[nmfisher]

Generic house style is fine for a lot of real-world applications. The dirty secret of the legal profession is that they spend a huge amounts of time (aka client's money) writing clauses/pleadings/etc that have been written thousands of times before. Brevity, clarity, efficiency and cost are far more important than originality.

[dotancohen]

Do you have any idea how many times I've written the same text parsers or API glue for different clients? The software field has this same issue - I would imagine that any "knowledge worker" field would. That's probably why ChatGPT is so good at producing code.

How many identical prescriptions do chemists write? Doctors write diagnosis'? Teachers write end of semester summaries? Architects sketch rooms? I'm sure that 80% of some fields' output is near-identical to previous work.

[nmfisher]

I feel exactly the same way - a few years ago I was lamenting the fact that I was writing JSON serialization/deserialization code for the 1000th time, and begging for a tool that could automate it for me. I haven't tried ChatGPT for that specific task just yet, but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the solution I had in mind.

[klabb3]

I mean this sounds much more like a job for tooling and higher level meta-programming. If “everything but X” is identical busywork, then just automate the “everything” part. Using AI to generate code seems equally bad for maintenance and possibly worse for silent errors.

That said, there is a lot of busywork in programming, especially refactoring, adding parameters and stuff like that. Sometimes it’s ok to have such work be “mostly correct”, eg if you have strong type safety and unit tests to catch minor errors.

[mattclarkdotnet]

The thing is, with code you mostly do want the verbose output, with a prescription you do need the output to follow an official format, etc. Tools like these seem to fill a niche where you know what you want, but the target format/process is onerous.

[Spivak]

I think what makes code frustrating is that we absolutely could consolidate all this duplicate boilerplate but the “writing code is easier than reading it” problem makes it so the cheapest path for any individual is duplicating work ad hoc rather than making something reusable.

[ben_w]

I was momentarily surprised that was counted as a secret, until I remembered I'm one of the wierdos who (used to) actually read the terms and conditions before ticking the mandatory checkbox, so I'm one of the few non-lawyers who has even read enough contracts to notice that pattern.

(Now I'm imagining boilerplate legalese being reduced to an enumerated list like the Space Corps Directives in Red Dwarf, with the associated failure mode).

[jdaxe]

Maybe one day we will use an AI to generate the legalese, and also use an AI to convert it back into a concise, readable form.

[ben_w]

IIUC, with law you can have concise, readable, and unambiguous, but you can only have two of them at a time.

But IANAL.