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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

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Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#681

Post by alxndr »

koyote wrote: post #263
aaaronic wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity. I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by makin…

Reminds me of “sorry this is so long, I didn’t have time to make it short” (variously attributed, but the original may be Blaise Pascal)

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#682

Post by platevoltage »

sdellis wrote: post #637
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say this, but AI artists keep getting listens on music platforms, doing at least as well as human artists if the listener is making a blind choice. https://www.promarket.org/2026/05/04/consumers-prefer-ai-mus...

Expressing a preference between two choices is not how I would measure what listeners want. What they should have been testing is whether the listener ends up playing the track over and over and singing along to every word of the track. I think you would end up with a very different conclusion if you measured passion and not preference. This study merely reflects what the companies want to measure.

It's like how the Pepsi challenge predicted everyone's preference for Pepsi.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#683

Post by etruong42 »

noman-land wrote: post #113
LPisGood wrote: post #56

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

Have you considered talking about it? You're in a professional environment collectively working in a new way with a group of people. It's up to somebody to have opinions about what does and doesn't suck. If you silently go along and don't say anything you're dooming yourself and all of us to a lifetime of this garbage.

You might be presuming a culture that protects free expression. Free expression is hard to protect. Sure, you could express your experience, but it could threaten or offend someone "with power" and they use their "power" to punish you and suppress the ideas you're trying to express.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#684

Post by munksbeer »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #640
munksbeer wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was nodding to your post for a short period, then you just had to throw in the usual anti-capitalism zeitgeist rant. Reframe your context, pretend you're in a communist society, and you could be making the exact same point about speaking up against the grain being bad for you. It feels as though people are brainwashed by anti-capitalism sentiment at the moment, unable to see outside of that context.

I don't want communism, I want a functioning free market with socialist safety net policies and for strong anti-trust/monopoly regulations. Mega corporations pervert free markets and democracy, and we have a huge number of mega corporations At this point.

That's not the point of my response. It is tiresome, and detracts from meaningful discourse to have the same tired anti-capitalism meme tacked onto everything. It didn't even make sense in the post I was responding to - which is entirely my point.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#685

Post by WorldMaker »

miraculixx wrote: post #666
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if he speaks against it he gets labeled "anti-AI" and laid off or not promoted. If he stays silent he retains his job. Corporate Capitalism's main innovation was virtualizing feudalism. Now anyone with a bit of cash flow can be a feudal lord with peasants to do his will. No need to maintain land or fight over it with other feudal lords. There's still fighting, naturally, but now the game isn't zero sum. The serfs…

Who'd want to work in an environment like this? It's not sustainable

That's the existential threat right now, isn't it? So much of our industry is top-down being told "agentic programming is the only way forward" and anyone who disagrees is laid off. (I'm in that boat. I've been out of work since April.)

It doesn't feel sustainable now. It won't feel sustainable in the future when companies are trying to operate on an entire fossil layer of LLM-generated legacy code.

Do I expect managers to get smarter about LLMs and their limits or do I "retire" and find an entire new industry to work in?

It's really depressing and there has been a lot of grieving since April that it feels like my entire 20+ year career path disappeared overnight, replaced by something unsustainable and ultimately terrifying.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#686

Post by BeetleB »

27183 wrote: post #656
BeetleB wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your bosses don't want you actually reviewing it anyway. They want you to approve the PR. Just give them what they want. Then remove the whole process and let it go through automatically. I've worked in high trust teams where we would do that - there was no gate.

If that's what they wanted they'd mandate that process. They want the deniability of having you rubber stamp the PR. That way they can blame you when it goes wrong. There may be high trust teams, but I've never seen one firsthand, but my sample size is only N=5.

Before I became a SW engineer, I've worked in such teams (you "own" the quality, but they want you to do it so quickly that you can't really own it).

I left. I will always recommend finding a new job when you have dishonest management. (Dishonest by not admitting they are lowering the quality.)

Fortunately, none of my jobs since that job had that problem. They either allow good quality reviews, or they explicitly accept the technical debt that comes out of it and don't blame me for poor codebases.

(But then again, I make sure to probe these things during the interview process...)

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#687

Post by coderatlarge »

account42 wrote: post #608
coderatlarge wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc

Are you implying that one should not be offended by that? It's commonly mocked when it becomes apparent.

well it’s widely understood that any large scale social media account is managed by a team and not the individual being represented and we seem broadly ok with that. what those teams produce is often vapid manipulative corporate bs which i don’t find any less offensive for it being typed by humans earning a salary as compared to tensors assembling copy via gpu. the current anti AI sentiment strikes me as a bit of a high-minded pose when the actual underlying behaviors have been in place for a while.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#688

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

otterley wrote: post #661
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is precisely the observation we're not seeing. What is the basis for this claim? To me, my formulation reads as logically self evident, to the point of near tautology. Your claim is what? People who genuinely care about things are delegating those things to LLMs? Then in what sense do they actually "care" about them?

You said: "if a human cares, a human will author." That statement was somewhat ambiguous, and I interpreted that in such a way that the first human (the consumer) is different from the second (producer). Perhaps that's not what you meant. I also think, respectfully, that you're overindexing on LinkedIn. I was using it as an example to illustrate a point. My primary concern is with teams I work with day to day, and to…

I'm not sure where the lack of clarity on my part came in. I think at this juncture it is best to thank you for the back and forth and wish you a good day. I will just also suggest debates at work should be settled at work.

Thanks! I appreciated it.

Edit: I see what you mean. In my formulation the "human" in question was one and the same. Perhaps this clarification makes my point more intelligible. Thanks again!

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#689

Post by delecti »

swat535 wrote: post #278
delecti wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the ocean, it's the poster's own team. A simple "AI comments suck" in a sprint retro would be trivially easy and would at least start the conversation.

You're going to have convince upper management why the team's velocity is suddenly affected in feature releases once they stop using AI. All the execs know that they can refresh the screen faster and see the features for marketing and sales. When has engineering ever had a voice anyway? The bean counters have been looking to cut us out since the inception of our industry.

> My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments

That's the behavior being discussed. In my experience, overly large PRs are a detriment to productivity, so if anything my suggestion (asking one's coworkers to stop that) might lead to an improvement in velocity. If I have to read an essay before and throughout every PR, I'm not going to be able to review that very quickly.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#690

Post by atomicnumber3 »

munksbeer wrote: post #684
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want communism, I want a functioning free market with socialist safety net policies and for strong anti-trust/monopoly regulations. Mega corporations pervert free markets and democracy, and we have a huge number of mega corporations At this point.

That's not the point of my response. It is tiresome, and detracts from meaningful discourse to have the same tired anti-capitalism meme tacked onto everything. It didn't even make sense in the post I was responding to - which is entirely my point.

It's relevant because the feedback mechanism for countering all of this is "theoretically, the firm gets outcompeted by other actors who are not doing the bad things."

I'm pointing out that, due to how strongly capitalism rewards cash flow and previously accumulated capital, that feedback/correcting mechanism is often _extremely slow_.

That feels relevant to me.

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