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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#391

Post by pjmlp »

williamcotton wrote: post #279
aeturnum wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even if no one reads it I gotta disagree with you there! Code that isn't read doesn't do anything. Code must be read to be compiled, it must be read to be interpreted, etc. I think this points to a difference in our understanding of "read" means, perhaps? To expand my pithy "not gonna read if you didn't write" bit: The idea that code stands on its own is a lie. The world changes around code and code must be changed…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you wrote a dependency-free recursive descent parser in C89 thirty years ago it should still compile and return the same AST.

Well, if it made use of any UB alongside its code, and it gets compiled with the latest version of a modern compiler in -O3, it might, or might not.

Re: AI makes you boring

#392

Post by theK »

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)…

> AI is great at allowing you not to write the dumb boiler plate we all could crank...

I've actually started having a different view on this. After getting over the "glancing instead of reading llm suggestions" phase I started noticing that even for simple or boilerplate tasks, LLMs all too often produce quite wasteful results regardless the setting or your subscription. They are OK to get you going but in the last weeks I haven't accepted one Claude, devstral or gpt suggestion verbatim. Nevertheless, I often throw them boilerplate tasks even though I now know that typically I'll end up coding 6 out of 10 myself and only use the other four as skeletons. But just seeing the "naive" or "generic" implementation and deciding I don't like it is a plus as it seems to compress the time of thinking about it by a good part.

Re: AI makes you boring

#393

Post by amarant »

abustamam wrote: post #369
skydhash wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean, you can't quote the Linux kernel by heart? I thought it was gospel for all nerds:

Loongarch kernel, first paragraph, the lord Linus said, in all his wisdom: /* Hardware capabilities */ unsigned int elf_hwcap __read_mostly EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(elf_hwcap)

Re: AI makes you boring

#394

Post by nicbou »

nickjj wrote: post #88

Look at the world Google is molding. Here's a guy who has had an online business dependent on ranking well in organic searches for ~20 years and has 2.5 million subs on YouTube. Traffic to his site was fine to sustain his business this whole time up until about 2-3 years where AI took over search results and stopped ranking his site. He used Google's AI to rewrite a bunch of his articles to make them more friendly to…

Same, same. It's just awful. A decade of very carefully choosing my words, and I'm competing against shittier AI summaries of my own work.

Re: AI makes you boring

#395

Post by kouru225 »

latexr wrote: post #361
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…

Choosing a different brush size (and pressing down harder or softer) means varying the range of locations that each bristle can land within, but no one cares about where each bristle lands as long as it's within the range that the artist chooses. The fact that you have to use a different tool than a brush in order to get perfect lines proves my point.

Re: AI makes you boring

#396

Post by danparsonson »

sillyfluke wrote: post #364
danparsonson wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry, with respect I think you've missed the point of my comment (which was a reply to your comment, and not a reply to the original post).

You asserted that

> pre-AI, what was impressive to Show HN readers was that you were able to actually implement all that you describe in that sentence by yourselves...

and latterly

> ... 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

and my point is that I disagree - the implementation of an idea in terms of the actual coding is far less interesting to me (and my assertion is: by extension, less interesting to the average reader) than the implementation in terms of the behaviour of the thing. Perhaps you're concerned about someone opening Claude Code and typing "Write me an application that does XYZ" but it's pretty obvious that so far that doesn't produce anything useful, and I think is more of a problem for sites like Stack Overflow where an answer is a small singular thing rather than an entire system.

There is a spectrum between 'writing it all yourself' and 'YOLO vibe-coding' and if you're only arguing about the latter end of the spectrum then, sure, those tend to suck, but I don't think we're really at risk of being drowned in those projects; that's a kind of slippery-slope argument. This is why I talked about 3D graphics; I earlier feared the 'YOLO 3D game' projects taking over, and that just hasn't happened. I believe we (humans) had similar discussions around the time that typewriters and the printing press were invented - 'if you're not handwriting your ideas then you're not really thinking!' but the ideas are the point, not the process of writing them down.

Re: AI makes you boring

#397

Post by techgnosis »

topaz0 wrote: post #300
techgnosis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People project all kinds of ethics on writing code. The constant hum of anti-LLM on HN is monotonous and telling. Hurt egos everywhere.

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

That's fair frankly, hurt egos on both sides.
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