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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#341

Post by skydhash »

josephg wrote: post #338
mwcampbell wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every little detail matters though. In SQL, do you want your database field to have limited length? If so, pay attention to validation, including cases where the field's content is built up in some other way than just entering text in a free-form text field (e.g. stuffing JSON into a database field). If not, make sure you don't use some generic "string" field type provided by your database abstraction layer that has…

> So we need to pay attention to every detail that doesn't have a single obviously correct answer I really, really wish that were the case. But look at the modern web. Look at iOS apps. Look at how long discord takes to launch on a modern computer. Look how big and slow everything is. Most end user applications released today do not pay attention to those small details. Definitely not in early versions of the softwar…

> But look at the modern web. Look at iOS apps. Look at how long discord takes to launch on a modern computer. Look how big and slow everything is. Most end user applications released today do not pay attention to those small details. Definitely not in early versions of the software. And they're still successful. At least, successful enough.

The main issue is that we have a lot of good tech that are used incorrectly. Each components are sound, but the whole is complex and ungainly. They are code chimeras. Kinda like using a whole web browser to build a code editor, or using react as the view layer for a TUI, or adding a dependency just to check if a file is executable.

It's like the recently posted project which is a lisp where every function call spawn a docker container.

Re: AI makes you boring

#342

Post by keyle »

zahlman wrote: post #272
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

> The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it…

From what I can tell, domain experts mostly don't directly respond like that. They just make separate meta-level commentaries about Show HN getting flooded. Most submissions get little or no response.

I agree with this, and personally I don't even go to the comment section of those posts. What's the point? There is nothing to learn and no one willing to learn anything.

Re: AI makes you boring

#343

Post by saulpw »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #335
saulpw wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM-generated documentation is great for LLMs to read so they can code better and/or more efficiently. You can write it manually, but as I've discovered over the decades, humans rarely read documentation anyway. So you'll be spending a lot of time writing good for the bots.

I guess I can understand that, but please at least put a warning on it that says "if you actually take the time to read this you'll have spent more effort on it than its author did" so I know not to waste my time.

Heh, maybe how articles say "a 7 minute read" they should also include the time it took to write it. "a 3 hour write"

Re: AI makes you boring

#344

Post by novemp »

selridge wrote: post #310
topaz0 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I think the boosters show their hurt feelings here more often than the detractors do.

Lmfao. The front page is littered with whining about the craft from people who can’t argue coherently why I should go back to getting yelled at by a linter. It’s all “I can’t think anymore” or “software bad now” followed by a critique of the industry circa 2015. Most of the people making cool stuff with LLMs are making it, not writing blog posts hoping to be a thought leader.

If telling something else to make something for you is a craft, I'm an artisan for hiring a webdev to build my site.

Re: AI makes you boring

#345

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

kouru225 wrote: post #306
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan.…

What you’re talking about is found object art so I’m confused. These objects are not created by the artist at all. In fact, they were created in a factory by machines. You’re responding to the story behind it, which is also something a LLM could’ve created. I understand if you’d feel betrayed if someone put a found object piece in a museum with a fake story created by an LLM, but let’s not pretend like a LLM is not c…

No, sorry, a lot of the original post I was responding to was my bafflement that artists are supposed to be gatekeeping their strategies or techniques when it’s very evident to me that the art that moves me the most really didn’t gatekeep anything, and in fact the opposite. I’m not particularly anti LLM being involved in the creative process, I just had no idea wtf you were talking about with gatekeeping artistic intent. I also think these pieces fundamentally don’t work if the story they were telling was fiction. There are fictional stories like Pose that speak to very similar cultural moments but Pose is not Paris is Burning and that distinction is fundamentally important to the place of art in society. I’m very baffled that you’re seemingly saying as long as I am lied to about what I think is true, thats the same as a real work existing.

Re: AI makes you boring

#347

Post by benreesman »

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)…

It's not worth my time to read something that was not done to a high standard, where that standard has a definition with some basis in rigor rather than opinion, where even the notion of good taste is in some way attached to experience of the distribution from which examples of good and bad taste are drawn.

It is not about the author and it is in not about the effort. It is about the quality.

Re: AI makes you boring

#348

Post by bandrami »

drcxd wrote: post #337
bandrami wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing the "boilerplate" argument but it never made sense to me. Text editors have had snippets for half a century now and they're strictly better than an engine that generates plausible-enough boilerplate.

Yeah, and if there really is any boilerplate thing, can't we programmers come up with a more deterministic solution, like a framework? I don't know.

We have, haven't we? That was what was so nice about rails 20 years ago; you just said rails new app something and had a functioning web app that could even just read your database and generate all the model files.

Re: AI makes you boring

#349

Post by ai_tools_daily »

The article conflates two very different things: using AI to skip thinking vs using AI to think faster.

When I write with AI assistance, I spend MORE time editing, questioning, and restructuring — not less. The AI gives me a faster first draft, but I'm pickier about the result because the baseline is higher. The thinking doesn't disappear; it shifts from "how do I phrase this" to "is this actually what I mean."

The real risk isn't that AI makes you boring — it's that lazy usage of AI makes lazy people more visibly lazy. The same person who would have written a generic email before AI now writes a generic AI email. The tool didn't change the person.

What I've noticed in practice: the people who produce the most interesting AI-assisted work are the ones who were already interesting thinkers. They use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter. They argue with it, redirect it, and use its output as raw material.

The boring output people complain about is a prompting problem, not an AI problem.

Re: AI makes you boring

#350

Post by josephg »

skydhash wrote: post #341
josephg wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we need to pay attention to every detail that doesn't have a single obviously correct answer I really, really wish that were the case. But look at the modern web. Look at iOS apps. Look at how long discord takes to launch on a modern computer. Look how big and slow everything is. Most end user applications released today do not pay attention to those small details. Definitely not in early versions of the softwar…

> But look at the modern web. Look at iOS apps. Look at how long discord takes to launch on a modern computer. Look how big and slow everything is. Most end user applications released today do not pay attention to those small details. Definitely not in early versions of the software. And they're still successful. At least, successful enough. The main issue is that we have a lot of good tech that are used incorrectly.…

Yep I think this is broadly true. Though its still not clear to me if vibe coding is going to make this better or worse.
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