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The first 40 months of the AI era

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Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#51

Post by shimman »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #36
Aurornis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will start to recognize it over time. The major AI models each have their own voice and patterns that they overuse. The more you see those patterns the more you start recognizing them. By now I can recognize quickly if a blog post or README.md was generated by Claude or ChatGPT because the signs are so obvious. Even Hacker News comments that are AI written are easy to spot if they weren't edited. I know I'm not a…

This is a temporary problem. Look at how fast things are progressing. Things will improve until none of this matters because the output is indistinguishable.

I wish I could be this confident about the future.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#52

Post by MichaelZuo »

jmalicki wrote: post #41
theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

My favorite thing is when some projects now have better documentation in their Claude skills or MCPs than they ever did for users.

Why continue involvement with a project that clearly devalues their “customers” or “users” who care about documentation?

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#53

Post by jmalicki »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #52
jmalicki wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite thing is when some projects now have better documentation in their Claude skills or MCPs than they ever did for users.

Why continue involvement with a project that clearly devalues their “customers” or “users” who care about documentation?

Projects that spend time on documentation for my robots have shown me they care about my use case!

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#54

Post by nextaccountic »

KetoManx64 wrote: post #38
maxbeech wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

100% Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust. Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.

An idea is to have the AI ingest your templates, it might be useful

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#55

Post by refactor_master »

aidos wrote: post #7

> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI? Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.

If you’re an employee who can finish their work 25% faster but you’re not getting a 4-day work week, what are the incentives for not introducing creep?

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#56

Post by kelvinjps10 »

andai wrote: post #49
tkgally wrote: post #18

Nice observation about AI-generated content: > I’ve had the idea that from a social perspective it’d be regarded like plastic surgery, in that it only looks weird when its over-done, or done badly.

It's the same way with writing as with video. There are some videos now where it's actually hard to tell. You can only tell it's AI when it's bad. When it's done well, you don't even know it's AI. So it creates this selection effect where people only associate AI with fake and bad. The good stuff, they don't associate with AI at all.

But there is also the case where you see polished apps but are ai generated. It's like those ai websites they look "sleek" but all look the same, versus a crappy same that it doesn't look as pretty but looks very human. I don't know quite how to put it

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#57

Post by dghlsakjg »

Aurornis wrote: post #28
H8crilA wrote: post #9

Do you regularly find text content that you know is AI written (but is not marked as such)? Because honestly I don't, and it must exist in decent quantity by now. Or perhaps it's still sparse?

You will start to recognize it over time. The major AI models each have their own voice and patterns that they overuse. The more you see those patterns the more you start recognizing them. By now I can recognize quickly if a blog post or README.md was generated by Claude or ChatGPT because the signs are so obvious. Even Hacker News comments that are AI written are easy to spot if they weren't edited. I know I'm not a…

It’s very obvious if you leave the default tone. If you specifically ask it to hide its ai voice and make it appear human, it does a really good job. Even better if you give it an example of the writing style.

Ask it to write in the style of patio11 or someone else with a distinctive tone, and it will do a remarkable job.

It will pass pretty consistently. Not sure I love it.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#58

Post by skydhash »

KetoManx64 wrote: post #38
maxbeech wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

100% Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust. Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.

Cognitive overload? For me, it’s easier to construct a mental model of the thing than have a full (sometime complex) example which may not necessarily be valid and/or on point. And as I’ve been exploring some foundational ideas of computing, you can do away with a lot of complexity in modern development.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#60

Post by SloppyDrive »

The biggest positive I have seen is not so much in the new tools, but in new ways to convince the higher ups to do sensible things.

We always find that small teams of locals can do much much more than a team with an unlimited number of low cost "developers". Not just because the competence of low cost devs is poor, but also the structure of how you work changes for the worse with a bigger team, for the worse with a distributed team, and for the worse with a skill-diverse team.

Thats before you get into the cultural flaws of favored destinations like India.

So we have been able to argue things like add one local + ai is better than about 20-100 Indians, depending on role and business structure needed to manage low-competence low-trust "developers". So we are planning to completely on-shore in the near future.

The bean counters are happy, and the quality of the work is improving.

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