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Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

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Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#31

Post by satisfice »

janaagaard wrote: post #12

A Danish audio newspaper host / podcaster had the exact apposite conclusion when he used ChatGPT to write the manuscript for one his episodes. He ended up spending as much time as he usually does because he had to fact check everything that the LLM came up with. Spoiler: It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. To him, it was the most fun part, that is writing the…

As a writer I find his take appalling and incomprehensible. So, apparently not all writers agree that writing with AI is fun. To me, it’s a sickening violation of integrity.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#32

Post by KronisLV »

JimDabell wrote: post #27

If AI can do the easiest 50% of our tasks, then it means we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks. This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

> we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks

Either that, or replacing the time with slacking off and not even getting whatever benefits doing the easiest tasks might have had (learning, the feeling of accomplishing something), like what some teachers see with writing essays in schools and homework.

The tech has the potential to let us do less busywork (which is great, even regular codegen for boilerplate and ORM mappings etc. can save time), it's just that it might take conscious effort not to be lazy with this freed up time.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#33

Post by NetRunnerSu »

notachatbot123 wrote: post #21
janaagaard wrote: post #12

A Danish audio newspaper host / podcaster had the exact apposite conclusion when he used ChatGPT to write the manuscript for one his episodes. He ended up spending as much time as he usually does because he had to fact check everything that the LLM came up with. Spoiler: It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. To him, it was the most fun part, that is writing the…

> It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. LLMs are not sentient. They are designed to make stuff up based on probability.

Unfortunately, they could have been thinking, but the designation of the training/inference separation made them all specimens.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44488126

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#34

Post by oc1 »

rijoja wrote: post #19
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #5

The vast majority of any interesting project is boilerplate. There's a small kernel of interesting 'business logic'/novel algorithm/whatever buried in a sea of CRUD: user account creation, subscription management, password resets, sending emails, whatever.

Yes so why would you spend tons of time and introduce a huge amount of technical debt by rewriting the boring parts, instead of just using a ready made off the shelf solution in that case. You'd think that there be someone who'd be nice enough to create a library or a framework or something that's well documented and is popular enough to get support and updates. Maybe you should consider offloading the boring part to…

That was a solved problem in the 00's with the advent of Rails, or so i thought. Then came the JS framework craze and everything needed to be reinvented. Not just that, but frameworks which had all these battle-tested boring parts were not trendy anymore. Micro framworks became the new default and idiots after idiots jumped on that bandwagon only to reimplement everything from scratch because almost any app will grow to a point where it will need authn, user mgmt, mail, groups and so on...

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#35

Post by NitpickLawyer »

n4r9 wrote: post #29
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Curious to see examples of interesting non-boilerplate work that is now possible with AI. Previously discussed on HN - oAuth library at cloudflare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166

For a review of this library see https://neilmadden.blog/2025/06/06/a-look-at-cloudflares-ai-... Upshot: though it's possible to attempt this with (heavily supervised) LLMs, it's not recommended.

Such a cool review! thanks for posting it. Great to see that authoritative experts are sharing their time and thoughts, lots to learn from this review. Despite the caveats mentioned by Neil, I still think this is a good example of a "non trivial / not boilerplate thing done w/ LLMs". To think we got from chatgpt's cute "looks like python" scripts 2.5 years ago to these kinds of libraries is amazing in my book.

I'd be curious to see how the same exercise would go with Neil guiding claude. There's no debating that LLMs + domain knowledge >>> vibe coding, and I would be curious to see how that would go, and how much time/effort would an expert "save" by using the latest models.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#37

Post by JimDabell »

KronisLV wrote: post #32
JimDabell wrote: post #27

If AI can do the easiest 50% of our tasks, then it means we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks. This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

> we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks Either that, or replacing the time with slacking off and not even getting whatever benefits doing the easiest tasks might have had (learning, the feeling of accomplishing something), like what some teachers see with writing essays in schools and homework. The tech has the potential to let us do less busywo…

The industry has already gone through many, many examples of software reducing developer effort. It always results in developers becoming more productive.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#38

Post by tjpnz »

JimDabell wrote: post #27

If AI can do the easiest 50% of our tasks, then it means we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks. This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

You'll potentially be building on flimsy foundations if it gets the foundational stuff wrong (see anecdote in sibling post). I fear for those who aren't so diligent, especially if there are consequences involved.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#39

Post by odyssey7 »

notachatbot123 wrote: post #21
janaagaard wrote: post #12

A Danish audio newspaper host / podcaster had the exact apposite conclusion when he used ChatGPT to write the manuscript for one his episodes. He ended up spending as much time as he usually does because he had to fact check everything that the LLM came up with. Spoiler: It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. To him, it was the most fun part, that is writing the…

> It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. LLMs are not sentient. They are designed to make stuff up based on probability.

I love this turn of phrase. It quite nicely evokes the difference between how the reader thinks vs how the LLM does.

It also invites reflections on what “sentience” means. In my experience — make of it what you will — correct fact retrieval isn’t really necessary or sufficient for there to be a lived, first-person experience.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#40

Post by satyrun »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #9
lubujackson wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Oh it's feels like crypto again. Outlandish statements but no argument. "Few Understand" as they say.

It has basically ruined this bored with stupid thoughtless comments like this on every fucking article.
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