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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#361

Post by latexr »

kouru225 wrote: post #175

This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…

> Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not.

Of course you do, that’s why there are so many different types and sizes of paintbrushes, so you can exert exactly as much fine control as you want/need. Learning the craft is to learn to pick and use your tools to get the desired result. Being unable to microscopically predict where each bristle lands is not the same as not wanting to. Some times you’ll pick a more haphazard brush because the small amount of randomness is a feature (e.g. when emulating nature) and other times you’ll use a fine grained tool, maybe even a toothpick instead of a brush because you need it to be precise.

Re: AI makes you boring

#362

Post by jpfromlondon »

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…

>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).

When your boss (assuming you have one) tells you to do something, do you just ignore it?

Re: AI makes you boring

#363

Post by doublerabbit »

jen729w wrote: post #150
doublerabbit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The boring parts where you learn. "Oh, I did that, this is now not that and it does this! But it was so boring building a template parser" - You've learnt. Boring is suppose to be boring for the sake of learning. If you're bored then you're not learning. Take a look back at your code in a weeks time and see if you still understand what's going on. Top level maybe, but the deep down cog of the engine of the applicatio…

I think this is a terrible argument. I assume you use JavaScript? TypeScript or Go perhaps? Pfft , amateur. I only code in Assembly. Must be boring for you using such a high-level language. How do you learn anything? I bet you don't even know what the cog of the engine is doing.

    variable assumption "wrong"

    switch $assumption {
        wrong { puts "your assumption is wrong" }
        default { puts "perl, erlang, Tcl" }
    }

Re: AI makes you boring

#364

Post by sillyfluke »

danparsonson wrote: post #332
sillyfluke wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is quite a strange argument. Any technical show-and-tell in the form of 'I wrote a cool implementation of such-and-such algorithm' is obviously much less impressive if someone/something else wrote it, but that's always been true, and I think the Show HN format is largely used for tools or products that someone has created, in which case what's more interesting is the problem it solves and how it solves i…

You seem to be insisting on arguing against arguments that have not been made and ignoring the whole point of the original post.

I am having to repeat the beginning of my previous comment:

>>The trigger for the [original] post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders.

The topic is: The drop in quality of post-AI Show HN. It is specifically about this community. Please read the context the OP has referenced in their own post:

Is Show HN Dead? No, but it's Drowning

https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/

Instead of adressing the specifics of that post you seem to ignore the points that were made there and seem to prefer to talk about why vibe-coding solutions should be interesting to pre-AI programmers. Ok, let's go there.

>if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. [Turns out that's not the case.]

Here in this context, you are confusing "easy" with "non-human". Specifically, when people here decry the banality and tediousness of perusing and reviewing vibe-coded solutions by "everyone and their dog" the emphasis is on and their dog. Let's be clear, a non-deterministic non-human entity that is coding something by approximating the intentions of a human is not the same thing as a human developing a 3D engine or SDK end-to-end with human intentionality no matter how "easy" coding a 3D engine has become. So it leaves it to the HN reader to figure out what level of ownership the human poster has over their 90% vibe-coded solution. It's no surprise that HN readers, when alerted to the possibility via a Show HN post, would rather just vibe-code a solution themselves if they are interested in the problem space instead of engaging with the Show HN post itself. When hard-pressed, I can think of very few instances where programmers would not prefer to vibe-code there own solution instead of test-running and reviewing someone else's AI slop. Some of the casual statistics that the original posters have bothered to look at seem to bear this out.

Re: AI makes you boring

#365

Post by toldnotmywrath »

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…

I don't know if this happens to anyone else but on reading LLM-generated text I did not prompt, my eyes do incredibly quick saccades from start to middle to end in always around It's entirely involuntary, I am just unable to care. It's almost always justified because the text in question is always painfully bloated, and repetitive.

The LLM-text you posted could have been (given I didn't read it carefully):

"Skill issue. Iterate on the output, never accept what you receive on the first pass"

Instead we get the standard:

- Agree with the user

- Lackluster simile

- Actual content

- Not X, Y. X, not Y.

Re: AI makes you boring

#366

Post by selridge »

novemp wrote: post #344
selridge wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reading is fundamental

Re: AI makes you boring

#367

Post by ozim »

abustamam wrote: post #326
ozim wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

10% is still quite a lot! Reliability matters in lots of areas that aren't war. Ignoring obvious ones like medicine/healthcare and driving, I want my banking app to be reliable. If they charge me $100 instead of $1 because their LLM didn't realize their currency was stored in floating point dollars and not cents, then I may not die but I'd be pretty upset!

I was writing about Therac 25 that’s not war that’s medical equipment and code written by a human that killed people. Without LLM.

Re: AI makes you boring

#368

Post by agentultra »

abustamam wrote: post #325
agentultra wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer of software I often have to care because it matters and so I read the code. Source code is often written for other humans first and foremost.

I've had to dig into node modules to try to debug code from a closed source library that we depended on. I'd much rather wade through AI slop than minified code, which may have previously been AI slop.

Both can be equally bad. Especially if you could get the source of the minified dependency and find that it is also slop.

What a world when we’re playing Would you rather with people’s property and information.

Re: AI makes you boring

#369

Post by abustamam »

skydhash wrote: post #340
abustamam wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had to dig into node modules to try to debug code from a closed source library that we depended on. I'd much rather wade through AI slop than minified code, which may have previously been AI slop.

Minified code is not for humans, it may as well been bytecode.

Agreed! That's why I told my llm to help me.

But I think larger point being, it's not always feasible for humans to understand every line of code that runs in their software.

Re: AI makes you boring

#370

Post by mpalmer »

tptacek wrote: post #3

That 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 have not seen many of these hypothetical "intrinsically interesting" Show HN posts generated by unskilled users.

The single one I can think of is someone who (I quote) "accidentally created the fastest CSV parser ever using SIMD". This person had no interest in researching prior art themselves, and thus incorrectly claimed credit for "coming up" with this approach - and they didn't even do that.

It's not only the prose that's the problem if submitters are determined not to think.

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