation is so at pains to ensure there's some way people can play with whatever it is being shown ("sign up pages can't be Show HN's").
Re: AI makes you boring
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do. If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code. Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested. I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far. But I guess as opp…
Key part is *where reliability matters*, there are not that many cases where it matters. We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much. E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be deliv…
Most code will not kill people, but a lot of code could kill a business.