81–90 of 155 posts
> 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.
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> 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…
then you should be delighted we have LLMs one of the use cases they are best suited to is writing documentation, much better than humans can.
I think we'll find that for most AI stuff.
> 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…
Probably negligible. It's not a problem you can solve by pouring more money in. Evidence: configuration file format. I've never seen programmers who enjoy writing YAML. And pure JSON (without comments) is simply not a format should be written by humans. But as far as I know even in the richest companies these formats are still common. And the bad thing they were supposed to replace, XML config, was popularized by rich companies too...!
> 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.
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.
An important aspect of comparison is that nobody is going to tell you that your surgery is noticeable or looks bad. Your friends, family, partners, coworkers, aren't going to say anything, neither are people you meet casually, certainly not service workers, strangers aren't going to pull you aside to tell you the truth about your nose job, etc. I hope the same social taboo doesn't transfer over to AI content. We shou…
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.
An important aspect of comparison is that nobody is going to tell you that your surgery is noticeable or looks bad. Your friends, family, partners, coworkers, aren't going to say anything, neither are people you meet casually, certainly not service workers, strangers aren't going to pull you aside to tell you the truth about your nose job, etc. I hope the same social taboo doesn't transfer over to AI content. We shou…
One big issue I've found is that HN seems to automatically comments from all new users, no matter the content. I used to try to change handles every so often because HN doesn't allow people to delete their comments after the first hour, which becomes a bigger and bigger privacy issue over time (and frankly, extremely hostile to users). Especially for those of use who don't use AI, our individual writing styles are likely identifiable over a long enough period of time.
But the last few times I tried it, all of my comments were immediately shadowbanned. No notification or any indication on the new account, but if I checked with an older account, the comments were all "dead." I try to put effort into my comments, reading through the entirety of the comment I'm replying to (often multiple times), proofreading them myself (I never use AI), and linking to any claims I'm making. All of this takes considerable time. It's extremely frustrating to put that kind of effort into a comment and have it autobanned. It's even more frustrating when the system deceives you and makes you believe it's been posted, and you have to check with another account to learn that it was actually set to dead.
Supposedly there's a desire for comments that people put effort into and aren't written by AI. But why would new users bother putting in that work when their comments get automatically and secretly killed, without them having any way of knowing?
I'm starting to think that the best solution is to move away from these types of online communities in general.
> 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…
then you should be delighted we have LLMs one of the use cases they are best suited to is writing documentation, much better than humans can.
Generating AI Content sucks, Consuming AI Content sucks, but combine them in the same loop and it's really addicting. AI Content Prosuming rocks. Since LLMs, if I see a video I think is interesting, I take the transcript, feed it into an LLM, I summarize it and ask it a couple of questions. I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. I suppose that when you're the one generating the req…
> I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. Why not read the original news? Okay, there are many reasons why you might not want to do that, such as ads, tracking, having to pay for a subscription if you only want one article, and just plain boredom. I wasn't trying to call you out, it was more of a question for society at large. Why has it become more appealing to have a "content crea…
Also, with videos like "what X said about situation Y in discourse Z". Sometimes you're just curious, and you can't realistically extract that efficiently from a full one-hour speech on a geolocked, untranscribed mass-media website, so it's easier to summarize the transcript of the 12 min video directly.
As for why everything is 12 minutes long, it's most likely because content creation isn't optimized to teach you anything or be useful, it's optimized to maximize watch time so platforms can serve more ads to you. The pattern is: I got you intrigued in something; you want the answer? pay me your time.