[HN Gopher] AI makes you boring
___________________________________________________________________
AI makes you boring
Author : speckx
Score : 468 points
Date : 2026-02-19 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.marginalia.nu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.marginalia.nu)
| nemomarx wrote:
| I've seen a few people use ai to rewrite things, and the change
| from their writing style to a more "polished" generic LLM style
| feels very strange. A great averaging and evening out of future
| writing seems like a bad outcome to me.
| skissane wrote:
| I sometimes go in the opposite direction - generate LLM output
| and then rewrite it in my own words
|
| The LLM helps me gather/scaffold my thoughts, but then I
| express them in my own voice
| taude wrote:
| that's a perfect use, imhno, of AI-assisted writing. Someone
| (er-something) to help you bounce ideas, and organize....
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I do something similar: give it a bunch of ideas I have or a
| general point form structure, have it help me simplify and
| organize those notes into something more structured, then I
| write it out myself.
|
| It's a fantastic editor!
| ExtremisAndy wrote:
| This is exactly how I use them too! What I usually do is give
| the LLM bullet points or an outline of what I want to say,
| let it generate a first attempt at it, and then reshape and
| rewrite what I don't like (which is often most of it). I
| think, more than anything, it just helps me to quickly get
| past that "staring at a blank page" stage.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, if anything it might make sense to do the opposite. Use
| LLMs to do research, ruthlessly verify everything, validate
| references and help you guide you in some structure, but then
| actually write your own words manually with your little fingers
| and using your brain.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Are you joking? The facts and references are the part we know
| it will hallucinate.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You can check the references.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| I have an opinion of people that have opinions on AI
| baal80spam wrote:
| It's not them, it's you.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I had to write a difficult paragraph that I talked through with
| copilot. I think it made one sentence I liked but found GPTZero
| caught it. I would up with 100% sentences I wrote but that I
| reviewed extensively with Copilot and two people.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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 question. Don't let a single word
| an LLM generates land in your document; even if you like it, kill
| it.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| It's not a hazing ritual, it's a valuable learning experience.
| Yes, it's nice to have the option of foregoing it, but it's a
| tradeoff.
| tptacek wrote:
| So the point of a "Show HN" is to showcase your valuable
| learning experience?
| discreteevent wrote:
| What the article is saying is:
|
| "the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much
| about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of
| a discussion to be had. The cool part about pre-AI show HN
| is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a
| problem for way longer than you had. It was a real
| opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely
| different perspective."
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, so it's about the person and how they've qualified
| themselves, and not about what they've built.
|
| I feel like I've been around these parts for a while, and
| that is not my experience of what Show HN was originally
| about, though I'm sure there was always an undercurrent
| of status hierarchy and approval-seeking, like you
| suggest.
| discreteevent wrote:
| It's not about status. It's about interest. A joiner is
| not going to have an interesting conversation about
| joinery with someone who has put some flatpak furniture
| together.
| tptacek wrote:
| Oh, is that what Show HN is? A community of craftspeople
| discussing their craft? I hadn't realized.
| jgon wrote:
| Based on your replies here, one thing it really doesn't
| seem like is a community of people trying to earnestly
| exchange ideas or points of view. It really seems like
| you're viewing this whole thing as some sort of debate
| contest or point sparring, and its both aggravating and
| disappointing to read.
|
| What is your hoped for outcome here man? To come off like
| enough of a jerk or obtuse enough that people just
| abandon the thread and you can declare victory?
| overgard wrote:
| I think the valuable learning experience can be what makes
| a Show HN worth viewing, if it's worth viewing. (I don't
| feel precious about it though.. I didn't think Show HN was
| particularly engaging before AI either)
| pwython wrote:
| Did you just "it's not x, it's y" me?
| c22 wrote:
| Most ideas _aren 't_ interesting. Implementations are
| interesting. I don't care if you worked hard on your
| implementation or not, but I do care if it solves the problem
| in a novel or especially efficient way. These are not the
| hallmarks of AI solutions.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| In the vast majority of contexts I don't want "novel" and
| "interesting" implementations, I want _boring_ and _proven_
| ones.
| c22 wrote:
| In the vast majority of contexts I'm not using "Show HN"
| submissions to manage important functions of my life.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| I can't believe the mods at /r/screenprinting took down my post
| on the CustomInk shirt I ordered.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping
|
| "Gatekeeping" became a trendy term for a while, but in the
| post-LLM world people are recognizing that "gatekeeping" is not
| the same as "having a set of standards or rules by which a
| community abides".
|
| If you have a nice community where anyone can come in and do
| whatever they want, you no longer have a community, you have a
| garbage dump. A gate to keep out the people who arrive with
| bags of garbage is not a bad thing.
| gary_0 wrote:
| I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around
| when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people
| with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage
| newcomers by making their field seem mysterious and only able
| to be done by super special people, and intimidating or
| making fun of newbies who come along and ask naive questions.
|
| "Gatekeeping" is NOT when you require someone to be willing
| learn a skill in order to join a community of people with
| that skill.
|
| And in fact, saying "you are too stupid to learn that on your
| own, use an AI instead" is kind of gatekeeping on its own,
| because it implicitly creates a shrinking elite who actually
| have the knowledge (that is fed to the AI so it can be
| regurgitated for everyone else), shutting out the majority
| who are stuck in the "LLM slum".
| tptacek wrote:
| Making ham radio operators learn Morse Code was "requiring
| someone to be willing to learn a skill". Also pure
| gatekeeping.
| oytis wrote:
| Some people here enjoy solutions to difficult technical
| problems? It's not product hunt
| strogonoff wrote:
| While at first glance LLMs do help expose and even circumvent
| gatekeeping, often it turns out that gatekeeping might have
| been there for a reason.
|
| We have always relied on superficial cues to tell us about some
| deeper quality (good faith, willingness to comply with code of
| conduct, and so on). This is useful and is a necessary
| shortcut, as if we had to assess everyone and everything from
| first principles every time things would grind to a halt. Once
| a cue becomes unviable, the "gate" is not eliminated (except if
| briefly); the cue is just replaced with something else that is
| more difficult to circumvent.
|
| I think that brief time after Internet enabled global
| communication and before LLMs devalued communication signals
| was pretty cool; now it seems like there's more and more
| closed, private or paid communities.
| kakamadafuka wrote:
| Really? You think LLMs are a bigger shift in how internet
| communities are than big corporations like Google, Facebook
| etc.? I personally see much less change last few years than I
| did 15 years ago.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| It's not about having to put in effort for the sake of it, the
| point is that building something by hand you will gain insight
| into the problem, which insight then becomes a valuable
| contribution.
| matthewowen wrote:
| I think that having some difficulty and having to "bloody your
| forehead" acts as a filter that you cared enough to put a lot
| of effort into it. From a consumer side, someone having spent a
| lot of time on something certainly isn't a guarantee that it is
| good, but it provides _some_ signal about the sincerity of the
| producer's belief in it. IMO it's not gatekeeping to only want
| to pay attention to things that care went into: it's just
| normal human behavior to avoid unreasonable asymmetries of
| effort.
| AstroBen wrote:
| > what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone
| had the technical competence to put something together
|
| Wouldn't the masses of Show HN posts that have gotten no
| interest pre-AI refute that?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| What if the AI produces writing that better accomplishes my
| goal than writing it myself? Why do you feel differently about
| these two acts?
|
| For what it's worth, the unifying idea behind both is basically
| a "hazing ritual", or more neutrally phrased, skin in the game.
| It takes time and energy to look at things people produce. You
| should spend time and energy making sure I'm not looking at a
| pile of shit. Doesn't matter if it's a website or prose.
|
| Obviously some people don't. And that's why the signal to noise
| ratio is becoming shit very quickly.
| tptacek wrote:
| It doesn't, is the problem. If it did, I would feel
| differently.
| overgard wrote:
| Gatekeeping can be a good thing -- if you have to put effort
| into what you create, you're going to be more selective about
| what ideas you invest in. I wouldn't call that "bloodying your
| forehead", I'd call it putting work into something before
| demanding attention
| iainctduncan wrote:
| gatekeeping is just a synonym for curration by people who don't
| like the currators choice.
|
| And we are going to need more curration so goddamned badly....
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Nothing wrong with some degree of gatekeeping though. A
| measured amount of elitism is a force for good.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| I mean, can't you just... prompt engineer your way out of this? A
| writer friend of mine literally just vibes with the model
| differently and gets genuinely interesting output.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I think the point of the article is that on sites like HN,
| people used to need domain expertise to answer questions. Their
| answer was based on unique experience, and even if maybe it
| wasn't optimal it was unique. Now a lot of people just check
| chatgpt and answer the question without actually knowing what
| they're talking about. Worse the bar to submit something to
| Show HN has gotten lower, and people are vibe coding projects
| in an afternoon nobody wants or cares about. I don't think the
| article is really about writing style
| wagwang wrote:
| Isnt this just flat out untrue since bots can pass turing tests
| hyperhello wrote:
| The bot doesn't pass, the human fails.
| wsowens wrote:
| People are often boring in conversation. Therefore, an AI agent
| doesn't need to be interesting to seem human enough in a Turing
| test.
| saalweachter wrote:
| "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of
| the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
| recursive wrote:
| The turing test isn't designed to select for the most
| interesting individuals. Some people are less interesting than
| other people. If the machine is acting similar to a boring
| human, it can make you more boring, and still pass the test.
| lasgawe wrote:
| The more interesting question is whether AI use causes the
| shallowness, or whether shallow people simply reach for AI more
| readily because deep engagement was never their thing to begin
| with.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| More interesting question than _what_? And also, say you have
| an answer to that question, what insight do you have now that
| you didn 't have before?
| igor47 wrote:
| Well the claim was that AI _makes_ you boring. The counter is
| that interesting people remain interesting, it 's just that a
| flood of previously already boring people are pouring into
| tech. We could make some predictions that depend on how you
| model this. For instance, the absolute number of interesting
| projects posted to HN could increase or decrease, and
| likewise for the relative number vs total projects. You might
| expect different outcomes
| swiftcoder wrote:
| AI enables the stereotypical "idea guy" to suddenly be a
| "builder". Of course, they are learning in realtime that having
| the idea was always the easy part...
| lywald wrote:
| I had found this rebuttal: Ideas are cheap only if you have
| cheap ideas.
|
| I would argue good ideas are not so easy to find. It is
| harder than it seems to fit the market, and that is why most
| of apps fail. At the end of the day, everyone is blinded by
| hubris and ignorance... I do include myself in that.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| They may not be the easiest thing to find, but I'd submit
| that good ideas are way more common than the skill and
| resources needed to capitalise on them
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I'm going to guess the same way Money makes rich people turn
| into morons, AI will turn idiots into...oh...no
| mym1990 wrote:
| Most ideas people have are not original, I have epiphanies
| multiple times a day, the chance that they are something no one
| has come up with before are basically 0. They are original _to
| me_ , and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about
| it. There is a huge case for having good taste to drive the LLMs
| toward a good result, and original voice is quite valuable, but I
| would say most people don't hit those 2 things in a meaningful
| way(with or without LLMs).
| spijdar wrote:
| Most ideas people have aren't original, but the original ideas
| people _do_ have come after struggling with a lot of unoriginal
| ideas.
|
| > They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful
| moment, and thats about it.
|
| The insight is that good ideas (whether wholly original or
| otherwise) are the result of many of these insightful moments
| over time, and when you bypass those insightful moments and the
| struggle of "recreating" old ideas, you're losing out on that
| process.
| taude wrote:
| AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better
| writers. It'll also make people who write better than average,
| worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use
| wisely.
|
| EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write
| code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing
| much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with
| your voice and style. Don't be lazy, just because you're leaning
| on LLMs.
| wagwang wrote:
| Highly doubt that since its the complete opposite for coding.
| Whats missing for people of all skill levels is that writing
| helps you organize your thoughts, but that can happen at prompt
| time?
| notahacker wrote:
| Good code is marked by productivity, conformance to
| standards, and absence of bugs. Good writing is marked by
| originality and personality and _not_ overusing the
| rhetorical crutches AI overrelies on to try to seem engaging.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| After telling Copilot to lose the em-dash, never say "It's not
| A, it's B" and avoid alternating one-sentence and long
| paragraphs it had the gall to tell me it wrote better than most
| people.
| runarberg wrote:
| This claim sounds plausible, but it is also testable. Do you
| know whether this has actually been tested in an experimental
| setting?
| latexr wrote:
| > AI writing will make people who write worse than average,
| better writers.
|
| _Maybe_ it will make them output better text, but it doesn't
| make them better writers. That'd be like saying (to borrow the
| analogy from the post) that using an excavator makes you better
| at lifting weights. It doesn't. _You_ don't improve, _you_
| don't get better, it's only _the produced artefact_ which
| becomes superficially different.
|
| > If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have
| your own prompt that can help with your voice and style.
|
| The point of the article is _the thinking_. Style is something
| completely orthogonal. It's irrelevant to the discussion.
| parpfish wrote:
| i think a lot of people that use AI to help them write want it
| specifically BECAUSE it makes them boring and generic.
|
| and that's because people have a weird sort of stylistic cargo-
| culting that they use to evaluate their writing rather than
| deciding "does this communicate my ideas efficiently"?
|
| for example, young grad students will always write the most
| opaque and complicated science papers. from their novice
| perspective, EVERY paper they read is a little opaque and
| complicated so they try to emulate that in their writing.
|
| office workers do the same thing. every email from corporate is
| bland and boring and uses far too many words to say nothing.
| you want your style to match theirs, so you dump it into an AI
| machine and you're thrilled that your writing has become just
| as vapid and verbose as your CEO.
| AstroBen wrote:
| 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)
| taude wrote:
| 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 at a blank page.
|
| The real problem isn't that AI _can 't_ produce concise,
| precise writing -- it's that most people accept the first
| completion and hit send. That's a user problem, not a tool
| problem."
| mwigdahl wrote:
| This response provides the recommended daily allowance of
| irony.
| buu700 wrote:
| Time, effort, and skill being equal, I would suggest that AI
| access generally improves the quality of any given output. The
| issue is that AI use is only externally identifiable when at
| least one of those inputs is low, which makes it easy to
| develop poor heuristics.
|
| No one finds _AI-assisted_ prose /code/ideas boring, per se.
| They find _bad_ prose /code/ideas boring. "AI makes you boring"
| is this generation's version of complaining about typing or
| cellular phones. AI is just a tool; it's up to humans how to
| use it.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| A table saw doesn't make you a better carpenter. It makes you
| faster - for better or worse.
|
| LLMs and agents work the same way. They're power tools. Skill
| and judgment determine whether you build more, or lose fingers
| faster.
| themafia wrote:
| > AI writing will make people who write worse than average,
| better writers.
|
| If they don't care enough to improve themselves at the task in
| the first place then why would they improve at all? Osmosis?
|
| If this worked then letting a world renown author write all my
| letters for me will make me a better writer. Right?
|
| Who cares if you're a "good writer?" Are you "easy to
| understand" is the real achievement.
| matsemann wrote:
| If you spent 3 hours on a show HN before, people most likely
| wouldn't appreciate it, as it's honestly not much to show. The
| fact that you now can have a more polished product in the same
| timeframe thanks to AI doesn't really change that. It just
| changes the baseline for what's expected. This goes for other
| things as well, like writings or art. If you normally spent 2
| hours on a blog post, and you now can do it in 5 minutes, that
| most likely means it's a boring post to read. Spend 2 hours
| still, just with the help of AI it should now be better.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| AI is great for getting my first bullet points into paragraph
| form, rephrasing/seeing different ways of writing to keep me
| moving when I'm stuck, and just general copy-editing (grammar
| really). Like you said it generally doesn't save me a ton of
| time, but I get a quality copy done maybe a little bit faster
| and I find it just keeps me working on something rather than
| constantly stopping and starting when I hit a mental wall.
| Sometimes I just need/wanf to get it done, and for that LLM's
| can be great.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| This is a great way to think about it. Put in the same effort
| and get farther.
|
| AI is a bicycle, not a motorcycle.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Also sounds likely that it's the mediocre who gravitate to AI in
| the first place.
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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) but it's inelegant and
| boring. I do think AI is great at allowing you not to write the
| dumb boiler plate we all could crank out if we needed to but
| don't want to. It just won't help you do the innovative thing
| because it is not innovative itself.
| uean wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Amen to that. I am currently cc'd on a thread between two
| third-parties, each hucking LLM generated emails at each other
| that are getting longer and longer. I don't think either of
| them are reading or thinking about the responses they are
| writing at this point.
| rkomorn wrote:
| It's bad enough they didn't bother to actually write it, but
| often it seems like they also didn't bother to read it
| either.
| overtone1000 wrote:
| Honest conversation in the AI era is just sending your
| prompts straight to each other.
| multjoy wrote:
| I mean one thing we have learnt from Epstein is that the
| 'elite' don't spend much time crafting the perfect email!
| rurp wrote:
| Very true, and it's not just creepy elites either. Before
| I got into tech I worked a blue collar job that involved
| zero emailing. When I first started office work I was so
| incredibly nervous about how to write emails and would
| agonize over trivial details. Turns out just being clear
| and concise is all most people care about.
|
| There might be other professions where people get more
| hung up on formalities but my partner works in a non-tech
| field and it's the same way there. She's far more likely
| to get an email dashed off with a sentence fragment or
| two than a long formal message. She has learned that
| short emails are more likely to be read and acted on as
| well.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| This is the dark comedy of the AI communication era -- two
| LLMs having a conversation with each other while their human
| operators have already checked out. The email equivalent of
| two answering machines leaving messages for each other in the
| 90s.
|
| The real cost isn't the tokens, it's the attention debt.
| Every CC'd person now has to triage whether any of those
| paragraphs contain an actual decision or action item. In my
| experience running multiple products, the signal-to-noise
| ratio in AI-drafted comms is brutal. The text looks
| professional, reads smoothly, but says almost nothing.
|
| I've started treating any email over ~4 paragraphs the same
| way I treat Terms of Service -- skim the first sentence of
| each paragraph and hope nothing important is buried in
| paragraph seven.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > the signal-to-noise ratio in AI-drafted comms is brutal
|
| This is also the case for AI generated projects btw, the
| backend projects that I've been looking at often contains
| reimplementations of common functionality that already
| exists elsewhere, such as in-memory LRU caches when they
| should have just used a library.
| dhdaadhd wrote:
| oh the irony
| enobrev wrote:
| I feel like dealing with robo-calls for the past couple years
| had led me to this conclusion a bit before this boom in ai-
| generated text. When I answer my phone, if I hear a recording
| or a bot of some sorts, I hang up immediately with the thought
| "if it were important, a human would have called". I've
| adjusted this slightly for my kid's school's automated
| notifications, but otherwise, I don't have the time to listen
| to robots.
| hananova wrote:
| Robocalls nowadays tend to wait for you to break dead air
| before they start playing the recording (I don't know why.)
| So I've recently started not speaking immediately when
| someone calls me, and if after 10 seconds the counterparty
| hasn't said something I hang up.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > 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 things increasingly
| do). Really elegant code is cool to read, but many tools I use
| daily are closed source, so I have no idea if their code is
| elegant or not. I only care if it works.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Sometimes (or often) things with horrible security flaws
| "work" but not in the way that they should and are exposing
| you to risk.
| rescripting wrote:
| If you refuse to run AI generated code for this reason,
| then you should refuse to run closed source code for the
| same reason.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I don't see how the two correlate - commercial, closed
| source software usually have teams of professionals
| behind them with a vested and shared interest in not
| shipping crap that will blow up in their customers' face.
| I don't think the motivations of "guy who vibe coded a
| shitty app in an afternoon" are the same.
|
| And to answer you more directly, generally, in my
| professional world, I don't use closed source software
| often for security reasons, and when I do, it's from
| major players with oodles of more resources and capital
| expenditure than "some guy with a credit card paid for a
| gemini subscription."
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hell, I'd read an instruction manual that AI wrote as long as
| it accurately describes.
|
| I see a lot of these discussions where a person gets
| feelings/feels mad about something and suddenly a lot of
| black and white thinking starts happening. I guess that's
| just part of being human.
| 1shooner wrote:
| >Code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose
| doesn't have
|
| But isn't this the distinction that language models are
| collapsing? There are 'prose' prompt collections that
| certainly make (programmatic) things happen, just as there is
| significant concern about the effect of LLM-generated prose
| on social media, influence campaigns, etc.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software)
| do.
|
| If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't
| take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody
| read the code.
|
| Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external
| behaviour they've tested.
|
| I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where
| reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far.
|
| But I guess as opposed to other types of writing, developers
| _do_ read generated code. At least as soon as something goes
| wrong.
| tptacek wrote:
| Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software
| they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor
| would I ever want to (the _worst_ thing I could learn about
| that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then
| live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings
| about it). This "developers read code" thing is just
| special pleading.
| hexaga wrote:
| You're a user of jq in the sense of the comment you're
| replying to, not a developer. The developer is the
| developer _of jq_, not developers in general.
| tptacek wrote:
| We're talking about Show HN here.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly how I meant it. I might _rarely_
| peruse some code if I'm really curious about it, but by
| and large I just trust the developers of the software I
| use and don't really care how it works. I care about what
| it does.
| Stefan-H wrote:
| They can be "a developer" and use jq as a component
| within what they are developing. They do not need to be a
| developer of jq to have reason to look at jq's code.
| orwin wrote:
| But you read your coworkers PRs. I decided this week I
| wouldn't read/correct the AIgen doc and unit tests from 3
| of my coworkers today, because else I would never be able
| to work. They produce twice as much poor output in 10
| time the number of line change, that's too much.
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, I'm not arguing developers don't read their own
| code or their teammates code or anything that merges to
| main in a repo they're responsible for. Just that the
| "it's only worth reading if someone took the time to
| actually write it" objection doesn't meaningfully apply
| to code in Show HN's --- there's no expectation that code
| gets read at all. That's why moderation is so at pains to
| ensure there's some way people can play with whatever it
| is being shown ("sign up pages can't be Show HN's").
| ozim wrote:
| 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
| delivered.
| wussboy wrote:
| Most code will not kill people, but a lot of code could
| kill a business.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << 90% of software out there doesn't kill people.
|
| As we give more and more autonomy to agents, that % may
| change. Just yesterday I was looking at hexapods and the
| first thing it tells you ( with a disclaimer its for
| competitions only ) that it has a lot of space for weapon
| install. I had to briefly look at the website to make
| sure I did not accidentally click on some satirical link.
| ozim wrote:
| Main point is that there is many more lines of code of
| CRUD business apps running on AWS and instances of
| applications than even non-autonomous car software even
| though we do have lots of cars.
| cobbal wrote:
| We guarantee 5 nines of uptime, and 1 nine of not killing
| people
| arscan wrote:
| > But I'll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long
| as it works (which these things increasingly do).
|
| It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a
| common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how
| hard it is to get people to use software they aren't
| effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain
| access to something or 'network effects' or whatever).
|
| Most people's time and attention is precious, their habits
| are ingrained, and they are fundamentally pretty lazy.
|
| And people that don't fall into the 'most people' I just
| described, probably won't want to use software you had an LLM
| write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet
| their exact need. UNLESS it's something very novel that came
| from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of. But that
| bit isn't what we are talking about here, I don't think.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _probably won't want to use software you had an LLM write
| up when they could have just done it themselves to meet
| their exact need_
|
| Sure... to a point. But realistically, the "use an LLM to
| write it yourself" approach _still_ entails costs, both up-
| front and on-going, even if the cost may be much less than
| in the past. There 's still reason to use software that's
| provided "off the shelf", and to some extent there's reason
| to look at it from a "I don't care how you wrote it, as
| long as it works" mindset.
|
| _came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable
| of._
|
| I think you're making an overly binary distinction on
| something that is more of a continuum, vis-a-vis "written
| by human vs written by LLM". There's a middle ground of
| "written by human and LLM together". I mean, the people
| building stuff using something like SpecKit or OpenSpec
| still spend a lot of time up-front defining the tech stack,
| requirements, features, guardrails, etc. of their project,
| and iterating on the generated code. Some probably even
| still hand tune some of the generated code. So should we
| reject their projects just because they used an LLM at all,
| or ?? I don't know. At least for me, that might be a step
| further than I'd go.
| arscan wrote:
| > There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM
| together".
|
| Absolutely, but I'd categorize that 'bit' as the
| innovation from the human. I guess it's usually just
| ongoing validation that the software is headed down a
| path of usefulness which is hard to specify up-front and
| by definition something only the user (or a very good
| proxy) can do (and even they are usually bad at it).
| mindcrime wrote:
| > but I'd categorize that 'bit' as the innovation from
| the human.
|
| Agreed.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Yeah, sure, you could create a social media or photo-
| sharing site, but most people that want to share cat photos
| with their friends could just as easily print out their
| photos and stick them in the mail already.
| josephg wrote:
| > It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use?
|
| This is something I like about the LLM future. I get to
| spend my time with users thinking about their needs and how
| the product itself could be improved. The AI can write all
| the CSS and sql queries or whatever to actually implement
| those features.
|
| If the interesting thing about software is the code itself
| - like the concepts and so on, then yeah do that yourself.
| I like working with CRDTs because they're a fun little
| puzzle. But most code isn't like that. Most code just needs
| to move some text from over here to over there. For code
| like that, it's the user experience that's interesting. I'm
| happy to offload the grunt work to Claude.
| exit wrote:
| similarly, i think that something that someone took the time
| to proof-read/verify can be of value, even if they did not
| directly write it.
|
| this is the literary equivalent of compiling and running the
| code.
| rubslopes wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment, and it touches on one of the
| reasons I left academia for IT. Scientific research is
| preoccupied with finding the truth, which is beautiful but
| very stressful. If you're a perfectionist, you're always
| questioning yourself: "Did I actually find something
| meaningful, or is it just noise? Did I gaslight myself into
| thinking I was just exploring the data when I was actually
| p-hacking the results?" This took a real toll on my mental
| health.
|
| Although I love science, I'm much happier building programs.
| "Does the program do what the client expects with reasonable
| performance and safety? Yes? Ship it."
| nicbou wrote:
| It makes sense. A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job,
| just like some cheap Chinese-made widget. Not every task
| requires hand-crafted professional grade tools.
|
| For example, I have a few letter generators on my website.
| The letters are often verified by a lawyer, but the generator
| could totally be vibe-coded. It's basically an HTML form that
| fills in the blanks in the template. Other tools are
| basically "take input, run calculation, show output". If I
| can plug in a well-tested calculation, AI could easily build
| the rest of the tool. I have been staunchly against using AI
| in my line of work, but this is an acceptable use of it.
| ethmarks wrote:
| I guess it depends on whether you're _only_ executing the
| code or if you 're submitting it for humans to review. If
| your use case is so low-stakes that a review isn't required,
| then vibe coding is much more defensible. But if code quality
| matters even slightly, such that you need to review the code,
| then you run into the same problems that you do with AI-
| generated prose: nobody wants to read what you couldn't be
| bothered to write.
| josephg wrote:
| There's lots of times where I just don't care how it's
| implemented.
|
| I got Claude to make a test suite the other day for a
| couple RFCs so I could check for spec compliance. It made a
| test runner and about 300 tests. And an html frontend to
| view the test results in a big table. Claude and I wrote
| 8500 lines of code in a day.
|
| I don't care how the test runner works, so long as it
| works. I really just care about the test results. Is it
| finding real bugs? Well, we went though the 60 or so
| failing tests. We changed 3 tests, because Claude had
| misunderstood the rfc. The rest were real bugs.
|
| I'm sure the test runner would be more beautiful if I wrote
| it by hand. But I don't care. I've written test runners
| before. They're not interesting. I'm all for beautiful,
| artisanal code. I love programming. But sometimes I just
| want to get a job done. Sometimes the code isn't for
| reading. It's for running.
| zahlman wrote:
| > it can make real things happen even if no one reads it
| (it's executable).
|
| "One" is the operative word here, supposing this includes
| only humans and excludes AI agents. When code is executed, it
| does get read (by the computer). Making that happen is a
| conscious choice on the part of a human operator.
|
| The same kind of conscious choice can feed writing to an LLM
| to see what it does in response. That is much the same kind
| of "execution", just non-deterministic (and, when given any
| tools beyond standard input and standard output, potentially
| dangerous in all the same ways, but worse because of the
| nondeterminism).
| morgoths_bane wrote:
| > I only care if it works
|
| Okay but it is probably not going to be a tool that will be
| reliable or work as expected for too long depending on how
| complex it is, how easily it can be understood, and how it
| can handle updates to libraries, etc. that it is using.
|
| Also, what is our trust with this "tool"? E.g. this is to be
| used in a brain surgery that you'll undergo, would you still
| be fine with using something generated by AI?
|
| Earlier you couldn't even read something it generated, but
| we'll trust a "tool" it created because we believe it works?
| Why do we believe it will work? Because a computer created
| it? That's our own bias towards computing that we assume that
| it is impartial but this is a probabilistic model trained on
| data that is just as biased as we are.
|
| I cannot imagine that you have not witnessed these models
| creating false information that you were able to identify.
| Understanding their failure on basic understandings, how then
| could we trust it with engineering tasks? Just because "it
| works"? What does that mean and how can we be certain? QA
| perhaps but ask any engineer here if companies are giving a
| single shit about QA while they're making them shove out so
| much slop, and the answer is going to be disappointing.
|
| I don't think we should trust these things even if we're not
| developers. There isn't anyone to hold accountable if (and
| when) things go wrong with their outputs.
|
| All I have seen AI be extremely good at is deceiving people,
| and that is my true concern with generative technologies.
| Then I must ask, if we know that its only effective use case
| is deception, why then should I trust ANY tool it created?
|
| Maybe the stakes are quite low, maybe it is just a video
| player that you use to watch your Sword and Sandal flicks. Ok
| sure, but maybe someone uses that same video player for an
| exoscope and the data it is presenting to your neurosurgeon
| is incorrect causing them to perform an action they otherwise
| would have not done if provided with the correct information.
|
| We should not be so laissez-faire with this technology.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _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 to keep up with the world. Every "program" (is the
| git I run the same as the git you run?) is a living document
| that people maintain as need be. So when we extend the "not
| read / didn't write" it's not using the program (which I
| guess is like taking the lessons from a book) it's
| maintaining the program.
|
| So I think it's possible that I could derive benefit from
| someone else reading an llm's text output (they get an idea)
| - but what we are trying to talk about is the work of
| maintaining a text.
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| The short version of "I am not interested in reading something
| that you could not be bothered to actually write" is "ai;dr"
| techblueberry wrote:
| What's interesting is how AI makes this problem worse but not
| actually "different", especially if you want to go deep on
| something. Like listicles were always plentiful, even before
| AI, but inferior to someone in substack going deep on a topic.
| AI generated music will be the same way, there's always been an
| excessive abundance of crap music, and now we'll just have more
| more of it. The weird thing is how it will hit the uncanny
| valley. Potentially "Better" than the crap that came before it,
| but significantly worse than what someone who cares will
| produce.
|
| DJing is an interesting example. Compared with like
| composition, Beatmatching is "relatively" easy to learn, but
| was solved with CD turntables that can beatmatch themselves,
| and yet has nothing to do with the taste you have to develop to
| be a good DJ.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| In other words, AI partially solves the technique problem,
| but not the taste problem.
|
| In the arts the differentiators have always been technical
| skill, technical inventiveness, original imagination, and
| _taste_ - the indefinable factor that makes one creative work
| more resonant than another.
|
| AI automates some of those, often to a better-than-median
| extent. But so far taste remains elusive. It's the opposite
| of the "Throw everything in a bucket and fish out some
| interesting interpolation of it by poking around with some
| approximate sense of direction until you find something you
| like" that defines how LLMs work.
|
| The definition of slop is poor taste. By that definition a
| lot of human work is also slop.
|
| But that also means that in spite of the technical crudity,
| it's possible to produce interesting AI work if you have
| taste and a cultivated aesthetic, and aren't just telling the
| machine "make me something interesting based on this
| description."
| furyofantares wrote:
| > "I am not interested in reading something that you could not
| be bothered to actually write"
|
| At this point I'd settle if they bothered to read it
| themselves. There's a lot of stuff posted that feels to me like
| the author only skimmed it and expects the masses to read it in
| full.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Except its not. What's a programmer without a vision? Code
| needs vision. The model is taking your vision. With writing a
| blog post, comment or even book, I agree.
| doomslayer999 wrote:
| Exactly, I think perplexity had the right idea of where to go
| with AI (though obviously fumbled execution). Essentially
| creating more advanced primitives for information search and
| retrieval. So it can be great at things we have stored and need
| to perform second order operations on (writing boilerplate,
| summarizing text, retrieving information).
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The truth is now that nobody will bother to read anything you
| write AI or not mostly, creating things is like buying a
| lottery ticket in terms of audience. Creating something
| lovingly by hand and pouring countless hours into it is like a
| golden lottery ticket that has 20x odds, but if it took 50x
| longer to produce, you're getting significantly outperformed by
| people who just spam B+ content.
| UltraSane wrote:
| It actually makes a lot more sense to share the LLM prompt you
| used than the output because it is less data in most cases and
| you can try the same prompt in other LLMs.
| popalchemist wrote:
| For now.
| himata4113 wrote:
| I've actually ran into few blogs that were incredibly shallow
| while sounding profound.
|
| I think when people use AI to ex: compare docker to k8s and don't
| use k8s is how you get horrible articles that sound great, but to
| anyone that has experience with both are complete nonsense.
| Sol- wrote:
| The headline should be qualified: Maybe it makes you boring
| compared to the counterfactual world where you somehow would have
| developed into an interesting auteur or craftsman instead, which
| few people in practice would do.
|
| As someone who is fairly boring, conversing with AI models and
| thinking things through with them certainly decreased my
| blandness and made me tackle more interesting thoughts or
| projects. To have such a conversation partner at hand in the
| first place is already amazing - isn't it always said that you
| should surround yourself with people smarter than yourself to
| rise in ambition?
|
| I actually have high hopes for AI. A good one, properly aligned,
| can definitely help with self-actualization and expression.
| Cynics will say that AI will all be tuned to keep us trapped in
| the slop zone, but when even mainstream labs like Anthropic speak
| a lot about AI for the betterment of humanity, I am still
| hopeful. (If you are a cynic who simply doesn't belief such
| statements by the firms, there's not much to say to convince you
| anyway.)
| argee wrote:
| In other words, AI raises the floor. If you were already near
| the ceiling, relying on it can (and likely will) bring you
| down. In areas where raising the floor is exceptionally good
| value (such as bespoke tools for visualizing data, or
| assistants that intelligently write code boilerplate, or having
| someone to speak to in a foreign language as opposed to talking
| to the wall), AI is amazing. In areas where we expect a high
| bar, such as an editorial, a fast and reliable messaging
| library, or a classic novel, it's not nearly as useful and
| often turns out to be a detriment.
| latexr wrote:
| > As someone who is fairly boring
|
| As determined by whom?
|
| > conversing with AI models and thinking things through with
| them certainly decreased my blandness
|
| Again, determined by whom?
|
| I'm being genuine. Are those self-assessments? Because those
| specific judgement are something for other people to decide.
| Sol- wrote:
| I think I can observe the world and my relative state
| therein, no? I know I am unfortunately less ambitious, driven
| and outgoing than others, which are commonly associated with
| being interesting. And I don't complain about it, the word
| has a meaning after all and I'll not delude myself into
| changing its definition.
|
| Definitely at a certain threshold it is for others to decide
| what is boring and not, I agree with that.
|
| In any case, my simple point is that AI can definitely raise
| the floor, as the other comment more succinctly expressed.
| Irrelevant for people at the top, but good for the rest of
| us.
| latexr wrote:
| > I think I can observe the world and my relative state
| therein, no?
|
| Yes, _to an extent_. You can, for example, evaluate if
| you're sensitive or courageous or hard working. But _some
| things_ do not concern only you, they necessitate another
| person, such as being interesting or friendly or generous.
|
| A good heuristic might be "what could I not say about
| myself if I were the only living being on Earth?". You can
| still be sensitive or hard working if you're alone, but you
| can't be friendly because there's no one else to be
| friendly _to_.
|
| Technically you could bore yourself, but in practice that's
| something you do to other people. Furthermore, it is highly
| subjective, a D&D dungeon master will be unbearably boring
| to some, and infinitely interesting to others.
|
| > I know I am unfortunately less ambitious, driven and
| outgoing than others
|
| I disagree those automatically make someone boring.
|
| I also disagree with LLMs improving your situation. For
| someone to find you interesting, they have to know what
| makes you tick. If what you have to share is limited by
| what everyone else can get (by querying an LLM), _that_ is
| boring.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to
| someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you
| had
|
| Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded
| solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever
| and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts
| responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of
| schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too?
|
| I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming
| infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time
| getting to high level interesting problems?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a
| nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or
| just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem
| at all and results from a lack of understanding.
|
| The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy
| had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and
| his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't
| remember) in one account, then exported it all to another
| account for reasons that didn't make any sense at all. These
| are already solved problems (in multiple ways) and it seemed
| like the person just didn't realize terraformer was already
| an existing, proven tool.
|
| I am not trying to say these things don't allow you to
| prototype quickly or get tedious, easy stuff out of the way.
| I'm saying that if you try to solve a problem in a domain
| that you have no expertise in with these tools and show other
| experts your work, they may chuckle at what you tried to do
| because it sometimes does look very silly.
| rickandmorty99 wrote:
| I'm building an education platform. 95% is vibe coded. What
| isn't vibe coded though is the content. AI is really
| uninspiring with how to teach technical subjects. Also, the
| full UX? I do that. Marketing plan? 90% is me.
|
| But AI does the code. Well... usually.
|
| People call my project creative. Some are actually using
| it.
|
| I feel many technical things aren't really technical things
| they are simply a problem where "have a web app" is part of
| the solution but the real part of the solution is in the
| content and the interaction design of it, not in how you
| solved the challenge technically.
| dormento wrote:
| > or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a
| problem at all and results from a lack of understanding
|
| You might be on to something. Maybe its self-selection (as
| in people who want to engage deeply with a certain topic
| but lack domain expertise might be more likely to go for
| "vibecodable" solutions).
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I compare it to a project I worked on when I was very
| junior a very long time ago - I built by hand this
| complicated harness of scripts to deploy VM's on bare
| metal and do stuff like create customizable, on-the-fly
| test environments for the devs on my team. It worked
| fine, but it was a massive time sink, lots of code, and
| was extremely difficult to maintain and could have weird
| behavior or bad assumptions quite often.
|
| I made it because at that point in my career I simply
| didn't know that ansible existed, or cloud solutions that
| were very cheap to do the same thing. I spent a crazy
| amount of effort doing something that ansible probably
| could have done for me in an afternoon. That's what
| sometimes these projects feel like to me. It's kind of
| like a solution looking for a problem a lot of the time.
|
| I just scanned through the front page of the show HN page
| and quickly eyeballed several of these type of things.
| dormento wrote:
| Yeah, the feeling that hits when you finally realize you
| spent THIS MUCH EFFORT in a problem and you realize you
| can do more with less.
|
| > I made it because at that point in my career I simply
| didn't know that ansible existed
|
| Channels Mark Twain. "Sorry for such a long letter, i
| didn't have the time to make it shorter."
| skydhash wrote:
| This is why I make it a goal to have a very good
| knowledge about the tools I use. So many problems, can be
| solved by piping a few unix tools together or have a
| whole chapter in the docs (emacs, vim, postgres,...)
| about how to solve it.
|
| I write software when the scripts are no longer suitable.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| I've read opinions in the same vein of what you said,
| except painting this as a good outcome. The gist of the
| argument is why spend time looking for the right tool and
| effort learning its uses when you can tell an agent to work
| out the "problem" for you and spit out a tailored solution.
|
| It's about being oblivious, I suppose. Not too different to
| claiming there will be no need to write new fiction when an
| LLM will write the work you want to read by request.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It's a reasonable question - I would probably answer,
| having shipped some of these naive solutions before, that
| you'll find out later it doesn't do entirely what you
| wished, is very difficult/impossible to maintain, has
| severe flaws you're unable to be aware of because you
| lack the domain expertise, or the worst in my opinion,
| becomes completely unable to adapt to new features you
| need with it, where as the more mature solutions most
| likely already had spent considerable amount of time
| thinking about these things.
|
| I was dabbling in consulting infrastructure for a bit,
| often prospects would come to me with stuff like this
| "well I'll just have AI do it" and my response has been
| "ok, do that, but do keep me in mind if that becomes very
| difficult a year or two down the road." I haven't yet
| followed up with any of them to see how they are doing,
| but some of the ideas I heard were just absolute insanity
| to me.
| kshacker wrote:
| we need a stackoverflow "dupe" structure, something meme-
| worthy
| gspr wrote:
| I do believe you, but I have to ask: what are these
| incredibly tedious "easy, time consuming parts of projects"
| everyone seems to bring up? Refactoring I can see, but I have
| a sense that's not what you mean here.
| sigbottle wrote:
| That's actually a great point. I feel like unless you know
| for sure that you will never need something again, nothing
| is disposable. I find myself diving into places I thought I
| would never care about again ALL the time.
|
| Every single time I have vibe coded a project I cared
| about, letting the AI rip with mild code review and
| rigorous testing has bit me in the ass, without fail. It
| doesn't extend it in the taste that I want, things are
| clearly spiraling out of control, etc. Just satisfying some
| specs at the time of creation isn't enough. These things
| evolve, they're a living being.
| zahlman wrote:
| From what I can tell, domain experts mostly _don 't_ directly
| respond like that. They just make separate meta-level
| commentaries about Show HN getting flooded. Most submissions
| get little or no response.
| glitchc wrote:
| It used to be that all bad writing was uniquely bad, in that a
| clear line could be drawn from the work to the author. Similarly,
| good writing has a unique style that typically identifies the
| author within a few lines of prose.
|
| Now all bad writing will look like something generated by an LLM,
| grammatically correct (hopefully!) but very generic, lacking all
| punch and personality.
|
| The silver lining is that good authors could also use LLMs to
| hide their identity while making controversial opinions. In an
| internet that's increasingly deanonymized, a potentially new
| privacy enhancing technique for public discourse is a welcome
| addition.
| TheDong wrote:
| We don't know if the causality flows that way. It could be that
| AI makes you boring, but it could also be that boring people were
| too lazy to make blogs and Show HNs and such before, and AI
| simply lets a new cohort of people produce boring content more
| lazily.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I was onboard with the author until this paragraph:
|
| _> AI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any
| thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not
| very original, even if they're very good at treating your inputs
| to the discussion as amazing genius level insights._
|
| The author comes off as dismissive of the potential benefits of
| the interactions between users and LLMs rather than open-minded.
| This is a degree of myopia which causes me to retroactively
| question the rest of his conclusions.
|
| There's an argument to be made that rubber ducking and just
| having a mirror to help you navigate your thoughts is ultimately
| more productive and provides more useful thinking than just
| operating in a vacuum. LLMs are particularly good at telling you
| when your own ideas are un-original because they are good at
| doing research (and also have median of ideas already baked into
| their weights).
|
| They also strawman usage of LLMs:
|
| _> The way human beings tend to have original ideas is to
| immerse in a problem for a long period of time, which is
| something that flat out doesn't happen when LLMs do the thinking.
| You get shallow, surface-level ideas instead._
|
| Who says you aren't spending time thinking about a problem with
| LLMs? The same users that don't spend time thinking about
| problems before LLMs will not spend time thinking about problems
| after LLMs, and the inverse is similarly true.
|
| I think everybody is bad at original thinking, because most
| thinking is not original. And that's something LLMs actually help
| with.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| > AI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any
| thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not
| very original, even if they're very good at treating your inputs
| to the discussion as amazing genius level insights.
|
| This is repeated all the time now, but it's not true. It's not
| particularly difficult to pose a question to an LLM and to get it
| to genuinely evaluate the pros and cons of your ideas. I've used
| an LLM to convince myself that an idea I had was not very good.
|
| > The way human beings tend to have original ideas is to immerse
| in a problem for a long period of time, which is something that
| flat out doesn't happen when LLMs do the thinking. You get
| shallow, surface-level ideas instead.
|
| Thinking about a problem for a long period of time doesn't bring
| you any closer to understanding the solution. Expertise is highly
| overrated. The Wright Brothers didn't have physics degrees. They
| did not even graduate from high school, let alone attend college.
| Their process for developing the first airplanes was much closer
| to vibe coding from a shallow surface-level understanding than
| from deeply contemplating the problem.
| notahacker wrote:
| Have to admit I'm _really_ struggling with the idea that the
| Wright brothers didn 't do much thinking because they were self
| taught, never mind the idea that figuring out aeronautics from
| reading every publication they could get their hands on,
| intuiting wing warping and experimenting by hand-building
| mechanical devices looks much like asking Claude to make a CRUD
| app...
| nickysielicki wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying. My point is that expertise, as
| in, credentials, institutional knowledge, accepted wisdom,
| was actively harmful to solving flight. The Wrights succeeded
| because they built a tool that made iteration cheap (the wind
| tunnel), tested 200 wing shapes without deference to what the
| existing literature said should work (Lilienthal's tables
| were wrong and everyone with "expertise" accepted them
| uncritically), and they closed the loop with reality by
| actually flying.
|
| That's the same approach as vibe coding. Not "asking Claude
| to make a CRUD app.", but using it to cheaply explore
| solution spaces that an expert's priors would tell you aren't
| worth trying. The wind tunnel didn't do the thinking for the
| Wrights, it just made thinking and iterating cheap. That's
| what LLMs do for code.
|
| The blog post's argument is that deep immersion is what
| produces original ideas. But what history shows is that
| deeply immersed experts are often totally wrong and the
| outsiders who iterate cheaply and empirically take the prize.
| The irony here is that LLM haters feel it falls victim to the
| Einstellung effect [1]. But the exact opposite is true: LLMs
| make it so cheap to iterate on what we thought in the past
| were suboptimal/broken solutions, which makes it possible to
| cheaply discover the more efficient and simpler methods,
| which means _humans_ uniquely fall victim to the Einstellung
| effect whereas LLMs don 't.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect
| notahacker wrote:
| The Wright brothers _were_ deeply immersed experts in
| flight like only a handful of other people other people at
| the time, and were obsessed with Lilenthal 's tables to the
| point they figured out how aerodynamic errors killed
| Lilenthal.
|
| The blog's _actual_ point isn 't some deference to
| credentials straw man you've invented, it's that stuff
| lazily hashed together that's got to "good enough" without
| effort is seldom as interesting as people's passion
| projects. And the Wright brothers' application of their
| hardware assembly skills and the scientific method to
| theory they'd gone to great lengths to get sent to Dayton
| Ohio is pretty much the antithesis of getting to "good
| enough" without effort. Probably nobody around the turn of
| the century devoted more thinking and doing time to powered
| flight
|
| Using AI isn't necessary or sufficient for getting to "good
| enough" without much effort (and it's of course possible to
| expend lots of effort _with AI_ ), but it does act as a
| multiplier for creating passable stuff with little thought
| (to an even greater extent than templates and frameworks
| and stock photos). And sure, a founding tenet of online
| marketing (and YC) from long before Claude is that many
| small experiments to see if $market has any takers might be
| worth doing _before_ investing thinking time in
| understanding and iterating, and some people have made
| millions from it, but that doesn 't mean experiments
| stitched together in a weekend mostly from other people's
| parts aren't boring to look at or that their hit rate won't
| be low....
| turnsout wrote:
| I think it's simpler than that. AI, like the internet, just makes
| it easier to communicate boring thoughts.
|
| Boring thoughts always existed, but they generally stayed in your
| home or community. Then Facebook came along, and we were able to
| share them worldwide. And now AI makes it possible to quickly
| make and share your boring tools.
|
| Real creativity is out there, and plenty of people are doing
| incredibly creative things with AI. But AI is not making people
| boring--that was a preexisting condition.
| Oarch wrote:
| Just earlier I received a spew of LLM slop from my manager as
| "requirements". He clearly hadn't even spent two minutes
| reviewing whether any of it made sense, was achievable or even
| desirable. I ignored it. We're all fed up with this productivity
| theatre.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| "productivity theatre" is a brilliant phrase. Thank you!
| daxfohl wrote:
| And the irony is it tries to make you feel like a genius while
| you're using it. No matter how dull your idea is, it's
| "absolutely the right next thing to be doing!"
| tonymet wrote:
| you can prompt it to stop doing that, and to behave exactly how
| you need it. my prompts say "no flattery, no follow up
| questions, PhD level discourse, concise and succinct responses,
| include grounding, etc"
| oytis wrote:
| > PhD level discourse
|
| What is that? Do you think PhDs have some special way of
| talking about things?
| tonymet wrote:
| Yes
| iambateman wrote:
| We are going to have to find new ways to correct for low-effort
| work.
|
| I have a report that I made with AI on how customers leave our
| firm...The first pass looked great but was basically nonsense.
| After eight hours of iteration, the resulting report is better
| than I could've made on my own, by a lot. But it got there
| because I brought a lot of emotional energy to the AI party.
|
| As workers, we need to develop instincts for "plausible but
| incomplete" and as managers we need to find filters that get rid
| of the low-effort crap.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-
| generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete
| waste of everybody's time.
|
| The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where
| person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs,
| and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two
| sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations
| where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten
| paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten
| paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming
| to me.
|
| I remember in the early days of LLMs this was the joke meme.
| But, now seeing it happen in real life is more than just
| alarming. It's ridiculous. It's like the opposite of
| compressing a payload over the wire: We're taking our output,
| expanding it, transmitting it over the wire, and then
| compressing it again for input. Why do we do this?
| claudiulodro wrote:
| > Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-
| generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete
| waste of everybody's time.
|
| I had a similar realization. My team was discussing whether we
| should hook our open-source codebases into an AI to generate
| documentation for other developers, and someone said "why can't
| they just generate documentation for it themselves with AI"?
| It's a good point: what value would our AI-generated
| documentation provide that theirs wouldn't?
| The_Fox wrote:
| Yesterday my manager sent LLM-generated code that did a thing.
| Of course I didn't read it, I only read Claude's summary of it.
| Then I died a little inside.
|
| It was especially unfortunate because to do its thing, the code
| required a third party's own personal user credentials
| including MFA, which is a complete non-starter in server-side
| code, but apparently the manager's LLM wasn't aware enough to
| know that.
| Kalpaka wrote:
| The boring part isn't AI itself. It's that most people use AI to
| produce more of the same thing, faster.
|
| The interesting counter-question: can AI make something that
| wasn't possible before? Not more blog posts, more emails, more
| boilerplate -- but something structurally new?
|
| I've been working on a system where AI agents don't generate
| content. They observe. They watch people express wishes, analyze
| intent beneath the words, notice when strangers in different
| languages converge on the same desire, and decide autonomously
| when something is ready to grow.
|
| The result doesn't feel AI-generated because it isn't. It's AI-
| observed. The content comes from humans. The AI just notices
| patterns they couldn't see themselves.
|
| Maybe the problem isn't that AI makes you boring. It's that most
| people ask AI to do boring things.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > Not more blog posts, more emails, more boilerplate -- but
| something structurally new?
|
| This is a point that often results in bad faith arguments from
| both AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics. Enthusiasts will say
| "everything is a remix and the most creative works are built on
| previous works" while skeptics will say "LLMs are stochastic
| parrots and cannot create anything new by technical
| definition".
|
| The truth is somewhere in the middle, which unfortunately
| invokes the Golden Mean Fallacy that makes no one happy.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Funny thing is, LLMs can create novel ideas, they're just
| crap. Turn the temperature setting up or expand top_p and
| it'll come up with increasingly wacky responses, some of
| which might even be good.
|
| Creativity often requires reasoning in unusual ways, and
| evaluating those ideas requires learning. The first part we
| can probably get LLMs to do; the latter part we can't (RL is
| a separate process and not really scalable).
|
| Even without any of that, you can prompt your way into new
| things. I'm building a camper out of wood, and I've gotten
| older LLM models to make novel camper designs just by asking
| it questions and choosing things. You can make other AI
| models make novel music by prompting it to combine different
| aspects of music into a new song. Human creativity works that
| way too. Think of all the failed attempts at new things that
| humans come up with before a good one actually sticks.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| This is too broad of a statement to possibly be true. I agree
| with aspects of the piece. But it's also true that not every
| aspect of the work offloaded to AI is some font of potential
| creativity.
|
| To take coding, to the extent that hand coding leads to creative
| thoughts, it is possible that some of those thoughts will be lost
| if I delegate this to agents. But it's also very possibly that I
| now have the opportunity to think creatively on other aspects of
| my work.
|
| We have to make strategic decisions on where we want our
| attention to linger, because those are the places where we likely
| experience inspiration. I do think this article is valuable in
| that we have to be conscious of this first before we can take
| agency.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I 100% agree with the sentiment, but as someone that have worked
| on Government systems for a good amount of time, I can tell you,
| boring can be just about right sometimes.
|
| In an industry that does not crave bells and whistles, having the
| ability to refactor, or bring old systems back to speed can make
| a whole lot of difference for an understaffed, underpaid,
| unamused, and otherwise cynic workforce, and I am all out for it.
| josefresco wrote:
| While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here:
| I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2
| months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project
| more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past.
| Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of
| "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about
| goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture"
| stuff.
| logicprog wrote:
| This is precisely it. If anything, AI gives me more freedom to
| think about more novel ideas, both on the implementation and
| the final design level, because I'm not stuck looking up APIs
| and dealing with already solved problems.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's kind of freeing to put a software project together and
| not have to sweat the boilerplate and rote algorithm work.
| Boring things that used to dissuade me. Now, I no longer have
| that voice in my head saying things like: "Ugh, I'm going to
| have to write yet another ring buffer, for the 14th time in
| my career."
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 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 application, doubt so. Not to preach but
| that's what I've discovered.
|
| Unless you already have the knowledge, then fine. "here's
| my code make it better" but if it's the 14th time you've
| written the ring buffer, why are you not using one of the
| previous thirteen versions? Are you saying that the vibed
| code is more superior then your own coding?
| jen729w wrote:
| 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.
| logicprog wrote:
| > The boring parts where you learn.
|
| It's okay not to memorize everything involved in a
| software project. Sometimes what you want to learn or
| experiment with is elsewhere, and so you use the AI to
| handle the parts you're less interested in learning at a
| deep and intimate level. That's okay. This mentality that
| you absolutely have to work through manually implementing
| everything, every time, even when it's not related to
| what you're actually interested in, wanted to do, or your
| end-goal, just because it "builds character" is
| understandable, and it can increase your generality, but
| it's not mandatory.
|
| Additionally, if you're not doing vibe coding, but sort
| of pair-programming with the AI in something like Zed,
| where the code is collaboratively edited and it's very
| code-forward -- so it doesn't incentivize you to stay
| away from the code and ignore it, the way agents like
| Claude Code do -- you can still learn a _ton_ about the
| deep technical processes of your codebase, and how to
| implement algorithms, because you can look at what the
| agent is doing and go:
|
| "Oh, it's having to use a very confusing architecture
| here to get around this limitation of my architecture
| elsewhere; it isn't going to understand that later, let
| alone me. Guess that architectural decision was bad."
|
| "Oh, shit, we used this over complicated
| architecture/violated local reasoning/referential
| transparency/modularity/deep-narrow modules/single-
| concern principles, and now we can't make changes
| effectively, and I'm confused. I shouldn't do that in the
| future."
|
| "Hmm, this algorithm is too slow for this use-case, even
| though it's theoretically better, let's try another one."
|
| "After profiling the program, it's too slow here, here,
| and here -- it looks like we should've added caching
| here, avoided doing that work at all there, and used a
| better algorithm there."
|
| "Having described this code and seeing it written out, I
| see it's overcomplicated/not DRY enough, and thus
| difficult to modify/read, let's simplify/factor out."
|
| "Interesting, I thought the technologies I chose would be
| able to do XYZ, but actually it turns out they're not as
| good at that as I thought / have other drawbacks / didn't
| pan out long term, and it's causing the AI to write reams
| of code to compensate, which is coming back to bite me in
| the ass, I now understand the tradeoffs of these
| technologies better."
|
| Or even just things like
|
| "Oh! I didn't know this language/framework/library could
| do that! Although I may not remember the precise syntax,
| that's a useful thing I'll file away for later."
|
| "Oh, so that's what that looks like / that's how you do
| it. Got it. I'll look that up and read more about it, and
| save the bookmark."
|
| > Unless you already have the knowledge, then fine.
| "here's my code make it better" but if it's the 14th time
| you've written the ring buffer, why are you not using one
| of the previous thirteen versions? Are you saying that
| the vibed code is more superior then your own coding?
|
| There are a lot of reasons one might not be able to, or
| want to, use existing dependencies.
| logicprog wrote:
| If learning about individual cogs is what's important,
| and once you've done that it's okay to move on and let AI
| do it, than you can build the specific thing you want to
| learn about in detail in isolation, as a learning project
| -- like many programmers already do, and many CS courses
| already require -- perhaps on your own, or perhaps
| following along with a substantial book on the matter;
| then once you've gained that understanding, you can move
| on to other things in projects that aren't focused on
| learning about that thing.
| Refreeze5224 wrote:
| > The boring parts where you learn.
|
| Exactly this. Finding that annoying bug that took 15
| browser tabs and digging deep into some library you're
| using, digging into where your code is not performant,
| looking for alternative algorithms or data structures to
| do something, this is where learning and experience
| happen. This is why you don't hire a new grad for a
| senior role, they have not had time to bang their heads
| on enough problems.
|
| You get no sense of how or why when using AI to crank
| something out for you. Your boss doesn't care about
| either, he cares about shipping and profits, which is the
| true goal of AI. You are an increasingly unimportant cog
| in that process.
| zahlman wrote:
| ... Why aren't any of the first 13 ring buffers reusable,
| though?
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Like any tool it can be put to productive use or it can be
| used to crank out absolute garbage.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Yesterday I had two hours to work on a side project I've been
| dreaming about for a week. I knew I had to build some libraries
| and that it would be a major pain. I started with AI first,
| which created a script to download, extract, and build what
| needed. Even with the script I indeed encountered problems. But
| I blitzed through each problem until the libraries were built
| and I could focus on my actual project, which was not building
| libraries! I actually reached a satisfying conclusion instead
| of half-way through compiling something I do not care about.
| jtr1 wrote:
| I tend to agree, this has been my experience with LLM-powered
| coding, especially more recently with the advent of new
| harnesses around context management and planning. I've been
| building software for over ten years so I feel comfortable
| looking under the hood, but it's been less of that lately and
| more talking with users and trying to understand and
| effectively shape the experience, which I guess means I'm being
| pushed toward product work.
| biophysboy wrote:
| That's the key: use AI for labor substitution, not labor
| replacement. Nothing necessarily wrong with labor saving for
| trivial projects, but we should be using these tools to push
| the boundaries of tech/science!
| imiric wrote:
| You don't fit the profile OP is complaining about. You might
| not even be "vibe" coding in the strictest sense of that word.
|
| For every person like you who puts in actual thought into the
| project, and uses these tools as coding _assistants_ , there
| are ~100 people who offload _all_ of their thinking to the
| tool.
|
| It's frightening how little collective thought is put into the
| ramifications of this trend not only on our industry, but on
| the world at large.
| j2kun wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the implied claim that you've never built
| a project that you spent more than two months thinking about? I
| could maybe see this being true of an undergraduate student,
| but not a professional programmer.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| 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 to Show HN readers.
|
| 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 also have some biochemist
| commenting, "I'm working at a so-and-so research lab and this
| is exactly what I was looking for!"
|
| Now the biochemist is out there vibe-coding their own solution,
| and now, there is no way for the HN reader to differentiate
| your "robust" entry from a completely vibe-code noobie entry,
| no matter how long you worked on the "important stuff".
|
| Why? because the barrier of entry has been completely
| obliterated. What we took for granted was that "knowing how to
| code" was a proxy filter for "thought and worked hard on the
| problem." And that filter allowed for high-quality posts.
|
| That is why the observation that you know longer can guarentee
| or have any way of telling quickly that the posters spent some
| time on the problem is a great observation.
|
| The very value that you gain from vibe-coding is also the very
| thing that threatens to turn Show HN into a glorified Product
| Hunt cesspool.
|
| "No one goes there any more, it's too crowded." etc etc
| techgnosis wrote:
| 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.
| logicprog wrote:
| I think this is generally a good point if you're using an AI to
| come up with a project idea and elaborate it.
|
| However, I've spent years sometimes thinking through interesting
| software architectures and technical approaches and designs for
| various things, including window managers, editors, game engines,
| programming languages, and so on, reading relevant books and
| guides and technical manuals, sketching out architecture diagrams
| in my notebooks and writing long handwritten design documents in
| markdown files or in messages to friends. I've even, in some
| cases, gotten as far as 10,000 lines or so of code sketching out
| some of the architectural approaches or things I want to try to
| get a better feel for the problem and the underlying
| technologies. But I've never had the energy to do the raw code
| shoveling and debug looping necessary to get out a prototype of
| my ideas -- AI now makes that possible.
|
| Once that prototype is out, I can look at it, inspect it from all
| angles, tweak it and understand the pros and cons, the
| limitations and blind spots of my idea, and iterate again. Also,
| through pair programming with the AI, I can learn about the
| technologies I'm using through demonstration and see what their
| limitations and affordances are by seeing what things are easy
| and concise for the AI to implement and what requires brute
| forcing it with hacks and huge reams of code and what's
| performant and what isn't, what leads to confusing architectures
| and what leads to clean architectures, and all of those things.
|
| I'm still spending my time reading things like _Game Engine
| Architecture_ , _Computer Systems_ , _A Philosophy of Software
| Design_ , _Designing Data-Intensive Applications_ , _Thinking in
| Systems_ , _Data-Oriented Design_ , articles in CSP, fibers,
| compilers, type systems, ECS, writing down notes and ideas.
|
| So really it seems more to me like boring people who aren't
| really deeply interested in a subject use AI to do all of the
| design and ideation for them. And so, of course, it ends up
| boring and you're just seeing more of it because it lowered the
| barrier to entry. I think if you're an interesting person with
| strong opinions about what you want to build and how you want to
| build it, that is actually interested in exploring the literature
| with or with out AI help and then pair programming with it in
| order to explore the problem space, it still ends up interesting.
|
| Most of my recent AI projects have just been small tools for my
| own usage, but that's because I was kicking the tires. I have
| some bigger things planned, executing on ideas I have pages and
| pages, dozens of them, in my notebooks about.
| discreteevent wrote:
| > Original ideas are the result of the very work you're
| offloading on LLMs. Having humans in the loop doesn't make the AI
| think more like people, it makes the human thought more like AI
| output.
|
| There was also a comment [1] here recently that "I think people
| get the sense that 'getting better at prompting' is purely a one-
| way issue of training the robot to give better outputs. But you
| are also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions
| that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no longer
| occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself)
| might be the most pertinent ones!"
|
| Both of them reminded me of Picasso saying in 1968 that "
| Computers are useless. They can only give you answers,"
|
| Of course computers are useful. But he meant that they have are
| useless for a creative. That's still true.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059206
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I've been bashing my head against the wall with AI this week
| because they've utterly failed to even get close to solving my
| novel problems.
|
| And that's when it dawned on me just how much of AI hype has been
| around boring, seen-many-times-before, technologies.
|
| This, for me, has been the biggest real problem with AI. It's
| become so easy to churn out run-of-the-mill software that I just
| cannot filter any signal from all the noise of generic side-
| projects that clearly won't be around in 6 months time.
|
| Our attention is finite. Yet everyone seems to think their dull
| project is uniquely more interesting than the next persons dull
| project. Even though those authors spent next to zero effort
| themselves in creating it.
|
| It's so dumb.
| crawshaw wrote:
| It is a good theory, but does it hold up in practice? I was able
| to prototype and thus argue for and justify building exe.dev with
| a lot of help from agents. Without agents helping me prove out
| ideas I would be doing far more boring work.
| solarisos wrote:
| This resonates with what I'm seeing in B2B outreach right now. AI
| has lowered the cost of production so much that 'polished' has
| become a synonym for 'generic.' We've reached a point where a
| slightly messy, hand-written note has more value than a perfectly
| structured AI essay because the messiness is the only remaining
| signal of actual human effort.
| daxfohl wrote:
| I want to say this is even more true at the C-suite level. Great,
| you're all-in on racing to the lowest common denominator AI-
| generated most-likely-next-token as your corporate vision, and
| want your engineering teams to behave likewise.
|
| At least this CEO gets it. Hopefully more will start to follow.
| jrmg wrote:
| The issue with the recent rise in Show HN submissions, from the
| perspective of someone on the 'being shown' side, is that they
| are from many different perspectives lower quality than they used
| to be.
|
| They're solving small problems or problems that don't really
| exist, usually in naive ways. The things being shown are
| 'shallow'. And it's patently obvious that the people behind them
| will likely not support them in any meaning full way as time goes
| on.
|
| The rise of Vibe Coding is definitely a 'cause' of this, but
| there's also a social thing going on - the 'bar' for what a Show
| HN 'is' is lower, even if they're mostly still meeting the letter
| of the guidelines.
| notatoad wrote:
| i think about this a lot wit respect to AI-generated art. calling
| something "derivative" used to be a damning criticism. now, we've
| got tools whose whole purpose is to make things that are very
| literally derivative of the work that has come before them.
|
| derivative work might be _useful_ , but it's not interesting.
| nickjj wrote:
| 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 towards what ranks nowadays and he went from
| being ghosted to being back on the top of the first page of
| results.
|
| He told his story here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc.
|
| NOTE: I've never seen him in my YouTube feed until the other day
| but it resonated a lot with me because I have a technical blog
| for 11 years and was able to sustain an online business for a
| decade until the last 2 years or so. Traffic to my site nose
| dived. This translates to a very satisfying lifestyle business to
| almost $0. I haven't gone down the path of rewriting all of my
| posts with AI to remove my personality yet.
|
| Search engines want you to remove your personal take on things
| and write in a very machine oriented / keyword stuffed way.
| Retr0id wrote:
| This aligns with an article I titled "AI can only solve boring
| problems"[0]
|
| Despite the title I'm a little more optimistic about agentic
| coding overall (but only a little).
|
| All projects require some combination of "big thinking" and
| tedious busywork. Too much busywork is bad, but reducing it to 0
| doesn't necessarily help. I think AI can often reduce the tedious
| busywork part, but that's only net positive if there was an
| excess of it to begin with - so its value depends on the project
| / problem domain / etc.
|
| [0]: https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/boring-ai-
| problems.htm...
| fredliu wrote:
| We are in this transition period where we'll see a lot of these,
| because of the effort of creating "something impressive" is
| dramatically reduced. But once it stabilizes (which I think is
| already starting to happen, and this post is an example), and
| people are "trained" to recognize the real effort, even with AI
| help, behind creating something, the value of that final work
| will shine through. In the end, anything that is valuable is
| measured by the human effort needed to create it.
| tonymet wrote:
| When apps were expensive to build , developers at least had the
| excuse that they were too busy to build something appealing. Now
| they can cope by pretending to be an artisanal hand-built
| software engineer, and still fail at making anything appealing.
|
| If you want to build something beautiful, nothing is stopping
| you, except your own cynicism.
|
| "AI doesn't build anything original". Then why aren't you proving
| everyone wrong? Go out there and have it build whatever you want.
|
| AI has not yet rejected any of my prompts by saying I was being
| too creative. In fact, because I'm spending way less time on
| mundane tasks, I can focus way more time on creativity ,
| performance, security and the areas that I am embarrassed to have
| overlooked on previous projects.
| apexalpha wrote:
| Meh.
|
| Being 'anti AI' is just hot right now and lots of people are
| jumping on the bandwagon.
|
| I'm sure some of them will actually hold out. Just like those
| people still buying Vinyl because Spotify is 'not art' or
| whatever.
|
| Have fun all, meanwhile I built 2 apps this weekend purely for
| myself. Would've taken me weeks a few years ago.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| People who agree with you are right-minded and sensible, and
| people who disagree with you are "jumping on the bandwagon".
| hhsuey wrote:
| Another click bait title produced by a human. Most of your
| premises could be easily be countered. Every comment is
| essentially an example.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| OK, but maybe we only notice the mediocre uses of AI, while the
| smart uses come across as brilliant people having interesting
| insights.
| palmotea wrote:
| > OK, but maybe we only notice the mediocre uses of AI, while
| the smart uses come across as brilliant people having
| interesting insights.
|
| Then prove it. Otherwise, you're just assuming AI use must be
| good, and making up things to confirm your bias.
| clint wrote:
| Yet another boring, repetitive, unhelpful article about why AI is
| bad. Did the 385th iteration of this need to be written by yet
| another person? Why did this person think it was novel or
| relevant to write? Did they think it espouses some kind of unique
| point of view?
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > Ideas are then further refined when you try to articulate them.
| This is why we make students write essays. It's also why we make
| professors teach undergraduates. Prompting an AI model is not
| articulating an idea.
|
| I agree, but the very act of writing out your
| intention/problem/goal/whatever can crystallize your thinking.
| Obviously if you are _relying_ on the output spat out by the LLM,
| you 're gonna have a bad time. But IMO one of the great things
| about these tools is that, at their best, they can facilitate
| helpful "rubber duck" sessions that can indeed get you further on
| a problem by getting stuff out of your own head.
| elif wrote:
| And AI denial makes you annoying.
|
| Your preference is no more substantial than people saying "I
| would never read a book on a screen! It's so much more
| interesting on paper"
|
| There's nothing wrong with having pretentious standards, but
| don't confuse your personal aversion with some kind of moral or
| intellectual high ground.
| imiric wrote:
| I think there should be 10x more hardcore AI denialists and
| doomers to offset the obnoxiousness and absurdity of the other
| side. As usual, the reality is somewhere in the middle, perhaps
| slightly on the denialist side, but the pro-AI crowd has
| completely lost the plot.
| elif wrote:
| I'm all for well founded arguments against premature AGI
| empowerment..
|
| But what I'm replying to, and the vast majority of the AI
| denial I see, is rooted in a superficial, defensive, almost
| aesthetic knee jerk rejection of unimportant aspects of human
| taste and preference.
| imiric wrote:
| The article does not fit the description of blind AI
| denialism, though. The author even acknowledges that the
| tool can be useful. It makes a well articulated case that
| by not putting any thought into your work and words, and
| allowing the tool to do the thinking for you, the end
| product is boring. You may agree or disagree with this
| opinion, but I think the knee jerk rejection is coming from
| you.
| grimgrin wrote:
| I land on this thread to ctrl-f "taste" and will refresh and
| repeat later
|
| That is for sure the word of the year, true or not. I agree with
| it, I think
| grimgrin wrote:
| it was up to 3 when I first posted
|
| it's at 10 now. note: the article does not say "taste" once
| BiraIgnacio wrote:
| One of the down sides of Vibe-Coded-Everything, that I am seeing,
| is reinforcing the "just make it look good" culture. Just create
| the feature that the user wants and move on. It doesn't matter if
| next time you need to fix a typo on that feature it will cost 10x
| as much as it should.
|
| That has always been a problem in software shops. Now it might be
| even more frequent because of LLMs' ubiquity.
|
| Maybe that's how it should be, maybe not. I don't really know. I
| was once told by people in the video game industry that games
| were usually buggy because they were short lived. Not sure if I
| truly buy that but if anything vibe coded becomes throw away, I
| wouldn't be surprised.
| gAI wrote:
| I'm self-aware enough to know that AI is not the reason I'm
| boring.
| pbmango wrote:
| Along these same lines, I have been trying to become better at
| knowing when my work could benefit from reversion to the "boring"
| and general mean and when outsourcing thought or planning would
| cause a reversion to the mean (downwards).
|
| This echos the comments here about enjoying not writing
| boilerplate. The there is that our minds are programmed to
| offload work when we can and redirecting all the saved
| boilerplate to going even deeper on parts of the problem that
| benefit from original hard thinking is rare. It is much easier to
| get sucked into creating more boilerplate, and all the
| gamification of Claude code and incentives of service providers
| increase this.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Is Show HN dead? No, but it 's drowning_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (422
| comments)
| dabedee wrote:
| Anecdotally, I haven't been excited by anything published on show
| HN recently (with the exception being the barracuda compiler). I
| think it's a combination of what the author describes: surface-
| level solutions and projects mostly vibe-coded whose authors
| haven't actually thought that hard about what real problem they
| are solving.
| stopachka wrote:
| > Original ideas are the result of the very work you're
| offloading on LLMs.
|
| I largely agree that if someone put less work in making a thing,
| than it takes you to use it, it's probably not going to be
| useful. But I disagree with the premise that using LLMs will make
| you boring.
|
| Consider the absurd version of the argument. Say you want to
| learn something you don't know: would using Google Search make
| you more boring? At some level, LLMs are like a curated Google
| Search. In fact if you use Deep Research et al, you can consume
| information that's more out of distribution than what you _would_
| have consumed had you done only Google Searches.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Honestly, most people are boring. They have boring lives, write
| boring things, consume boring content, and, _in the grand scheme
| of things_ , have little-to-no interesting impact on the world
| before they die. We don't need AI to make us boring, we're
| already there.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| Sorry to hijack this thread to promote but I believe it's for a
| good and relevant cause: directly identifying and calling out AI
| writing.
|
| I was literally just working on a directory of the most common
| tropes/tics/structures that LLMs use in their writing and thought
| it would be relevant to post here: https://tropes.fyi/
|
| Very much inspired by Wikipedia's own efforts to curb AI
| contributions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
|
| Lmk if you find it useful, will likely ShowHN it once polished.
| imiric wrote:
| The obvious question is: was it vibe coded? :)
|
| As much as I'd like to know whether a text was written by a
| human or not, I'm saddened by the fact that some of these
| writing patterns have been poisoned by these tools. I enjoy,
| use, and find many of them to be an elegant way to get a point
| across. And I refuse to give up the em dash! So if that flags
| any of my writing--so be it.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| Absolutely vibe coded, I'm sure I disclosed it somewhere on
| the site. As much as I hate using AI for creative endeavours
| I have to agree that it excels as nextjs/vercel/quick
| projects like this. I was mostly focused on the curation of
| the tropes and examples.
|
| Believe me I've had to adjust my writing a lot to avoid these
| tells, even academics I know are second guessing everything
| they've ever been taught. It's quite sad but I think it will
| result in a more personable internet as people try to
| distinguish themselves from the bots.
| imiric wrote:
| > It's quite sad but I think it will result in a more
| personable internet as people try to distinguish themselves
| from the bots.
|
| I applaud your optimism, but I think the internet is a lost
| cause. Humans who value communicating with other humans
| will need to retreat into niche communities with zero
| tolerance for bots. Filtering out bot content will likely
| continue to be impossible, but we'll eventually settle on a
| good way to determine if someone is human. I just hope we
| won't have to give up our privacy and anonymity for it.
| minimaxir wrote:
| This is a very bad idea unless you have 100% accuracy in
| identifying AI generated writing, which is impossible.
| Otherwise, your tool will be more-often used to harass people
| who use those tropes organically without AI.
|
| This behavior has already been happening with Pangram Labs
| which supposedly does have good AI detection.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| I agree with the risks. However the primary goal of the site
| is educational not accusatory. I mostly want people to be
| able to recognise these patterns.
|
| The WIP features measure breadth and density of these tropes,
| and each trope has frequency thresholds. Also I don't use AI
| to identify AI writing to avoid accusatory hallucinations.
|
| I do appreciate the feedback though and will take it into
| consideration.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > However the primary goal of the site is educational not
| accusatory.
|
| How then is it different from the Wikipedia page you
| linked?
| serf wrote:
| AI doesn't make people boring, boring people use AI to make
| projects they otherwise never would have.
|
| Non-boring people are using AI to make things that are ... not
| boring.
|
| It's a tool.
|
| Other things we wouldn't say because they're ridiculous at face
| value:
|
| "Cars make you run over people." "Buzzsaws make you cut your
| fingers off." "Propane torches make you explode."
|
| An exercise left to the reader : is a non-participant in Show HN
| less boring than a participant with a vibe coded project?
| themafia wrote:
| Buggy whips are a tool.
|
| No one in their right mind would use one.
|
| Using the wrong tool for the job results in disaster.
|
| It's like watching a guy bang rocks together to "vibe build" a
| house. Good luck.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the
| output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable. It's
| the work that matters.
|
| This is reductive to the point of being incorrect. One of the
| misconceptions of working with agents is that the prompts are
| typically simple: it's more romantic to think that someone gave
| Claude Code "Create a fun Pokemon clone in the web browser, make
| no mistakes" and then just ship the one-shot output.
|
| As some counterexamples, here are two sets of prompts I used for
| my projects which _very much_ articulate an idea in the first
| prompt with very intentional constraints /specs, and then
| _iterating_ on those results:
|
| https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/P...
| (41 prompts)
|
| https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md (14
| prompts)
|
| It's the iteration that is the true engineering work as it
| requires enough knowledge to a) know what's wrong and b) know if
| the solution actually fixes it. Those projects are what I call
| super-Pareto: the first prompt got 95% of the work done...but 95%
| of the effort was spent afterwards improving it, with manual
| human testing being the bulk of that work instead of watching the
| agent generated code.
| adverbly wrote:
| Whoa there. Let's not oversimplify in either direction here.
|
| My take:
|
| 1. AI workflows are faster - saving people time
|
| 2. Faster workflows involve people using their brain less
|
| 3. Some people use their time savings to use their brain more,
| some don't
|
| 4. People who don't use their brain are boring
|
| The end effect here is that people who use AI as a tool to help
| them think more will end up being more interesting, but those who
| use AI as a tool to help them think less will end up being more
| boring.
| overgard wrote:
| Totally agree with this. Smart creators know that inspiration
| comes from doing the work, not the other way around. IE, you
| don't wait for inspiration and then go do the work, you start
| doing the work and eventually you become inspired. You rarely
| just "have a great idea", it comes from immersing yourself in a
| problem, being surrounded with constraints, and finding a way to
| solve it. AI completely short circuits that process. Constraints
| are a huge part of creativity, and removing them doesn't mean you
| become some unstoppable creative force, it probably just means
| you run out of ideas or your ideas kind of suck.
| fdefitte wrote:
| The article nails it but misses the flip side. AI doesn't make
| you boring, it reveals who was already boring. The people
| shipping thoughtless Show HN projects with Claude are the same
| people who would have shipped thoughtless projects with Rails
| scaffolding ten years ago. The tool changed, the lack of depth
| didn't.
| max8539 wrote:
| Before vibe coding, I was always interested in trying different
| new things. I'd spend a few days researching and building some
| prototypes, but very few of them survived and were actually
| finished, at least in a beta state. Most of them I left non-
| working, just enough to satisfy my curiosity about the topic
| before moving on to the next interesting one.
|
| Now, these days, it's basically enough to use agent programming
| to handle all the boring parts and deliver a finished project to
| the public.
|
| LLMs have essentially broken the natural selection of pet
| projects and allow even bad or not very interesting ideas to
| survive, ideas that would never have been shown to anyone under
| the pre-agent development cycle.
|
| So it's not that LLMs make programming boring, they've allowed
| boring projects to survive. They've also boosted the production
| of non-boring ones, but they're just rarer in the overall amount
| of products
| kouru225 wrote:
| 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 example, but the more you learn about
| art the more you notice just how much art works via unintentional
| processes like this. This is why the Trickster Gods, Hermes for
| example, are both the Gods of art (lyre, communication,
| storytelling) and the Gods of randomness/fortune.
|
| We used to assume that we could trust the creative to make their
| own decisions about how much randomness/automation was needed.
| The quality of the result was proof of the value of a process:
| when Max Ernst used frottage (rubbing paper over textured
| surfaces) to create interesting surrealist art, we retroactively
| re-evaluated frottage as a tool with artistic value, despite its
| randomness/unintentionality.
|
| But now we're in a time where people are doing the exact
| opposite: they find a creative result that they value, but they
| retroactively devalue it if it's not created by a process that
| they consider artistic. Coincidentally, these same people think
| the most "artistic" process is the most intentional one. They're
| rejecting any element of creativity that's systemic, and
| therefore rejecting any element of creativity that has a
| complexity that rivals nature (nature being the most systemic and
| unintentional art.)
|
| The end result is that the creative has to hide their process.
| They lie about how they make their art, and gatekeep the most
| valuable secrets. Their audiences become prey for creative
| predators. They idolize the art because they see it as something
| they can't make, but the truth is there's always a method by
| which the creative is cheating. It's accessible to everyone.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| AI bros: " _You 're gatekeeping because you think the result
| isn't art!_"
|
| Rest of the world: " _No, we 're gatekeeping because we think
| the result isn't good._"
|
| If someone can cajole their LLM to emit something worthwhile,
| e.g. Terence Tao's LLM generated proofs, people will be happy
| to acknowledge it. Most people are incapable of that and no
| number of protestations of gatekeeping can cover up the
| unoriginality and poor quality of their LLM results.
| kouru225 wrote:
| What concerns me is how easily the "rest of the world" is
| changing their opinions about what's good. If the result
| isn't good, then it isn't good, sure. But in my experience
| there's a large contingent of people, especially the youth,
| that are more reactionary about AI than they are interested
| in creativity. Their idea of creative value is inherently
| tied to self-expression and individualism, which AI and
| systems-based creative processes are threatening. When they
| don't understand the philosophical case for non-
| individualistic/systems-based creative processes, they can't
| differentiate between computer assisted creativity and
| computer assisted slop
| squidsoup wrote:
| The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art
| (algorithmic etc) that has much qualitative merit. Art for
| the most part has always been the expression of an
| individual, even art tightly bound to a cultural context.
| skydhash wrote:
| > Do you care where each bristle lands?
|
| Sometimes you do, which is why there's not only a single type
| of brush in a studio. You want something very controllable if
| you're doing lineart with ink.
|
| Even with digital painting, there's a lot of fussing with the
| brush engine. There's even a market for selling presets.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| In my opinion, the value of art cant be the quality of the
| output it must be the intention of the artist.
|
| There are plenty of times in which people will prefer the
| technically inferior or less aesthetically pleasing output
| because of the story accompanying it. Different people select
| different intention to value, some select for the intention to
| create an accurate depiction of a beautiful landscape, some
| select for the intention to create a blurry smudge of a
| landscape.
|
| I can appreciate the art piece made my someone who only has
| access to a pencil and their imagination more than someone who
| has access to adobe CC and the internet because its not about
| the output to me its about the intention and the story.
|
| Saying I made this drawing implies that you at least sat down
| and had the intention to draw the thing. Then revealing that
| you actually used AI to generate it changes the baseline
| assumption and forces people to re-evaluate it. So its not
| "finding a creative result that they value, but they
| retroactively devaluing it if it's not created by a process
| that they consider artistic
| hhutw wrote:
| I think IMO art is about conveying human ideas/emotions that's
| beyond words. So it's more about what the artist intentionally
| or unintentionally brought into the piece. With AI "art", it's
| just filling noise into the original prompt. In that case, why
| don't you just show me the prompt instead of the noisy lossy
| "art" piece?
| darod wrote:
| "You don't get build muscle using an excavator to lift weights.
| You don't produce interesting thoughts using a GPU to think."
| Great line!
| zinodaur wrote:
| Using AI to write your code doesn't mean you have to let your
| code suck, or not think about the problem domain.
|
| I review all the code Claude writes and I don't accept it unless
| I'm happy with it. My coworkers review it too, so there is real
| social pressure to make sure it doesn't suck. I still make all
| the important decisions (IO, consistency, style) - the difference
| is I can try it out 5 different ways and pick whichever one I
| like best, rather than spending hours on my first thought,
| realizing I should have done it differently once I can see the
| finished product, but shipping it anyways because the tickets
| must flow.
|
| The vibe coding stuff still seems pretty niche to me though - AI
| is still too dumb to vibe code anything that has consequences,
| unless you can cheat with a massive externally defined test
| suite, or an oracle you know is correct
| redwood wrote:
| AI is group think. Group think makes you boring. But then the
| same can be said about mass culture. Why do we all know Elvis,
| Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, etc? when there were
| countless others who came before them and after them? Because
| they happened to emerge at the right time in our mass culture.
|
| Imagine how dynamic the world was before radio, before tv, before
| movies, before the internet, before AI? I mean imagine a small
| town theater, musician, comedian, or anything else before we had
| all homogenized to mass culture? It's hard to know what it was
| like but I think it's what makes the great appeal of things like
| Burning Man or other contexts that encourage you to tune out the
| background and be in the moment.
|
| Maybe the world wasn't so dynamic and maybe the gaps were filled
| by other cultural memes like religion. But I don't know that
| we'll ever really know what we've lost either.
|
| How do we avoid group think in the AI age? The same way as in
| every other age. By making room for people to think and act
| different.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to
| someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you
| had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an
| entirely different perspective.
|
| But you could learn these new perspectives from AI too. It
| already has all the thoughts and perspectives from all humans
| ever written down.
|
| At work, I still find people who try to put together a solution
| to a problem, without ever asking the AI if it's a good idea. One
| prompt could show them all the errors they're making and why they
| should choose something else. For some reason they don't think to
| ask this godlike brain for advice.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Try the formulation "anything about AI is boring."
|
| Whether it is the guy reporting on his last year of agentic
| coding (did half-baked evals of 25 models that will be off the
| market in 2 years) or Steve Yegge smoking weed and gaslighting us
| with "Gas Town" or the self-appointed Marxist who rails against
| exploitation without clearly understanding what role Capitalism
| plays in all this, 99% of the "hot takes" you see about AI are by
| people who don't know anything valuable at all.
|
| You could sit down with your agent and enjoy having a coding
| buddy, or you could spend all day absorbed in FOMO reading long
| breathless posts by people who know about as much as you do.
|
| If you're going to accomplish something with AI assistants it's
| going to be on the strength of your product vision, domain
| expertise, knowledge of computing platforms, what good code looks
| like, what a good user experience feels like, insight into
| marketing, etc.
|
| Bloggers are going to try to convince you there is some secret
| language to write your prompts in, or some model which is so much
| better than what you're using but this is all seductive because
| it obscures the fact that the "AI skills" will be obsolete in 15
| minutes but all of those other unique skills and attributes that
| make you you are the ones that AI can put on wheels.
| waldopat wrote:
| Slop is probably more accurate than boring. LLM assisted
| development enables output and speed. In the right hands, it can
| really bring improvements to code quality or execution. In the
| wrong hands, you get slop.
|
| Otherwise, AI definitely impacts learning and thinking. See
| Anthropic's own paper: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-
| assistance-coding-skil...
| themafia wrote:
| Or.. Only boring people use AI.
| kazinator wrote:
| If actually making something with AI and showing it to people
| makes you boring ... imagine how boring you are when you blog
| _about_ AI, where at most you only verbally describe some
| attributes of what AI made for you, if anything.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Setting aside the marvelous murk in that use of "you," which
| parenthetically I would be happy to chat about ad nauseum,
|
| I would say this is a fine time to haul out:
|
| Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that
| contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved
| upon.
|
| Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to
| preclude some feature from future realization is false.
|
| Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved;
| they're just unevenly distributed.
|
| I can never these days stop thinking about the XKCD the punchline
| of which is the alarmingly brief window between "can do at all"
| and "can do with superhuman capacity."
|
| I'm fully aware of the numerous dimensions upon which the
| advancement from one state to the other, in any specific domain,
| is unpredictable, Hard, or less likely to be quick... but this
| the rare case where absent black swan externalities ending the
| game, _line goes up_.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| "every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary
| implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon."
|
| They're token predictors. This is _inherently_ a limited
| technology, which is optimized for making people feel good
| about interacting with it.
|
| There may be future AI technologies which are not just token
| predictors, and will have different capabilities. Or maybe
| there won't be. But when we talk about AI these days, we're
| talking about a technology with a skill ceiling.
| stack_framer wrote:
| AI also makes you bored.
| mhurron wrote:
| Jokes on you, I was boring before AI.
| ineedasername wrote:
| No, AI makes it easier to get boring ideas to more than an
| elevator pitch or "Wouldn't it be cool..". Countless people right
| now are able to get that initial bit of excitement over an idea
| and instead of a little groundwork on various aspects of it.
|
| That process is often long enough to think things through a bit
| and even have "so what are you working on?" conversations with a
| friend or colleague that shakes out the mediocre or bad, and
| either refines things or makes you toss the idea.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I vibe code little productivity apps that would take me months to
| make and now I can make them in a few days. But tbh talking to
| Google's Gemini is like taking to a drunk programmer; while
| solving one bug it introduces another bug and we fight back and
| forth until it realizes what and how needs to be fixed.
| nicbou wrote:
| I agree for writing, but not for coding.
|
| An app can be like a home-cooked meal: made by an amateur for a
| small group of people.[0] There is nothing boring about knocking
| together hyperlocal software to solve a super niche problem. I
| love Maggie Appleton's idea of barefoot developers building
| situated software with the help of AI.[1, 2] This could cause a
| cambrian explosion of interesting software. It's also an
| iteration of Steve Jobs' computer as a bicycle for the mind. AI-
| assisted development makes the bicycle a lot easier to operate.
|
| [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
|
| [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
|
| [2] https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-
| situateds...
| Supermancho wrote:
| > I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool
| and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe
| coded Show HN projects are overall pretty boring.
|
| Ironically, good engineering is boring. In this context, I would
| hazard that interesting means risky.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| AI is a mirror. If you are boring, you will use AI in a boring
| way.
| solaire_oa wrote:
| Additionally, the boredom atrophies any future collaboration. Why
| make a helpful library and share it when you can brute force the
| thing that it helps? Why make a library when the bots will just
| slurp it up as delicious corpus and barf it back out at us? Why
| refactor? Why share your thoughts, wasting time typing? Why
| collaborate at all when the machine does everything with less
| mental energy? There was a article recently about
| offloading/outsourcing your thoughts, i.e. your humanity, which
| is part of why it's all so unbelievably boring.
|
| Online ecosystem decay is on the horizon.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| Just this week I made a todo list app and a fitness tracking app
| and put them both on the App Store. What did you make?
| abalashov wrote:
| Brilliant. You put into words something that I've thought every
| time I've seen people flinging around slop, or ideating about
| ways to fling around slop to "accelerate productivity"...
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Bro, I'm a software developer, it's not the fucking AI making me
| boring.
| MATTEHWHOU wrote:
| There's a version of this argument I agree with and one I don't.
|
| Agree: if you use AI as a replacement for thinking, your output
| converges to the mean. Everything sounds the same because it's
| all drawn from the same distribution.
|
| Disagree: if you use AI as a draft generator and then
| aggressively edit with your own voice and opinions, the output is
| better than what most people produce manually -- because you're
| spending your cognitive budget on the high-value parts (ideas,
| structure, voice) instead of the low-value parts (typing,
| grammar, formatting).
|
| The tool isn't the problem. Using it as a crutch instead of a
| scaffold is the problem.
| dogleash wrote:
| > if you use AI as a draft generator [...] you're spending your
| cognitive budget on the high-value parts (ideas, structure,
| voice
|
| I don't follow. If you have the ideas and a structure to give
| to an AI you already have a working draft. Just start revising
| that. What would an AI add other than turn into the replacement
| for thinking described in your negative example?
| amoorthy wrote:
| We built an editor for creating posts on LinkedIn where - to
| avoid the "all AI output is similar/boring" issue - it operates
| more like a muse than a writer. i.e. it asks questions, pushes
| you to have deeper insights, connects the dots with what others
| are writing about etc.
|
| Users appear to be happy but it's early. And while we do scrub
| the writing of typical AI writing patterns there's no denying
| that it all probably sounds somewhat similar, even as we apply a
| unique style guide for each user.
|
| I think this may be ok if the piece is actually insightful.
| Fingers crossed.
| ge96 wrote:
| A tangent, I wonder what kind of people actually stick around
| and read LinkedIn, the posts on there are so bad. I only go on
| there when I'm trying to get recruiters to find me for a new
| job. Instagram too I can't bear to use Instagram it has so many
| ads.
| Lerc wrote:
| This is more about low effort than AI.
|
| It also seems like a natural result of all of the people
| challenging the usefulness of AI. It motivates people to show
| what they have done with it.
|
| It stands to reason that the things that take less effort will
| arrive sooner, and be more numerous.
|
| Much of that boringness, is people adjusting to what should be
| considered interesting to others. With a site like this, where
| user voting is supposed to facilitate visibility, I'm not even
| certain that the submitter should judge the worth of the
| submission to others. As long as they sincerely believe that what
| they have done might be of interest, it is perhaps sufficient. If
| people do not like it then it will be seen by few.
|
| There is an increase in things demanding attention, and you could
| make the case that this dilutes the visibility such that better
| things do not get seen, but I think that is a problem of too many
| voices wishing to be heard. Judging them on their merits seems
| fairer than placing pressure on the ability to express. This
| exists across the internet in many forms. People want to be
| heard, but we can't listen to everyone. Discoverability is still
| the unsolved problem of the mass media age. Sites like HN and
| Reddit seem to be the least-worst solution so far. Much like
| Democracy vs Benevolent Dictatorship an incredibly diligent
| curator can provide a better experience, but at the cost of
| placing control somewhere and hoping for the best.
| jason_oster wrote:
| Back in my day, boring code was celebrated.
| 5o1ecist wrote:
| It appears that the author only now discoverd what has been
| obvious all along, all the time. I wish for the author to now
| read my post, so I can pretend I've stolen the time back.
|
| Most people are boring. Most people have always been boring. Most
| people are average and the average is boring. If you don't want
| to believe that, simply compare the amounts of boring-people to
| not-boring people. (Note: People might be amusing and appearing
| as not-boring, but still be boring, generic, average people).
|
| It has actually nothing to do with AI. Most people around are, by
| default, not thinking deeply either. They barely understand
| anything beyond a surface level ... and no, it does not at all
| matter what it's about.
|
| For example: Stupid doctors exist. They're not rare, but the
| norm. They've spent a lot of time learning all kinds of
| supposedly important things, only to end up essentially as a
| pattern matching machine, thus easily replaced by AI. Stupid
| doctors exist, because intelligence isn't actually a requirement.
|
| Of course there exists no widely perceived problem in this
| regard, at least not beyond so called anecdotal evidence strongly
| suggesting that most doctors are, in fact, just as stupid as most
| other people.
|
| The same goes for programmers. Or blog-posters. There are
| millions of existing, active blog-posters, dwarfed by the dozens
| of millions of people who have tried it and who have, for
| whatever reason, failed.
|
| Of the millions of existing, active blog-posters it is impossible
| to make the claim that all of them are good, or even remotely
| good. It is inevitable that a huge portion of them is what would
| colloquially likely be called trash. As with everything people
| do, there is a huge amount of them within the average (d'uh) and
| then there's the outliers upwards, who everyone else benefits
| from.
|
| Or streamers. Not everyone's an xQc or AsmonGold for a reason.
| These are the outliers. The average benefit from their existence
| and the rest is what it is.
|
| The 1% rule of the internet, albeit the proportions being, of
| course, relative, is correct. [1]
|
| It is actually rather amusing that the author assumes that MY
| FELLOW HUMANS are, by default, capable of deep thinking. They are
| not. This is not a thing. It needs to be learned, just like
| everything else. Even if born with the ability, people in general
| aren't being raised into utilizing it.
|
| Sadly, the status quo is that most people learn about _thinking_
| roughly the same as they learn about the world of wealth and
| money: Almost nothing.
|
| Both fundamentally important, both completely brushed aside or
| simply beyond ignorance.
|
| > The way human beings tend to have original ideas is to immerse
| in a problem for a long period of time
|
| This is actually not true. It's the pause, after the immersion,
| which actually carries most of the weight. The pause. You can
| spend weeks learning about things, but convergence happens most
| effectively during a pause, just like muscles aren't self-
| improving during training, but during the pause. [2]
|
| Well ... it's that, or marihuana. Marihuana (not all types,
| strains work for that!) is insanely effective for both creativity
| and also for simply testing how deeply the gathered knowledge
| converged. [3]
|
| Exceptionally, as a Fun Fact, there are "Creativity Parties", in
| which groups of people smoke weed exactly for the purpose of
| creating and dismissing hundreds of ideas not worth thinking
| further about, in hopes of someone having that one singular grand
| idea that's going to cause a leap forward, spawned out of an
| artificially induced convergence of these hundreds of others.
|
| (Yes, we can schedule peak creativity. Regularly. No permanent
| downsides.)
|
| Anyhow, here's a brutal TLDR:
|
| No, I'm not boring. You are. Evidently so!
|
| Your post literally oozes irony.
|
| -----
|
| [1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-this-correct-for-
| testing...
|
| [2] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-this-correct-for-
| testing...
|
| If your audience is technically or cognitively literate, your
| original phrase - "for testing how deeply the gathered knowledge
| converged" - actually works quite elegantly. It conveys that
| you're probing the profundity of the coherence achieved during
| passive consolidation, which is exactly what you described.
|
| [3] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-this-correct-for-
| testing...
|
| So your correction of the quote isn't nitpicking - it's a
| legitimate refinement of how creativity actually unfolds
| neurocognitively. The insight moment often follows disengagement,
| not saturation.
|
| -----
| cal_dent wrote:
| Writing is thinking. If you outsource your writing then you're no
| longer really thinking. Some people keep trying to overcomplicate
| this but that is it in a nutshell.
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