I decided to respond to a lot of the replies I see in this thread with my own post. I spent a bunch of time writing and rewriting a reply and decided to extend it into a post since I seem to care a deal.
AI makes you boring
351–360 of 397 posts
Re: AI makes you boring
#352/me bunches blanket up next to chin, like Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense
/me whispers They don't know they're boring
I've had to unfollow multiple people I've followed for donkey's years since they pivoted to full-time AI* (LLM) posting, as they just don't know what's interesting and what isn't any more.
A link to something you said you've vibe coded is now at about the level of a link to your dream journal, or Suno, in terms of clickability.
Re: AI makes you boring
#353While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience a…
That's not vibe coding
Re: AI makes you boring
#354I'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)…
> because it is not innovative itself.
And what are you basing that claim on? What are your sources? Your arguments?
Re: AI makes you boring
#355While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience a…
I think you're missing the general point of the post. >AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff. The trigger for the post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders, whatever their coding chops are. For Show HN posts, the sentence I quoted precisely describes the things that would be mind-numbingly boring t…
> knowing how to code" was a proxy filter for "thought and worked hard on the problem."
Also: Actually made the thing. I know how to code, but have 0 Show-HNs because my ideas and fun side-projects never get to that stage.
Now, "making the thing" is not a good proxy either
Re: AI makes you boring
#356[dead]
> Not more blog posts, more emails, more boilerplate — but something structurally new? This is a point that often results in bad faith arguments from both AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics. Enthusiasts will say "everything is a remix and the most creative works are built on previous works" while skeptics will say "LLMs are stochastic parrots and cannot create anything new by technical definition". The truth is somewhere…
[dead]
Re: AI makes you boring
#357I think a useful framing is: AI raises throughput but can lower taste if you skip deliberation.
In my workflow the difference is whether I force a second pass where I delete half of the model output and rewrite the core argument in my own words. If I skip that pass, everything converges to the same polished-but-generic tone.
So for me AI is best as a draft generator and counterexample machine, not the final author.
Re: AI makes you boring
#358That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…
I agree with the sentiment in the first part of your post. But:
> AI for actual prose writing, no question. Don't let a single word an LLM generates land in your document; even if you like it, kill it.
Why? What's the difference? I'm genuinely curious about your perspective on this. Lots of people can't articulate themselves well, especially if they don't natively speak the language they're writing in. I have my problems with LLM generated text, but you seem to be taking an extreme approach here.
Re: AI makes you boring
#359I'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…
I am a software engineer, but I think code pales in comparison to the impact of every book, speech and essay had on our society throughout history.
Re: AI makes you boring
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inp…
"A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job" How do you know it ever does the job? I don't know either for most code that I use, but I do have reason to trust that the author does know. I don't really trust any code itself, only the people and processes (organizational, not computer) that generated it. I have no reason to trust that ai generated code is doing the correct thing. I know enough about the way code works…
> How do you know it ever does the job?
Because the part of the job it automates is simple, and can be tested. I cannot overstate how simple the tools I am thinking of are. Think tipping calculator. Neither new nor creative nor complex. The real value here is being familiar with the problem.
You are missing the point here. I am talking about people who were not served at all by software developers. The alternative is not craftsmanship, but at best duct taping wordpress plugins together.