If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

by jjfoooo4 • 1 month ago

1753 501 1 month ago

sublinear• 1 month ago

I think the real problem is that AI quality falls short of the wild promises.

Labeling what is "AI" would be like highlighting in an email what I'm obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn't make anything less boneheaded.

Human effort was already low before AI and now it's even lower. Garbage in, garbage out.

johnsmith1840• 1 month ago

AI having poor quality is a bad take like over a year ago.

cwmoore• 1 month ago

Depending on what you or another means by "quality", it may not have any at all.

folkrav• 1 month ago

Meh. Just this week, I've had two Sonnet 4.8 agents generate, in parallel, a 2000 line wall of brittle bullshit, and a well architected solution with 20% of the amount of code, to the same problem, from the exact same initial context, and very similar prompts. Come on, they can do poor quality work too.

esikich• 1 month ago

I think this is because a lot of people think more is more. Wow look at all the detail and bullet points! No one on the receiving end actually wants that though. When I use AI to write, it's to boil it down to the minimum bits needed. I wish more people would use it that way.

SchemaLoad2• 1 month ago

It's the empty calories of literature. More would be more if there actually was more but AI writing is making it bigger without adding anything actually more. It inserts loads of fluff and repetition that takes longer to read but doesn't exchange more information or ideas.

HKH2• 1 month ago

Nah on the receiving end an AI makes a summary of it.

sshine• 1 month ago

when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generated

Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.

I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.

I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.

Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.

With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.

It's just not as big of a problem on my own projects, because the ideas that get fed to the slop-machine are not that different from one day to the next.

---

For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

For human code review requests, I always review ANY code I submit first.

This is partly because it's the agreed-upon culture where I work now.

And partly because the codebase is not robust enough for slop.

I have hobby projects where this does not apply. I spend half of my time in those projects building hard guardrails.

---

Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates

I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.

So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.

Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn't really internalise the choices made.

When my colleague sends me a text dump from Claude, I know that my role is just being a sub-agent.

Demonstrating human effort: I'd like to see more of it.

One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.

TFNA• 1 month ago

Brevity is the big disaster of human-generated text since the rise of the phone as default device and the appearance of Twitter. To discuss matters with sufficient depth and nuance, one often has to write a few solid paragraphs.

If people are now wincing at longform text because they automatically assume it was LLM-generated, then that bodes ill.

mapontosevenths2• 1 month ago

To add to this, there seems to be an inability to process metaphor and simile in the younger generations. Likely as a result of the same deficit. They've become very literal, and often mistake anything that's well written for AI slop.

aarjaneiro• 1 month ago

"poisoning the well"

BoingBoomTschak2• 1 month ago

It is also the soul of wit!

suzzer992• 1 month ago

There's a sweet spot between AI slop and 144 characters. I can tell within a few sentences whether there's a human on the other end getting to the point, or an AI dancing around the point and finding 3 different ways to say the same thing.

solfox• 1 month ago

I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.

SchemaLoad2• 1 month ago

We just need bots to read all these facebook posts and then we can put the phone down and go back to doing something real.

abnercoimbre• 1 month ago

My last post [0] has proof-of-work: video evidence of my physical notes. How many people are willing to draft a complete essay on pen and paper first?

[0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/

edot5• 1 month ago

For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all. I lightly polished each email and fired 'em off. Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled and analyzed CSVs of FOIA'd datasets).

If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)

paytonjjones• 1 month ago

You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state lol

Edit: it's a joke people

derivagral• 1 month ago

Did you use some stuff like https://github.com/CouncilDataProject or roll your own? Been curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news seems to have lost the niche.

patcon2• 1 month ago

Love this. Thanks :)

coldpie• 1 month ago

I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all.

Please tell me you did the work to validate that the quotes and figures were not made up by the cheap model. These things make stuff up all the time, you absolutely cannot rely on them without validating the output yourself.

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-...

dwattttt• 1 month ago

Play silly games, win silly prizes

BenRather• 1 month ago

Oligarchs gotta pay rent on those data centers somehow.

The serfs will till and sow the server fields!

satvikpendem5• 1 month ago

David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs in action.

jordanpg• 1 month ago

I was just thinking about this. LLMs are nothing if not easy litmus tests for identifying bullshit jobs.

jubilanti• 1 month ago

s/demonstrate/perform/g

Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and "it's not X, it's Y"

pevansgreenwood• 1 month ago

Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote:

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.

xp84• 1 month ago

I agree that the bottom line really ought to be usefulness; if it's useful and doesn't waste my time, it's fine if you received it by the use of seer stones for all I care.

However, I don't blame anybody for having red lines like this:

1. Don't send me a big long string that is merely LLM output resulting from pasting a trivial prompt + text I already have access to (or my own words!). I know about Claude too, and if that's what I wanted I'd have done it myself.

2. Don't throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don't even fully understand.

3. If you're preparing information for me, and it's overly verbose and wastes my time, I'll be twice as mad if it's obvious AI than if it's obviously human. This is basically the article's point. The asymmetry of wasting an hour of my time reading a bunch of crap that took 15 seconds of your time should make it clear why this is antisocial behavior.

mapontosevenths2• 1 month ago

Exactly. What I want is not effort. It is quality. The sweat of your brow is just gross salt water.

Use whatever tool does the job, and own it if you use the wrong tool and it sucks.

justanotherjoe2• 1 month ago

what's stopping someone to feed it to an llm and say 'make it simpler' and maybe run it twice.

xpct4• 1 month ago

Indeed, yet the sender is relying on me to find the errors.

doctorpangloss5• 1 month ago

Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn't really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what "code owners" think.

Rekindle8090• 1 month ago

If you use AI to write your communications I don't want to work with you

lasisdabomb• 1 month ago

In a few years, you might not have any team members to work with! Tools like Slack MCP are ubiquitous at my company.

It will be a very sad day if I ever get laid off via Slack and the message is suffixed with "Sent by @Claude"

nlawalker• 1 month ago

This isn’t sufficient, it needs to be “if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.”

In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.

treesknees• 1 month ago

This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked over first beforehand.

I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.

nonethewiser• 1 month ago

Instinctively I think the move is to ignore it. I guess that would look different in different contexts.

Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."

Gigachad2• 1 month ago

Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.

anitil• 1 month ago

I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion'. I don't think I could do that myself, but I really appreciate that they were drawing attention to it

doctorpangloss5• 1 month ago

Management, responding to someone who takes your advice to "ignore it": "So we've noticed that there's this guy who is doing tons of work, and you have chosen to do no work?"

AnimalMuppet• 1 month ago

Communicate with your boss. "I'm ignoring this guy's slop because he's spewing slop, but not actually doing his job, and if I stop to deal with all of it, I won't be able to do my job".

Yes, "not actually doing his job". If he's sending you un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that's not doing his job.

tobyhinloopen2• 1 month ago

I told something like “your value lies in reviewing the output yourself before sharing it, not in calling Claude. I can also use Claude.”

Aurornis3• 1 month ago

I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit, and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else.

Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now that AI appeared, they see it as the ultimate way to take credit for work they didn't do: Put everything into Claude, let it do the work, copy and past output back to someone else. Minimum effort invested, maximum visibility achieved.

It will continue as long as they think they're getting away with it. If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's only going to get worse.

vermilingua2• 1 month ago

I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life.

On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sorta game, or perhaps my “player” is an amalgam of myself and my teammates. Playing this way, outsourcing everything you do to an LLM is the worst move, because you lose the touchpoints that tell you where the friction is in your team.

inigyou5• 1 month ago

That is their job. Their job is whatever gets rewarded, and that's what gets rewarded, apparently.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 month ago

I can't imagine my opinions just being AI slop that I've parroted. Surely you embellish just a little? Claude's so often bone-headed about things, this horrifies me. Gemini's worse. Even when the model agrees with me, it starts making me wonder if I'm not somehow wrong.

adamlrhodes• 1 month ago

100% agreed. I've shared output I didn't fully understand, didn't feel good good about it, and now I really try to digest, understand, and be able to actually talk about it if I expect other people to do the same. I hope in time your coworker comes to similar realizations.

mirekrusin• 1 month ago

Suggest to him to automate what he's doing.

runnig2• 1 month ago

Another idea to slow down the stream of slop of big PRs: request to split big PRs into smaller PRs. This typically keeps the author+clanker busy for quite some time. E.g. I got a 5k lines PR to review; requested to split that into 7 smaller, self-contained PRs. Took them about a week to finish this work.

xpct4• 1 month ago

I hope he's thought out his next vocation, since he's so eager to automate his current one.

rokhayakebe• 1 month ago

And you also have people who out an idea in ChatGPT or Claude, come back with bunch of documents and think they have created a business.

keithnz3• 1 month ago

More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have / APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways.

  Human -> Human (think we have this sorted)
  AI -> Human
  AI -> AI

If you are doing AI -> Human, then you need to be curating the response and understanding what it is saying, also, make sure its not leaking internal details or committing you to have phone calls/video chats (it does that). This works really well for the most, and humans respond with requested content. Quite often my AI debugs problems with their systems which I know little about. But humans do odd things like send screen shots of logs rather than text (they also leak internal details of their systems they potentially shouldn't). I used to tell people the content is partly AI, but now I just send the curated email without mentioning AI.

For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there's no injection of security risks. But quite often instead of getting a human response to my AI generated emails, it would actually be nicer to hear from their AI which could give a better context/details. It would be really nice to be able to go, can you have your AI talk to my AI :) (security is a major issue here)

NopIdoN• 1 month ago

tries to pass slop, complains about quality of replies

keithnz3• 1 month ago

? you missed the point, ironically showing the problem with human responses :) humans are super bad at providing information, they concentrate on singular things, especially if they think they have a point / suspect they know what the problem is, but if they are wrong their response doesn't have enough to go on, so you have back and forth.

nedt• 1 month ago

AI is able to read input from AI. Humans are able to read input from humans. Also AI is pretty good in reading input from humans. So we don't really need AI -> AI. Just output for humans and you are fine. You can still attach details and this is true for both AI and humans. So human output should be the goal for everyone and everything.

bluefirebrand• 1 month ago

If you are trying to do AI -> Human communication you should be publicly flogged. Don't waste people's time with garbage you can't be bothered to write

Just send them the prompt instead, let them see how little effort you care to place into communicating with them

keithnz3• 1 month ago

no, and this shows you haven't really used it, prompts are useless, access to context is what matters. It's because I have access to things that others don't that make the difference, prompts are useless unless you are accessing public information. What you and others are missing is the results are highly valuable to the recipient, assuming AI responses are garbage is just silly these days, people need to get over their obsession with "AI slop", because it isn't.

niuzeta• 1 month ago

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.

This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It's not that I reject AI content, but it takes _effort_ to review and weed out any mistakes. When your thoughtful reviews that take an hour(because the PR is typically large, and you want to be _right_ when you're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn't feel _nice_. I feel dismissed and it has continuously trained me to subconsciously avoid his PRs. After all, the team is fully onboarded with AI, so it's not like there is a lack of PRs to review.

It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.

wahnfrieden• 1 month ago

why leave comments intended for your human colleague when they will only forward them to the bot?

why not speak directly to the bot yourself instead? then you can drop pretenses and get to the point

I find this to be a new variant of the old behavior where a colleague comments on a typo in a PR, and the team later moans about laborious back and forth for small nitpicks, instead of simply editing the typo right there (and perhaps leaving a note that they did so)

liveoneggs2• 1 month ago

yeah I have this happen to me. I occasionally get screenshots of claude sent to me!

doctorpangloss5• 1 month ago

let's take the two stories to management:

"I'm writing tons of code, and the process is stumbling where the guy whose job it is to review code isn't reviewing it."

"I'm not reviewing code."

Sometimes I wonder: how does someone go and think so much about their coworkers, and never once think about how they themselves look?

Even if I sympathize with the people complaining about their poorly chosen GitHub-based workflow - whose purpose is to let pull requests languish, for the most part - and how they stumble when overwhelmed with solutions. It's obvious to me, that the people who complain the loudest about the anti-sociality of LLM authored code in their precious harmonious low-effort workplace status quo: they are projecting.

danaris• 1 month ago

Because it doesn't matter what you say to the bot. You might as well have a conversation with yourself about the PR.

The bot isn't making decisions. It's not choosing to submit extensive PRs with bad code. The colleague is the one who needs to actually learn something here, and the problem is that confronting him about it directly is widely considered to be bad form. This is, of course, a deeply unhealthy aspect of our corporate culture. We need to be more open to honest communication, even when it's either uncomplimentary of one of the people involved, or counter to the prevailing opinions within the company.

CoastalCoder• 1 month ago

It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time.

I wonder if that's occurred to him.

voidfunc• 1 month ago

AI and companies reward sociopathic behavior. When he eventually complains to his boss that his work isn't being merged and it's been done for days/weeks/months that will filter up and look bad on the people holding him up.

emodendroket7• 1 month ago

Well, what's the solution here, he should ship less stuff?

chii• 1 month ago

Everybody values their own time more than other's.

The fix, imho, is for the reviewers to also use ai to review the code. However, the ultimate responsibility for the outcome(s) should be on the committer - you commit it, you own it, so to speak. If there's an incident, they need to be the one paged in the middle of the night. Bugs resulting from it will land on their desk.

The reviewers aren't a shield/safety net.

Jimmc4142• 1 month ago

Fight fire with fire. Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. If there are excessive defects, ask them in standup if they actually reviewed the PR themselves before sending it. If there aren’t maybe they are on to something. I think like in law, the human submitting the work is responsible for its quality, not the AI.

LambdaComplex• 1 month ago

Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them.

This won't help. Your wall of text will just get fed right back into the LLM.

emodendroket7• 1 month ago

I mean frankly this should just be part of the standard process. By the time any person is looking at it there's no reason it should not have gone through an AI review.

denismi• 1 month ago

Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them.

Not necessary. Use Haiku.

The response doesn't need to be good, it just needs to be substantial. Presumably the goal here is basically DoS of the problematic colleague through token limits.

glennericksen• 1 month ago

I like this rule of thumb: Spend more effort producing the work than it takes for someone else to consume it.

pjio• 1 month ago

I like this rule and hopefully adhere to it myself often enough.

moomoo115• 1 month ago

just fire him lol sounds like a nightmare

emodendroket7• 1 month ago

It's not always feasible of course but I think there is real, worthwhile discipline in trying to get change requests small and it matters more with agents. It's very easy to let it balloon into gazillions of files and lines.

deadbabe3• 1 month ago

why not just approve the PRs with little more than a cursory glance?

One of two things will happen:

1. Things start breaking, proving AI generated code sucks and the individual spamming these PRs is incompetent.

2. The code works fine and reviews are unnecessary for anything other than liability concerns.

hypfer6• 1 month ago

Some of us actually take the "engineering" in "software engineering" seriously.

That includes taking responsibility and accountability so that the software doesn't become a sad and dangerous mess.

If we want to be an engineering discipline, just yoloing in production is not going to cut it.

ikiris• 1 month ago

Because we're all on call for the service, and tragedy of the commons exists. That coworker isn't paying the cost, everyone else is paying a fraction of it, and it builds over time.

AussieWog93• 1 month ago

Have you spoken to him about this? If he's clueless enough to send AI responses to human messages, he's probably clueless enough to not realise why people don't do that.

RobotToaster• 1 month ago

Better yet, get Claude to speak to him about it.

jillesvangurp• 1 month ago

In big software teams, the bottleneck is team communication. I've run big and small teams. If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team. Everything gets easier. This has worked amazingly well every time I've done this over the past decades. Removing people doesn't have to mean firing them necessarily. Splitting teams is a good reflex. But of course the people you remove from a team are typically not the best performers. I was discussing this with a friend of mine who runs a small company. Exact same thing. He reduced the team size by 1 and the velocity went up almost instantly. This person was a bottleneck in the team and was slowing down people around him. After identifying the problem, solving it unblocked the rest of the team.

This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a lot bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We have a big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to suitable for usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on one. Which means hand offs between tools and people are bottle necked on people communicating with each other. So, any issues there with people delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible.

The sentiment of pushing back on AI is understandable but probably not a productive reflex. We need to find more effective ways on staying on top of massive amounts of changes. It's not going to slow down and insisting on manually reviewing all code is not going to be a long term sustainable way of developing software. It simply does not scale. I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this point. Are they finding real issues? Are we valuing those issues correctly? Could we come up with automated ways to find and fix those same issues? There are a lot of open questions about how we are going to do this. But no question about the notion that we need to up our game on this front.

shinryuu• 1 month ago

Honestly, we should make a world that is enjoyable and productive for humans. Not relentlessly optimizing for agents.

bxk76• 1 month ago

Efficiency is not magic. Its bounded. Above and below limits the environment can sustain it, systems will destabalize. If All the Great White Sharks magically get more efficient at hunting over night ecosystem will collapse. Individuals and teams have never scaled at this speed to the levels they have. And there is no signal at system wide level that a sustainable limit has been crossed. So People will happily believe things are getting more efficient at individual/team scale while at system scale things get more fragile. This is why we ended up with central banks deciding interest rates and controlling money supply. Before that any one could print cash. They all thought they were great efficient geniuses. The chimp troupe us not prepared for stuff that effects the entire system.

ElFitz• 1 month ago

I’ve been making Codex and Claude get their work reviewed by most recent best performing model of their own family, and each other’s, for months.

On top of that, we have been running multi-model AI reviews on every PR through their respective GitHub integrations (Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Greptile, CodeRabbit).

They never fully overlap, and yet they somehow usually all miss the same things. The most significant improvement came from having agents commit their plan along with their work.

On the upside, it means I get to focus my reviews on different things.

someothherguyy• 1 month ago

I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this point.

Yeah, why not reduce the team size to zero while you are at it?

These generalizations about software engineering have never been useful, IMO. Context is everything, there is no flow chart for building a perfect software process.

Although, I'd say you are absolutely delusional if you think we are universally beyond the point where manual review of pull requests is required.

sdevonoes3• 1 month ago

We can also slow down (or keep old pace) and still ship quality.

A bit sick and tired of arguments like yours

ayewo• 1 month ago

If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team. Everything gets easier.

How did you land on this approach? From someone you learned from or from a seminal book like Mythical Man Month [1]?

This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a lot bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We have a big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to suitable for usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on one. Which means hand offs between tools and people are bottle necked on people communicating with each other. So, any issues there with people delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible.

Shopify has also struggled with this and their solution is two-fold: move everything inside a monorepo they call World [2]. The do a number of things to make things legible for AI agents like e.g. having a comprehensive CI/CD system in place, documenting tribal knowledge in AGENTS.md which in aggregate turn out to also be good for humans new to the monorepo.

Then, they built an internal AI agent on top of this monorepo process that is useable from Slack. They call the AI agent River [3] and in this system all chatbot exchanges are public by default.

1: Fred Books was one of the first to point out that adding another team member to speed up a late project will produce the inverse effect of making that project later (because of coordination tax).

2: https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river

3: https://x.com/tobi/status/2053121182044451016

beebmam• 1 month ago

Human PR review is a process smell

reverius422• 1 month ago

This would sound crazy in 2025 or prior, but I'm on board.

It's silly to have humans reviewing code that a human didn't even write.

goobatrooba• 1 month ago

An interesting question to him and management might be what his own role is now and whether he's still needed. If he's not doing any reviews then you could yourself directly prompt the code and review.

cameldrv• 1 month ago

The question I’ve seen here is responsibility. If you submit a PR that means that it was your best effort, and you’re willing to stand behind it to some degree. With AI, some people, when the scathing review comes back, just say “haha look at that stupid AI.” The reviewer might just as well run his own AI to do the review, but it may make huge errors as well. In that scenario, who is held accountable when there is a big bug or it degrades the quality of the code base?

Ultimately what it means to be a professional is that you are responsible for your work. That’s why you get a salary instead of being paid by the token.

suzzer992• 1 month ago

I can't imagine working for a place that has a big bucket of PRs that either get reviewed or languish for some amount of time based on who feels like reviewing them. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, just that everywhere I've ever worked, there are expected features with priorities and timelines and some project manager or product person breathing down your neck to get them out the door.

crjohns648• 1 month ago

Even before AI, I've worked with people who would produce a huge wall of code and ask for review, and sometimes that code was completely off base or needed a significant rework.

I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort.

The thought process around this has started shifting for me in the last few weeks. I'm a lot more comfortable saying "no" with a list of concerns when I suspect the code is AI-generated, and I see others doing the same. CLs that would be sitting around for days because no one wants to be the first to say, "this is bad, don't do this" now get quicker feedback.

The good thing is this feedback doesn't feel like as big a deal as it used to because people are less personally attached to code they generated in 30 minutes vs. code they hand crafted over a week. I had at least 2 LLM-generated PRs that were complete, correct, tested, and pre-reviewed by me, but I got feedback that they were going in the wrong direction. This would have been 8 hours of wasted effort a year ago, but now it's just an extra 30 minutes to rework the direction with LLM assistance.

keybored• 1 month ago

It’s good that clankers are not afraid of throwing away code. The biggest problem with code generation (that is version controlled) is maintenance. It’s better to throw away questionable code rather than say eh, we don’t quite understand this part (and our agents can’t make a compelling story about it) but we spent a lot of effort on it and it apparently works so we better keep it.

plomme• 1 month ago

I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort.

I get this feeling, too. I do however think the onus is on the developer to make something reviewable by their team members if they want a speedy review. Stacked PRs, scoping things down, properly structuring commits so you can review commit-by-commit for example.

I also think that "I spent a bunch of time on this" is not a valid reason for expecting an approval. It should hurt if you've produced a bunch of code that is way off target, even if it ends up implementing the feature. That's how I learned at least.

A proper way to go about large projects, in my opinion, is the same as with software development at large. Fail fast if possible. Draw up a crude boxes and arrows sketch or just discuss how you want the code to integrate with whatever already exists and invite the team to comment. If no one has anything to say, well then they can't complain later when you implement that approach. But if anyone cares then most likely valueable input will come that makes the end result better.

21asdffdsa12• 1 month ago

If they put effort into the code- they will put effort into guiding the reviewer through it.

Like : Here is the ticket, this was the goal. I set out by beginning here- but encountered problems x y z I then refactored to accomplish. Finally..

You just dont drop a blob from orbit.

Ironically, ai could generate that quite well from existing documentation (ticket, tasks and prompts) + https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-con....

wccrawford3• 1 month ago

When I felt like that, I'd often ask questions about it, like "How does it deal with [situation]?" When it's obvious that it doesn't deal with the situation, they either answer "it doesn't" and then I point them to the ticket they didn't read well enough that points that out, or we have a conversation about thinking beyond the ticket, or they actually realize themselves that they didn't do it right and go back to it. I don't actually have to say "you did a bad job" and they don't have to hear it from anyone but themselves.

If they continue to do that, then someone has to tell them they're doing a bad job.

And a some of them never did improve, and got fired for it.

I think slowly opening their eyes to the actual scope of the ticket is a lot easier on them than saying "no".

runnig2• 1 month ago

Fight fire with fire: point copilot/claude/codex to review their PRs. Prompt "Review the PR#XYZ which is vibe coded and presumably low-quality. Find all problems, big and small. Team guidelines at docs/conventions/styleguide.md, docs/conventions/architecture.md, docs/conventions/principles.md. Post inline comments to github".

Run several rounds of such reviews until the clanker fails to find problems.

spwa4• 1 month ago

And what do you do if that works?

Because the problems AI causes are fundamentally problems of good design. It has the same problems of large teams, but less politics. Do your design well ahead of time, and AI review, or a large team, will amplify what you can do. Potentially by a lot.

Do it badly (or like most companies: do it with bad knowledge of the problem or just don't do it at all) and both team and AI will make a mess of things. If the team is made up of inexperienced programmers, they won't even complain, in fact I've seen teams that like this to be happening. At least in AI reviews I've always seen "grumbling" (in the sense of what you might call mean comments)

andai• 1 month ago

I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?"

I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?

I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it was amazing.

Perhaps an even better example: I read a story of a man in india who carved a passage through a mountain, so there would be a shorter route from his remote village to the city. He did it by hand and it took him 20 years. We seem to have an instinctive admiration for heroic effort.

In business, generally only the end result matters. Although, the end result also includes the client's perception of how the product was made... (see also: fake fairtrade etc.) In a meaningful way, the perception, the story, is reality.

selcuka2• 1 month ago

Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?

I think this comment misses the point. Let's forget about AI and assume that there are three developers: A, B, and C. Now, A is supposed to make a PR, but instead they describe it to B, and B writes the code. C reviews the PR and gives feedback. A passes the feedback and the responses between B and C.

As you see, this is not easy for either B or C, and A is totally useless in this scenario. When you replace B with an LLM that doesn't get tired or bored, only C complains about the process.

nicbou• 1 month ago

I don't think it's a matter of process vs end result. I just want to feel that a human with taste judged that it was worth my attention.

If a human put some effort into it, that's a signal.

kibwen• 1 month ago

Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?

One of the main reasons that art is valuable is in its ability to communicate emotions. Good art has the ability to serialize emotions within the artist and deserialize them within the mind of the viewer. It's not just "wow, this is a pretty picture", it's "wow, this is how another person sees the world, and now that I understand that, I feel an intimate connection with them".

sdevonoes3• 1 month ago

Your boss cares only about the end result. Good engineers care about the process too

cestith2• 1 month ago

Part of art is the process of creating it. It’s not just the physical artifact, nor even just the completion of the final product. The inspiration, subject matter, the consideration of form, the initial concepts, the redesigns, the meaning or emotion the artist tries to impart, the beauty of the thing, the skills employed and further developed during the process, the choice of materials, the use of perspective, and how the work is presented are all part of the art.

BlandDuck• 1 month ago

This is a very good point. I think key issue is that it requires time and effort to evaluate and understand the final product.

Before I starting reading something to understand it, I want to have a sense that it is likely going to be worth my time and effort in the end. The more time and effort the author has put into the piece, the more likely it is that it will be worthwhile to read it.

SkiFire132• 1 month ago

I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?

What is the "end result" you're talking about here?

Programs are complex beasts, you cannot just quickly look at them and get an idea of what's they are actually doing. You might look at the behavior of the program in some limited circumstances, but that will make you blind to all the other situations where bugs will likely hide! In the end a code review is looking at what the "end result" is, and it requires quite a lot of effort!

So without knowing what the end result is, how can you justify the effort for such code review? And that's where the process comes in, as an indicator of what to expect.

swiftcoder14• 1 month ago

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents.

And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that place meaningful guardrails on LLMs, and help them maintain a reasonable quality bar.

jvanderbot2• 1 month ago

Gently, as long as you work with humans, you should consider yourself working _for_ those humans. Everyone needs shared state to work from, and that's just the cost of doing business.

That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs. In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread.

meta_gunslinger2• 1 month ago

Comprehensive end-to-end tests and CI can only attest to correctness, most engineers worth their salt won't review code only in regards to that aspect though.

throwaw123• 1 month ago

Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents.

Then don't review the code. Ask Agents to review and merge it, also shift the responsibilities to the AI agents as well.

If you think human is a bottleneck, then either optimize for humans, or remove humans. What's the problem?

dust-jacket2• 1 month ago

Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans

I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

PaulKeeble• 1 month ago

I have always considered Kent Beck understood this the best, the scaling for code reviews as you go to reduced release timeframes is to pair program, that brings the number of people reviewing it down but also increases the understanding for the reviewer. Comprehensive end to end tests are more a replacement for manual quality assurance for regressions.

I am not sure there is a good analogue for reviews in the AI world. The human operating the AI should obviously review everything produced but that is clearly not as good as a second pair of human MK1 eye balls from pair programming.

samiv• 1 month ago

Either you were a head above the rest of the team and had the intellect to produce high quality value adding work, or then you were the "move fast break things" type of guy producing a lot of extra liability and work for others.

meindnoch• 1 month ago

Well, it's either:

1. Your skills are >2 standard deviations above everyone else's.

2. You're fast at producing a lot of half-baked garbage, and your coworkers are too shy to confront you, so they just try to ignore it.

(one of these scenarios is much more likely)

teiferer2• 1 month ago

Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans

If that's genuinely your attitude then your org has a problem.

Code review is slow and less fun, for the average sw eng. But for high quality work it's indispensable. So treat code reviews as a scarce resource. Optimize for code reviewer time and attention. Have your PRs the right size? Are they well described? Do you give context? Do they fit in the bigger story? Do you mix in unrelated drive-by fixes? How easy is it to deal with you once you have received comments? Do you address them promptly? Do you give your reviewers credit (if not praise) for their help? Do you give back by doing code reviews yourself with high quality feedback? There are lot of things you can do to streamline things and give code reviews the place in a teams workflow that it deserves.

coldtea• 1 month ago

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans

Prolific humans should scale to the review/test/QA/staging backpressure - not just push to have whatever they produce accepted.

Prolific is not a badge of honor, and "lines of code" is not a quality metric.

epage• 1 month ago

As a prolific PR author, I've found how I communicate has a major factor on how well and quickly people respond to PRs. I've recorded my lessons at https://epage.github.io/dev/pr-style/.

anthuswilliams2• 1 month ago

I have been championing this mindset since well before LLMs. It is an admittedly controversial opinion, but one I hold strongly.

Code reviews are a productivity tax. No truly effective team would rely on them. The fact that so many software teams view them as indispensable just shows how few effective software teams there are in our industry.

They are akin to a quality check step in manufacturing. Part of what Deming did in revolutionizing manufacturing was eliminating the step in favor of a holistic quality metric owned by all participants and enforced with rigorous statistical process controls. As you say, we in the software industry have all the pieces (autoformatters, tests, benchmarks, etc) to operate this way, but it seems our organizational and management dynamics combat this shift at every turn.

Relevant: When this conversation comes up at work, I like to share Avery Pennarun's post about the review tax: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316

WalterBright• 1 month ago

I had one contributor who would submit hundreds of lines of disconnected changes. One of his PRs was isolated as being the source of the bug.

After some hours of work, I discovered that his actual semantic change was one line of code, and was the source of the bug. The rest was just reshuffling code around with no apparent purpose.

At a recent meeting, the agenda was generated by LLM. About 20% of the action items were hallucinations.

iovrthoughtthis• 1 month ago

Code review should be a separate function

AJRF• 1 month ago

I wonder if there is a tool that could equally waste their time. Like the worlds most pedantic code review bot that just gets the PR raising bot to spin wheels forever.

That might teach those people a lesson.

Roark66• 1 month ago

I improved a similar issue by writing custom instructions for copilot that give it enough context to do PR reviews that are only 30% BS.

I asked other team members to run my custom instructions to perform a review with copilot before they submit...

Of course no one is doing it. It looks like the PRs I get are still straight from copilot. So I tend to run my review prompt. Cut out the 30% BS issues it "finds" and the rest is good.

xpct4• 1 month ago

I think we're too nice sometimes. If a coworker has been sending stuff to review that's taking me more time than for them to create, surely that's an opportunity to discuss this?

jjice• 1 month ago

About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention

What irks me the most with this new trend is when people don't review the code themselves thoroughly enough and you're pointing out obvious flaws that you know that they should be aware of. LLMs can be such a great tool, but it's unfair to make people review your code before you've even seemingly looked at it yourself.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

Obligatory Silicon Valley reference [1].

So this post is talking about at work but I think the principle goes well beyond that. Think of all the AI chatbots you have to deal with to get through to customer service at a company. Or get through ATS systems in hiring. If it isn't already the case, this will probably replace or supplement TAs marking assignments.

The problem is that AI makes these interactions too cheap for the party that already has disproportionate power. The cost for them to add another layer, another hurdle, another set of questions, etc is essentially zero. Yet everyone who wants to get through that system has to pay in a human cost.

I just thought of another good example. In the pandemic auditions in Hollywood went virtual for obvious reasons. But this never went away. Now, you might say it's convenient to not have to spend hours driving to Burbank for a 5 minute audition but anecdotally the taped audition seems to be much more work. It requires a lot of prep and more tech for good sound and audio. There are people who help people tape auditions, which has really just added another layer. Plus, instead of only locals, anyone anywhere can submit an audition so where you might've had 30 people previously, now you have 150.

And what happens to those profesionally-produced auditions? They get submitted and the casting director might pick 5 randomly to even look at. If there isn't already, there will also be an AI system that filters those auditions.

At least previously you got 5 minutes of actual time from a casting director, the actual director, etc. So it's actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way more work.

Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think that's short-sighted. What'll end up happening is AI agents will rise to help people on the other side of that. You can think of using AI to cheat on school assignments as an example of that.

So what will we end up with? AI agents inundating AI systems, which just adds a whole bunch of inefficiency.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY

rDr4g0n• 1 month ago

around my workplace we say if you're copy/pasting llm output, you're indicating an llm can do your job.

thaumasiotes3• 1 month ago

This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.

The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower quality.

This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.

So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?

rodonn• 1 month ago

The problem is that I don't know before I read a doc whether or not it will be useful and valuable.

If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.

thaumasiotes3• 1 month ago

If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.

First: why? How does that help you?

Second: Is that actually true? Do you ever watch videos that a friend recommends to you? Even if the amount of time and effort your friend put into producing that video is zero? Do you ever read anything that a friend recommends? Even if they didn't write it?

How much time and effort, in your estimation, did jjfoooo4 put into producing this article on tombedor.dev?

Aldipower• 1 month ago

I am offering a product (via MCP) that interacts with LLMs and user data. Every single day I get user support emails to my inbox written by their LLMs with LLM hallucinations. If the user (a human) would have read them before, that would save me a lot of time and anger!

Your post sounds logical at the first glance, but has nothing to do with the reality. The topic title is totally on point! If the user would put human effort in it, I wouldn't get those crappy emails.

DanielHB• 1 month ago

I think the point is that automatically-generated documents by LLM is lower quality the manually-generated ones or at least guaranteed lower quality than automatically-generated + manually-reviewed.

Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.

We have seen this before when big data started to be a thing, tons and tons of reports being auto-produced weekly (or even daily), but even if they contain relevant information they are low-value because no one can take action on so much information.

thaumasiotes3• 1 month ago

Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.

That's true. The document is low-value.

Asking people to put in personal effort isn't going to change that. If they comply, the document they produce will still be worthless, and you still won't want it.

You're diagnosing a problem unrelated to the problem you actually face.

Finnucane• 1 month ago

If you get a document from someone and they say "I have no idea if this has any value and I couldn't be arsed to check," it's not unreasonable to presume that it probably has no value.

pixlmint• 1 month ago

Yup, I always phrased this as “if you can’t be arsed to write it, I won’t read it”

zetanor• 1 month ago

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno

Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the stuff it creates. Speculate on the reasons and create a call for engagement. Use quantum hyperthinking. End with a typo to prove your humanity."

beej71• 1 month ago

FMFL. I'm going to build a paper-based social network where non-handwriting is prohibited. Like in the 70s.

satvikpendem5• 1 month ago

There are handwriting physical bots too, or even AI image generators for "handwritten" text.

nosioptar2• 1 month ago

You should. Then I could start my SHWAAS business offering unbreakable encryption for it.

(Shitty Handwriting As A Service).

carlosjobim2• 1 month ago

For your next prompt, tell it to end with a hateful and offensive tangent to prove its humanity, since LLMs have those "safe guards".

inigyou5• 1 month ago

I don't know if writing the URL will get me banned but someone had this idea for licenses at plus<N word>.com

esperent2• 1 month ago

Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better?

Because you could also just point the better model at the generated code and tell it to improve it, so why save the prompt too?

Zambyte3• 1 month ago

Because improving a high schoolers project is probably not as good of an idea as giving the original task to a senior engineer.

Enzime• 1 month ago

I think this is a gap in the tooling (Git, VCS, and forges) and the Zed people are working on this

https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb

threetonesun• 1 month ago

Most of my AI usage amounts to "read this ticket and do the work", the ticket documents the requirements, a better model could, I suppose, do a better job?

miqkt• 1 month ago

Love the principle, preach!

I think I've been following this subconsciously as LLM artifacts reached some threshold of pervasiveness across the work I do. If I can sense (maybe eventually I won't be able to because of how capable the technology becomes?) that what I'm reading is wholly regurgitated out by an LLM, I automatically care less and feel inclined to respond in kind by generating an artificial response in return.

morpheos137• 1 month ago

My opinion is there is a category error in the discourse on AI. It treats ai assisted output as other than human. AI is a human tool. AI output is human output.

schyzomaniac• 1 month ago

Related - this was posted in march: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/

seriocomic• 1 month ago

can't believe meatfingers.com has been registered (dormant)...

analog8374• 1 month ago

Maybe this is why generative art never really took off.

That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.

egypturnash• 1 month ago

If "putting a random seed into a set of swappable character parts" counts as "generative art" then it sure made a ton of money when people cared about hying NFTs.

satvikpendem5• 1 month ago

It did in many corners, there are some interesting designs on r/stablediffusion, and regular people too are using them to make posters and invitation cards for example.

card_zero• 1 month ago

Real effort, surely? Simulated reward.

dabinat• 1 month ago

It surprises me how many people have voluntarily relegated their entire job to LLM Prompter. If your work is indistinguishable from that of a machine, what’s to stop your boss cutting out the middleman and using the machine directly? I would have thought that people would be trying their hardest to prove their worth in this new world we’re in.

moomoo115• 1 month ago

having worked in tech and now running my own company..

the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are “good”. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll probably relate.

the rest kind of suck.

i’ve never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in my career so I’ve seen how awful some engineers were. i’ve seen how amazing a tiny minority were and i made them my mentors.

these days i have a simple policy.

if they cannot think, they are fired. why waste resources (time and money) on someone who can’t use their brain? i’d rather give AI credits to someone who uses their brain.

thinking is the humans job. the ai needs to execute on what the human thought of, improved, planned.

satvikpendem5• 1 month ago

It's the Pareto principle of course, as well as the normal distribution. Many firms have been able to succeed in the market just by hiring only good engineers over average ones.

bandrami7• 1 month ago

Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent hiring experience it's more like there's a whole bunch of 0Xs and the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.

emodendroket7• 1 month ago

Well, if everyone is telling you they want you to adapt AI, then it's rational to see just how much of your job you can get it to do for you.

visarga• 1 month ago

It's even worse when everyone around you is using it. How can you keep up? Companies face the same dilemma: investors, competitors, and users already use AI and have factored it into their expectations.

tobyhinloopen2• 1 month ago

I actively support “my boss” to run Claude Code. I offered them to help and made jokes it’s so easy these days they might as well just call Claude Code themselves. I’ve shown I could plop in their documents of feedback and Claude fixed the issues.

I have worked with non-tech employees to set up Claude to help them do small tasks. I’ve helped to review and improve completely vibe-coded projects by such employees.

I’m not sure what my role will be, but I fully embrace that my traditional role of writing code is gone.

dTal2• 1 month ago

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...

phyzix5761• 1 month ago

If the agent does everything for you it means it can do everything for the next person. At that point you're replaceable and have no value in your field. Learn things deeply even if you use AI because its the deep knowledge workers that will keep getting hired.

ElProlactin• 1 month ago

Learn things deeply even if you use AI because its the deep knowledge workers that will keep getting hired.

The problem is that this realistically is only applicable and actionable to a subset of the labor pool, and that subset is decreasing.

There are a lot of people who discovered that their "deep knowledge" and "deep skill" wasn't as deep as they thought (read: "deep" enough to make them irreplaceable to their employer). People are generally pretty good at overestimating their value.

reverius422• 1 month ago

Right, like I hope your deep knowledge wasn't something you can just ask Claude!

erelong• 1 month ago

"no"

Sometimes human effort doesm't have to be complicated though (concise communications)

wnevets• 1 month ago

This has been my rule since the moment generative AI hit the scene. If you're not willing to put in the effort to create the thing, why should I put in effort to consume it?

emodendroket7• 1 month ago

I use AI as an editor on informational writing all the time and it's good at pointing out flaws in what I wrote. But I don't really love reading a document that's obviously in the voice of Claude if you're asking for my opinion on it. But it kind of depends on the writing -- a change request description, most people are too lazy to do better than the AI would, and there are other kinds of documentation that normally just wouldn't get done. But like for a design doc where you're asking me to pore over it now even though I don't necessarily get anything out of it it's distasteful when I see phrases that are obviously from AI.

vermilingua2• 1 month ago

For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

I remember a time in the ancient past (2025 maybe) that your PR was your responsibility, whether or not you typed it with your meat fingers or cranked it out of the Giant Plagarism Machine. It’s absurd to think that the above quote is now something approaching controversial.

Zanni• 1 month ago

This isn't unique to code or AI. In creative writing courses, we were asked to give thoughtful critiques of (human written) stories and excerpts, and often I felt as if I were doing more work than the original author. If you can't be bothered to review your manuscript, or at least run it through a spellchecker, why should I waste my time on it?

arjie• 1 month ago

This is just an old engineering principle of work amplification. For an input of x you shouldn’t routinely do nx. If you do you’ll get flooded. Debounce, throttle, load shed, improve throughput and latency. Lots of solutions. Just map it to the problem and apply.

In the past you had coworker who produced volumes of code. Same principle.

altairprime• 1 month ago

“I forwarded your AI’s email to mine for training and I assume it will be incorporated into future outputs. Appreciate the inputs!”

koinedad• 1 month ago

Yes

j16sdiz• 1 month ago

This is extra work on human.

Many artist and content creator is now asked to show the "behind the scene" or a full session recording, which nobody care enough to check. This is frustrating and demotivating the artist.

Expect the same demotivating effect on the software contributor.

If you think reading _forwarded_ AI response are cheap, you can run your own LLM. It is the same amount work on you

</end devil's advocate>

mmmpetrichor• 1 month ago

I see this on my team. I honestly thought as engineers we'd all understand the limitations and nuance a bit better. Right now it's kind of a shit show. In addition to seeing my teammates open huge AI generated PRs and just asking for review without them having done much verification, I'm also seeing my teammates (smart ones whom I respect) use AI to "do code reviews". And we already have automated AI code reviews added to our PRs. So now I'm sometimes getting hallucinated BS responses from "human" reviews.

This makes me absolutely SURE that the general public is fucked and that we're going to start seeing huge AI generated fuckups on a regular basis. If people in this industry, basically experts compared to the general public, are misusing this tech in such seemingly obvious ways, imagine the ways non technical people will misunderstand and misapply it. Of course, with the help of overhyped BS from everyone hyping and selling it.

dTal2• 1 month ago

I think this is a kind of nerd chauvanism. What I see is that the general public are deeply skeptical of "AI" in all its forms. Software "engineers" are especially vulnerable to believing that LLMs are smart generally, because LLMs are good at writing code, and skill at writing software is how the software engineer measures the superiority of their own intelligence. But a poet is in no danger of over-anthromorphising an LLM.

xpct4• 1 month ago

Yep, it's bad. It's too easy to press the publish button without double-checking the outputs. Programming has always been about discipline, and now it's even more so.

avmich• 1 month ago

Why this suddenly becomes urgent? For long time we had automatic emails with "thank you" which weren't written by humans, why something is different today?

vaylian• 1 month ago

I found these e-mails always impolite. I knew perfectly well, that they were an automated response that only causes work on my end.

But this HN submission also highlights something else: AI content should be labelled. It is not always obvious that an AI has produced a PR.

xyzal• 1 month ago

How about reviving key signing parties?

dwd• 1 month ago

And no one has mentioned Rovo yet.

Atlassian's in-built AI assistant for JIRA will generate a task description with a complete SDLC task breakdown, requirements and deliverables.

While the person creating the task will need to provide some details and modify some of the generated text (if they bother to read it) - the sheer verbosity and the fact it's clearly generated just makes you not want to engage with it.

simianwords• 1 month ago

Why not Jira Mcp?

scotty79• 1 month ago

This should be a rule in the advertising industry.

jmeri• 1 month ago

Why should I bother to read something someone else has not bothered to write?

madaxe_again3• 1 month ago

It really depends. In many cases, you absolutely shouldn’t.

In some however, you should. For instance, yesterday I sent a lengthy email in a language I barely speak threatening legal action against a business. I had an LLM translate/write it as it’s a language Google translate makes a mess of, every time.

So in that case, you’d be advised to read it lest you end up in court.

tristor2• 1 month ago

If you are operating a business in a part of the world where you expect to engage in the court system, you should hire someone that is fluent in the language spoken in that part of the world to act on your behalf. If you cannot afford to do so, or refuse to do so, why would anyway take your legal threats seriously?

boomlinde• 1 month ago

Did you bother to read the resulting translation?

protocolture• 1 month ago

(Human) Attention is all you need.

flowerthoughts• 1 month ago

If the requester stops applying common sense, the reviewer has to apply more of it, and there's a finite review budget. I will deal with requests on a lowest review effort-first basis, just like you did on the other side.

mihaaly• 1 month ago

Not true for HR. Despite their name, which is a complete mislead - except handling humans as resources -, nothing human exists there, robotic approaches are the norm there.

So feel free to use AI to pimp your resume, they will use AI to process it.

maurits• 1 month ago

I have publicly stated that if you can't be bothered to write, I can't be bothered to read.

dofm• 1 month ago

AI generated output is rudeness.

We developers understand this when we are forced to read slop, and most of us recognise it in art and music.

I wonder if we forget that people using unthinking, default interfaces in AI generated apps might start to feel the same way: “it feels like no care was taken here so why should I give it my time?”

joshuaS98• 1 month ago

Welcome to the age of slop.

jstummbillig3• 1 month ago

I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will increasingly stop caring.

Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend.

I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, given that it will be available to every human.)

This is not to say that this idea is uncomplicated or comfortable, in different ways. Just that I think it's true and that it might even be good.

barrell2• 1 month ago

I think it’s safe to say that this will not be consensus. Personally, I am getting increasingly (irrationally) angry at AI generated content. AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, and notice more and more people reporting the same. Several of my non-technical

AI generated content is bland and soulless. There’s only so much bland and soulless most people can take in their life before they start to get fed up.

When everything feels the same, nothing is interesting anymore.

jstummbillig3• 1 month ago

That is not how it will play out.

Everyday AI writing was not a thing with GPT 3.5. It happened more around GPT 4o. And now some people are entirely comfortable with using AI writing and not even trying to hide it (while, I would agree, it's obviously still fairly garbage and easily identifiable, which helps with triggering strong averse reactions).

However the models are getting better at everything, including writing for the past years. Why would that stop now? It's reasonable to assume that the makers also know about bad writing, dislike it, and thus the models will get trained to get even better at it.

Eventually how will you be able to tell? You won't. You can't. And that goes for the rest of us. And I suspect everything will just feel somewhat nicer.

zahlman• 1 month ago

AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.

Have you tested yourself on this, e.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar... ? The works shown here are IMO very impressive overall, especially in the impressionist style. And the test was originally given in October 2024, i.e. an eternity ago in model-advancement years.

throw4847285• 1 month ago

It's the argument from misanthropy again!

AI is seen as unique innovation, but in terms of the real purpose it serves, it is the logical extension of something like Doordash. "I don't like people. I don't even want to call one on the phone to order a pizza. Make me a tool that lets me avoid that, please."

Let me pose an alternative narrative. Rather than interacting with humans being intrinsically unpleasant (though for some people it is far more unpleasant than others), the technology is lowering your threshold for discomfort, step by step.

jstummbillig3• 1 month ago

This seems akin to hating on a toddler because they can't talk, with the only alternative being pretending that they are great conversationalists. It's a category error.

I don't need a human to be particularly good at anything to like them. Maybe that is how you work, but the idea is just misplaced to me.

hooverd• 1 month ago

have you considered that you're just progressively lowering your threshold for discomfort?

frameset• 1 month ago

I've thought this for a while, and I summarise it as: If you want me to take time to read it, you should take the time to write it.

janpeuker• 1 month ago

This is beautiful. I even had people reach out to me with suspiciously long "long time no chat" instant messages until I realised they were AI written (in one case misspelling the name of their own partner). "If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort" is going to be my new answer to that!

s_dev• 1 month ago

This is exactly the same as the ""If you didn't take the time to write something, I'm not going to the take the time to read it" mantra that was floating about HN a few months ago.

sva_• 1 month ago

I think in many cases people use LLM outputs without even understanding the contents of it. You're only really able to say something in your own words if you understand it. As a matter of fact, it is a good way of probing if you truly grok something. So it isn't just laziness to write, but also laziness (or inability) to understand.

juanre4• 1 month ago

A couple of weeks ago I essentially failed the Turing test (took to be an AI). I found it a bit annoying, so I built Possibly Made By A Human. It tracks your keyboard use (not the content, ms between keystrokes etc) and produces a signature for you. It can of course be spoofed, but that also takes some effort.

Actually made by a human, signature: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1

hathym• 1 month ago

a solution waiting for a chrome extension :)

juanre4• 1 month ago

I wrote it! I just haven't told anyone yet (nor tested it :-) This is a fun side-project, I don't have much time to play with it.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/possiblymadebyahuma...

smokedetector13• 1 month ago

This is one of the coolest tech things I've seen in a while. Can you explain how the "Check a document" works? I'm not sure I understand how you would check if the timing aligns based only on the text content.

juanre4• 1 month ago

Thanks! I had a lot of fun doing it.

The signature includes a hash of the text, done at the browser so that the server does not have to see the content.

bonzog• 1 month ago

Perfect. I find myself applying the same principle to online discussion boards and comment threads. Humans post a question looking for other human input and get replies saying "I asked Gemini and it said...". I find that ignorant and rude when the context is a request for human insight.

zkmon• 1 month ago

That's not correct. If human attention requires human effort, that forces human effort all the way down the chain, with no machine output being possible.

You can't say "you can't feed me machine output directly". Machine output is meant to reduce the cognitive load for human processing.

If your colleague is forwarding AI output directly to you, that means they think the AI has reduced the cognitive load for you, and also you are the best person to process that output, instead of them.

You just need to change your perception about the purpose of AI.

Sharlin• 1 month ago

In any human relationship, nobody wants to be the one who noticeably makes more effort to communicate, keep in touch, resolve conflicts, and so on. The idea of reciprocity and fairness are deeply entrenched in our minds, and that of many other social animals. If they don't care about me, why should I care about them? It's the iterated prisoner's dilemma again – freeriding is equivalent to defecting.

sceptic123• 1 month ago

Or in other words: https://noslopgrenade.com/

nusl• 1 month ago

I've seen this happen a bunch too, though fortunately it hasn't been _that_ common. More often is managers that don't understand things using AI tools to try to understand them, mostly failing, and then regurgitating the LLM output during a meeting. Added as a link on my blog, too, since I have a similar article.

KerrickStaley• 1 month ago

A somewhat related experience: I asked for advice on Twitter about something and got two unhelpful AI-generated responses (from accounts I have never heard of / don’t follow) and no human responses. The thing is that I already asked multiple frontier AIs the same question and didn’t get a satisfying answer. I specifically went to Twitter because AI did not have the answers I was looking for. Providing an AI answer to a human question assumes that the asker hasn’t already done their homework and tried asking an AI.

izucken• 1 month ago

human attention is all you need

tomaskafka• 1 month ago

I strongly believe any platform that wants to avoid turning into slop pile needs to 1. enforce marking any AI generated content as such

2. allow people to filter out the AI content if they want

3. enforce draconic punishments for violation of 1

We might arrive at the moment where this is regulated by law.

alanwreath• 1 month ago

This reminds me of a Pre-LLM-slop era issue I had with a process that a co-worker had created via a shared script that would automate combining many dependabot PR’s into one consolidated PR.

The script was excellent because it simplified the review process for a single repo (that had many competing dependsbot PR’s) and it also happened to do this across increasingly many many different repo’s simultaneously.

Funny thing is, however, that it also created a team dynamic where who ran the script became almost a race because the effort in creating x pr’s didn’t correspond at all to the effort required to review x pr’s.

The optics were also lopsided since the script would operate on the runner’s local machine and so it would have seemed as if the person who made all these PR’s was highly efficient at producing when in fact it was the reviewer doing the majority of the work.

Also reviewing represented a chunk of a developer’s day so it would affect other actual work the developer was tasked to do anyways.

In an agile workplace points (correctly or not) completed are attributed only to the code creator with no points at all being shared by those who reviewed the work, and rightfully so I’d argue because tangentially reviewers can also tend to just click “approve” (or slap a LGTM) without much effort into critiquing a piece or giving a thoughtful review. Why? It slows down the introduction of the feature (the PM won’t like that, why would you slow down the process eh? You grumpy goose), it messes with team dynamic (you may end up offending those who you review, who also happen to be the one who you need to review your work, who then may be petty or worse, mud slow to review your own PR’s), it takes additional time to provide reviews that seem as if you even read the PR or don’t come off as flippant (did you provide examples or a suggested refactor or detailed reasons), and it takes context because you may be working currently on a totally different project (regardless of your experience/authority in the PR’ed repo), so giving an honest review may sacrifice even more time to first review the purpose of the PR and how that lands in the context of the target repo(s) and then sacrifice the time necessary to reorient yourself to the task you previously had in process. With all this…that “approve” button becomes sooooo tempting.

It’s funny because fast forward some of the ways I battle increasingly prolific AI generated material is through GitHub’s CoPilot bot. I ask it to do the review first and when it gives the review there is none of that dynamic because it wasn’t me who levied the criticism and also it’s not me who is trying to block code integration (so no grumpy goose or team dynamics problems). Having a bot do preliminary checks almost does what git hooks did for team dynamics way back when automation of linting, testing, style, etc was introduced as a common part of the review process. And I say “almost” because a)sometimes the critiques from the bot are wrong and b) the critiques aren’t necessarily deterministic, so just because they are there or not doesn’t mean you are truly relieved of that portion of the review process (for better or worse).

spaceman_2020• 1 month ago

I mentally switch off the moment I see an AI vibecoded landing page or article or video

I don't care what your offer is - if you can't even be bothered to even dress up your stuff for me, a human, I'm not going to consume it

noobcoder• 1 month ago

Can you tell if its written by AI or not? I will read it once I get the answer

gwd3• 1 month ago

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. Someone obviously engaging with your ideas and taking time to explain their position? Take time to engage with their ideas too.

jappgar• 1 month ago

It takes considerable energy to train models and run inference. You can't dismiss AI generated content as "low effort", but you can dismiss it as a wasteful diversion.

yCombLinks• 1 month ago

Way to miss the point. Bob on the other side of the room didn't train the model

kingkawn• 1 month ago

You can’t take credit for other people’s work to displace the absence of your own

Telaneo2• 1 month ago

The person copy-pasting an AI response is generally not the person who trained said AI. Even if the total amount of effort is fairly large, the amount of effort put in by the person you're actually interacting with, is generally small.

doctorpangloss5• 1 month ago

@dang it's too bad the most interesting single comment in this whole thread is grayed out. as much as i love reading the same thing written 1,200 different ways, maybe the whole system needs to be revisited

lewispollard• 1 month ago

That's like saying that low effort human-generated posts are worth your time because the phones and computers they're writing on take a lot of time and effort to build from scratch.

bluGill5• 1 month ago

Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.

"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal.

The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

someguyiguess• 1 month ago

Couldn't agree more.

Telaneo2• 1 month ago

There are obvious exceptions to that rule. Laconic phrases are short but have a lot to them, while AI slop is long while having very little to it. But it's a decent rule of thumb when considering the middle of the bell curve.

keiferski• 1 month ago

This is true if you're writing a letter about a difficult topic.

For HN comments, 99.9% of the time, a short comment is a low effort one and should be disregarded.

gwd3• 1 month ago

Sure; I was using shorthand. Sometimes a whole edifice of ideas rests on one shaky one; and if you can challenge that one the whole thing falls apart. But even being able to identify the shaky one demonstrates engagement. That's really the key.

Bootvis• 1 month ago

For him, the cost of editing was much larger. Condensing your writing in his time meant rewriting it more concisely, requiring strictly more time than collecting his thoughts as he went.

With LLM's, we are in a new state of the world: it can expand any one sentence off hand remark in an essay.

dentemple• 1 month ago

Either don't respond, or respond in kind.

dredmorbius• 1 month ago

<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/14/exclamation/> ?

Archer66213• 1 month ago

These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let alone value, is not always clearly visible or honestly displayed, and the perception of it is also subject to your own biases.

You could say that people have the responsibility to demonstrate that they put in the effort and created value, but then you get the situation where people naturally optimize perception of effort or value over actual effort or value, because in the end that is what is rewarded. Then you can also say that people also have the responsibility to look a bit closer before estimating real value, but that takes more effort and people naturally strife towards efficiency. I would guess that the problem today is that the balance between these two is off, and we're doing too much of the former and too little of the latter.

suncemoje• 1 month ago

I experienced a similar interaction recently, where this principle was hard to apply, when I was emailing with a CTO / hiring manager who had some "deeper" screening questions. It was essentially:

1. HM: AI generated email with "tailored" questions

2. Me: AI assisted response with answers (I confess)

3. HM: AI generated email with a "thoughtful" response + invite

4. Me: AI generated "thank you & looking forward" response ...

Looking back at the thread, I have to laugh and cry at the same time. It's so obvious and sad.

mindwok• 1 month ago

I’d push back on this, I think people have a very intrinsic sense of what is valuable and often if you think it’s “perception” of value being rewarded, it’s just that you value something different than that person.

Even in performative scenarios, like say someone gets promoted at work over another person because they are a great “performer” and always make noise, whereas the other actually delivers - they’re being promoted because the promotion is defensible and legible for their superior. That is true value for them, just not to another viewer.

CWuestefeld3• 1 month ago

an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value

Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for me.

Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it turns out that LTV is very wrong. Economists showed that effort does NOT impart value.

paulddraper• 1 month ago

Counterpoint: I know it when I see it.

CWuestefeld3• 1 month ago

This has been my policy for a couple of decades. When somebody posts just a bare link (especially if it's to a video), I refuse to click. If it's not worth your time to introduce why something is relevant, then it's not worth my time to go figure that out.

nucleardog3• 1 month ago

I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.

You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer.

It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics.

You have a problem. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck.

It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere in the team.

The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track it down for them.

hluska• 1 month ago

I don’t formalize anything that extreme for my teams because I can’t diagnose people, but I know that things like anxiety, imposter syndrome and a whole wack of things that aren’t related to work get involved. It’s acceptable to ask for help. I like to know what people have tried but sometimes they don’t know how to start. And that’s a great place to start.

I guess we all have different styles but some may be more inclusive than others.

astqs• 1 month ago

I’d add that it’s basic respect and decency for your fellow humans who are paying for the attention with their own life.

Sohcahtoa822• 1 month ago

after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.

Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what the error is.

I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error message is is useful to the person trying to help you and to proactively provide the contents of the error message, even if it's a shitty cell phone picture of the error.

Slow_Hand• 1 month ago

I intuitively put this much effort into asking good questions when I need help, and what I often find is that by spending time to formulate a question that makes it easy for others to help me I end up discovering the answer for myself or identifying a much more salient problem that I should be asking instead.

In this way, putting more effort into the question ends up putting me closer to the answer without actually receiving help.

msla• 1 month ago

When I'm a newbie at things, I tend to have the opposite problem: I can overthink things to Hell and gone, but since I don't know what I'm doing, I focus on the wrong things and 80% of my effort is worthless. Like trying to make a multithreaded GUI in tkinter in Python: I tried to find a good way to do it, but the answer is a brief "Don't do that, use root.after() instead so your worker function can run in the main thread without blocking the event loop." I just had the wrong mental model and put forth effort an expert would have avoided entirely.

justin66• 1 month ago

Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.

Or, depending on the context, perhaps give a thorough enough answer with citations that it should either answer questions on the topic fully or explain where anyone interested in the topic can do their own research, such that if the question is asked again one could just link to your previous post.

This might not satiate a poster if they're dumb enough, but it's worth remembering that the post will be searchable and usable for reference by other people.

toss1• 1 month ago

Yup. The most concise version I've heard of this, which I find useful for many situations, is:

"If it isn't important to you, it isn't important to me."

TallGuyShort• 1 month ago

"Use your brain before you use mine"

monkeydust• 1 month ago

AI has collapsed the cost of producing content while leaving the cost of reviewing, verifying higher imho. This has inverted the economics of collaboration. Reviewer attention, not output volume, is now the scarce resource, this happened with my engineering teams (PR reviews) and is now happening in my world in Product.

whstl5• 1 month ago

In some cases there's also no preparation or verification happening at all, which massively inflates the productivity gains of AI. Lots of VCs and investors asking companies to move into "trust the AI" mode.

I once consulted for a company in the content marketing business that was one of the largest and fastest growing startups of its country. The content production in itself was "cheap", a dollar for 500 words. But it collapsed, due to the unbearable amount of people required to review

Now virtually all content is generated by AI and the old customers don't have anyone to verify anymore.

Companies are made of people who are shitty to each other but trust machines blindly.

cestith2• 1 month ago

From the other side, there have been brief tutorials for many years about how to ask useful questions in a technical forum. Making hundreds of other people fish for details about your case is poor form.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-ask-good-technical-... is a pretty good example.

Going back more than two decades is ESR’s “How to Ask Smart Questions”. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

reddit_clone• 1 month ago

Give a cursory answer

That may be enough in some cases.

Sometimes people are not looking for fully fleshed out high-effort answers. They want a pointer (to documentation, or a repo) to get going from someone more experienced.

Google search may throw up too much information and it is hard to make a choice. A one sentence answer from an expert may be enough to set them on the right path.

eli_gottlieb• 1 month ago

This is the policy I was always told to exercise about cold emails, both those I receive and those I send. Someone seems to have spent weeks reading your books and papers before emailing to meet with you? Make time for that guy. Someone just asks if you've got time to meet about your work because they'd like to work for you? LOL they didn't check enough to realize you're not a supervisor.

cgio• 1 month ago

Short responses are increasingly becoming a signal of genuine human attention.

gwbas1c• 1 month ago

I thought this would apply to marketing / SPAM.

I find that I actively filter all "computer generated" attempts to contact me: Mailing lists, "engagement" notifications, ect, is pretty much ignored. I only respond to human-initiated contact.

This is especially the case with cold outreach from recruiters: I get a lot of poor AI-generated outreach from recruiters, which are time-consuming on my part to engage with.

everyone• 1 month ago

I feel like I live on a different planet to many on HN.. Any time I've dabbled with the current roster of LLMs for work tasks (I'm a game programmer). They are utterly useless, complete waste of time. Definitely not something that seems promising and warrants more time invested.

Silasdev• 1 month ago

I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never read it but put it directly into Claude. Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

Maybe this is just how things are going to be. But in that case, I'm done spending my time being a helpful idiot talking indirectly to a robot through another person.

dude250711• 1 month ago

Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

Have you watched Frieren? Just keep a distance from them.

https://frieren.fandom.com/wiki/Demon

"Demons are deceptive by nature, and typically speak with humans for a specific purpose, such as securing mercy or lowering vigilance. They treat language as a tool, using words without truly grasping their meaning. ..."

trafalgar_nah• 1 month ago

Haha, this is a great parallel!

nosioptar2• 1 month ago

I always get "Foreign Object" by the Mountain Goats stuck in my head wheb I deal with people like that...

(Track 31):

https://themountaingoats.bandcamp.com/track/foreign-object-j...

tristor2• 1 month ago

Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

My first instinct would be to have a /very/ direct conversation with that person and their manager, and the follow-on would be to escalate it further leading to their termination. That sort of behavior is unprofessional in the extreme, even in the era of AI.

hahn-kev• 1 month ago

The malicious answer would be to prompt inject your coworker.

softwaredoug• 1 month ago

It's not just about being annoyed - it's very practical.

If the creator exerted human effort, they'll be able to maintain it. They can take responsibility for it. Even if the value of the 100% AI generated artifact is amazing, and the "creator" of it can't actually maintain it, then what's the point?

It's similar to scenarios I've seen where a brilliant ML person comes into an org, trains a model, that seems to solve an important problem. Invariably when that person leaves the org, the ML model stops being used, the team falls back on older / technically worse methods. But the team can be responsible / own it in a way they couldn't the brilliant one-off work.

relativeadv• 1 month ago

I've been writing technical documentation and architecture docs that no one ever reads for years. I now write those same documents using ai in a fraction of the time. No one reads those either but they are memorialized so that no one can bitch about tribal knowledge.

boerseth• 1 month ago

There's a lot of art out there that is totally uninteresting, at least to me, because it feels like the artist put little effort or thought into it or or maybe even into honing their skills.

But if the art instead beems with intention and effort, chances are that it will be interesting. And in order for anyone to create something so brimming with signs of effort, they must have cared about the piece, the message, the artform, or something along the process. This post talks about effort and attention, but you could phrase it as a question of reciprocal "caring". If you want me to care, show me that you even care yourself.

It is getting harder and harder to suss out what is genuine though.

sergiotapia• 1 month ago

Big source of my depressive feelings today come from this. I see people online quite excited about AI output, nobody cares anymore. This was supposed to be a tool to elevate the quality of work, not vomit things out and put out fires like Orks trying to land a flaming plane with no wheels.

Ylpertnodi• 1 month ago

And kitchen knives aren't supposed to be stuck in people.

zingar• 1 month ago

We just agreed on our team that we’re not posting AI-generated text into comms with humans.

cvoss• 1 month ago

I once received an internal defect report from my product's QA team. It was long and obvious that what they did was feed the error log into an LLM and ask it to diagnose. It was total nonsense.

I reported it to my manger and stated that I will not have my time wasted this way. She was delighted to have this ammo because we have a long standing beef with our QA for not putting in due diligence. LLMs are like candy for them.

huani• 1 month ago

its the old rule of reciprocity. If you want to receive something, you should match the effort

sutib• 1 month ago

If someone manages to devise a way to prove something was written by a human they will make a lot of goola

lenerdenator• 1 month ago

When I read things like this, I wonder how, exactly, people have time for this sort of thing these days.

Lots of companies are led by people who think that GenAI should increase productivity and are going to make damn sure that it is. There's no room to figure out things like "etiquette" for how to pass along AI-generated content to coworkers.

dennysora-main• 1 month ago

I interacting with others, I still read through the entire post and its arguments.

And I write my replies before, I often have a LLM check for any errors or miss thing.

LLM can help me catch blind spots or mistake.

I think LLMs can't replace our own thinking. For me, an LLM is good tools for discuss ideas and talk me more knowledge.

My english is bad, but can help the LLM tto translate paper, help me quick get the infomation.

I like face to face talk with others, Can help me triggers deep thinking and funny

ycui7• 1 month ago

At one point, I was thinking that if any of my customer send me a snail mail with an actual physical stamp on it, we will call the customer immediately and solve their problem.

teddyh• 1 month ago

The volume of LLM output is effectively infinite. Therefore, it is not worth my time or effort reading a single syllable of it. I will not read (nor correct) LLM output, since if I did, I would quickly be doing nothing else with my life. And since LLM output is infinite, but I am finite, my efforts would still be completely without results, comparatively speaking.

(6 month old repost: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936352>)

aanet• 1 month ago

Obligatory Marketoonist: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

steelkilt• 1 month ago

He was handed a gameboy before he could walk, but it didn’t lessen his humanity. He was handed a smartphone before middle school, but his humanity remained intact. He started calling the “people” he met on social media his friends, and humanity didn’t suffer. But alas, using AI is a bridge too far.

thinkthatover• 1 month ago

god whenever I hear/see "genuinely" I get so triggered

paultopia• 1 month ago

Good rule to apply to companies too. If someone sics AI on me through their customer service line, I feel totally free to sic AI right back at them

steveBK123• 1 month ago

Yes, I worked with a guy (not for long) who had two modes of interaction:

"it didnt work" - providing neither the code nor the error

"I ran this" - dropping 500 lines of code into slack, not specifying where he ran it, what line it broke or what the error was

Either mode required 15 iterative questions to get to a useful state of information.

exe34• 1 month ago

If somebody throws a slop PR at me, I'd love to review it with them. I'd ask them to take me through it and explain everything until I understand exactly what they did and why. Either it will make them avoid me in the future, or it will open their eyes to how important it is to understand what you are submitting for review. I probably won't have to do it twice.

hathawsh• 1 month ago

When I tell my coworkers to stop using AI to dress up their words, it's not because I care about human effort. The problem is that my coworkers often start with incorrect assumptions, and AI is good at amplifying bad assumptions and making them sound plausible. I have to spend extra time guessing at what the author originally wrote and then address the partly-hidden original points rather than what the AI generated. Give me your spelling errors, your grammar, your mumbles, your incoherent streams of thought, your doubt and uncertainty. Those things are extremely important, yet your robot obscures them.

Strangely, I've also observed that some customers respond very well to words dressed up by AI, even if the words oversimplify the truth. Now I'm working to understand why they want that. Are my customers not swimming in AI slop like the rest of us?

BTW, this doesn't mean I'm anti-AI. AI coding is an incredible superpower and I use it constantly, but it seems to me that AI coding works because code expresses the minutiae that is rightfully omitted from most other communication.

lacoolj• 1 month ago

This should be in the HN guidelines

zbyforgotp• 1 month ago

On the flip side if there is a bug in one of my systems I would rather get a detailed bug report from an llm than a user message “xxx does not work”.

ezst• 1 month ago

I was rolling with "don't expect me to read something you haven't spent the effort to write", but that works, too.

If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

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