[grayclhn]

I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?

Hackernews isn’t work, obviously, but “it’s impossible to engage deeper with the material because the author doesn’t really exist” is sort of a problem for a discussion site. If the human coauthor puts in enough work, they can make sure the doc really reflects their views and their understanding, but in my experience that’s much less common.

[tripzilch]

This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool".

You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it".

I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site.

It would be different if the vibe coded thing didn't come as a "look what it made and its vibe written README" but instead as a human written blog article about "how I made this thing using AI, what models, prompts and harnesses, how the experience was etc etc etc" --- again that would be something interesting to have a discussion about.

But otherwise what is there to say except "yeah cool that's cool that the AI made you that thing"

> it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough. Or if a surprising idea is raised — is it the authors insight, can they elaborate on it, where did it come from, etc?

[mghackerlady]

This is becoming a problem on the anti-HN (reddit). Someone will submit something cool, not disclose its status as vibecoded, and then not be able to answer any real questions about whatever it is they submitted. I don't have a problem with vibe coded software in general, but I think sharing it like that is strange. What do these people get from it? Prestige? I don't think they get any, as it's almost always clocked as vibecoded a few minutes after seeing it

[uncivilized]

This occurred on HN as well. It's not just Reddit-coded

[westurner]

> what is there to say

Ways to contribute: Peer review, human code review, money for tokens for code and code review, configure SAST and DAST tools to make it DevSecOps instead of DevOpsSec, configure AGENTS.md and an /upgrade-dependencies-and-run-tests skill,

Compare "It's inadequate because it's AI" with "it looks like this generation of agents doesn't yet handle this quality aspect with or without explicit prompts" with "you could improve quality by writing tests, docs, and before that refactor for maintainability and subjective elegance" (if you're trying develop a hit open source project)

> impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material

Shouldn't a researcher consider the argument - it's premises and form - instead of tangential ad hominem about the author?

Pushing for well-formed arguments is older than AI

[grayclhn]

Just skimmed your resume and, assuming it’s up to date, it looks like you mostly work independently. If that’s the case, I can totally see why my argument doesn’t resonate.

“The author doesn’t understand the material” isn’t an ad hominem — most of my work involves working with other people, usually less experienced, to help them deliver reasonably complex econometric or ML models. Sometimes I’m hands on, usually not. Knowing if it’s “the author not understanding the material” is important because my job is to help them understand it so that they can deliver something that 1) works and 2) does what it’s supposed to. AI written docs are at best a mixed blessing.

Or maybe it’s me not understanding! Either way, if something looks wrong, I want to discuss it with people who know the subject matter and can talk me through the parts that look off so that I can learn from it.

[grayclhn]

Too late to edit - should have looked at comment history and not profile I guess, because like an idiot I spent time replying to a clearly ai-written comment… Well GP isn’t going to learn anything from my (gracious! beautiful! dare I say, heroic?) attempt to find a common shared experience in our otherwise separate lives, but hopefully other people got something out of it. I hope to god there’s a lesson there for someone.

[westurner]

What?

No, that's not an ai written comment either.

[thevinter]

>My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document

Thanks for giving shape to a general annoyance, in my case with code, that I only recently started noticing.

When discussing code with my colleagues, especially with those that I do not know particularly well, I often relied on the quality of the code they produced to modulate how technical the conversation ought to be be.

Now, instead, I often see very complex code from people that I know wouldn't have been able to produce it themselves, and I have no clue how to engage with it, how to review it with them, how detailed can my comments be etc.

It's pretty annoying.

[woolion]

>My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough.

FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...

[tlb]

You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist).

Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.

[grayclhn]

I can indeed use AI to do research on topics I learn about on HN. That’s a different activity than what I come to HN for, or when I’m reviewing a proposal for something at work, or if I’m interested in an article and want to learn more about some of the details that didn’t make the final draft from either the author or from other people with experience in the area.

“Why didn’t the author consider [this thing that seems similar]” is almost never something you can ask an llm, especially for articles where the author is putting in so little of their own effort that they don’t edit out obvious AI tells.

[baubino]

> it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough

It doesn’t matter. The human responsible for the written piece is … responsible for the written piece. If someone is willing to use AI to supplement their own intellect and/or writing abilities, then they need to take ownership of the mistakes, misconceptions, etc., that come along with that, the same as an author who does all the work themselves. The problem you’ve identified here is that the human responsible for the writing is not fully taking responsibility for the writing.

[hoppp]

Status thing sounds correct because humans have a subconscious filter that checks what is the status of the person emitting the information to evaluate if it should be accepted or not.

This is well researched in both neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

But you are correct that it's also a feedback issue.

I don't read AI articles because if the writer didn't spend mental energy on it then why should I.

[dang]

That's interesting, thank you! My only pushback is that my bit about "allergy" and "status" is about the audience response here, whereas you seem to be talking on a somewhat different level.

[grayclhn]

Oh for sure. My only point is that IME (and I’d assume many other commenters) the quality of discussion and engagement around an imperfect ai-written doc is considerably worse than the same doc written by a human. Work is where it’s most obvious to me… because many of these are design docs for systems I care deeply about us delivering, but I’ve noticed the same thing elsewhere.

[tripzilch]

But you wouldn't have called it "allergy" or a "status" problem when considering the audience's response to human written posts of a similar low quality level.

It's always been the case that the HN audience has been "allergic" to low effort slop (including human generated).

The OP (and my) point was trying to point out how the AI generated stuff might masquerade as something "interesting" if it had been human written, but actually is much of a nothing burger when there's no human behind it:

if a human made a strange, weird, or even sub-optimal design decision, that's something to possibly have an interesting discussion about.

if an AI does the same, first of, I don't care and don't wanna guess why its weights did the thing it did, it's just not as interesting as human motivations, UNLESS the main meat of the article/link is in fact about (again the human experience of) "how I made this thing, using AI, what prompts, harness, models, etc".

I hope it makes sense and allows you to no longer dismiss this as an "allergy" (aka the audience's problem), but as something that is actually a quality problem with the post.

[heurist]

You are heavily discounting the human side of the generation effort. The first output from an AI might be slop but once you start injecting your own ideas and desires it lands much further away from what any AI would output on its own. (Not that there's no zero-effort slop around - there's a lot).

[tripzilch]

Sorry if I made it seem I think the human side of AI-use is without effort, because it's not and can take a lot of time (and effort/energy).

It is, however, my experience that even the people who spend a lot of time and effort generating something with AI, tend to shrug when you ask a deeper question about the project, and often point to the AI generated documentation, which is, let me be subtle and say, "not really a joy to read", and especially pales in comparison to having a conversation with a human who spent their effort on learning how to do the thing it did, instead of prompting an AI.

I'm also not saying there aren't any exceptions to this. But I've found them rare.

Like I said, even if the human doesn't quite understand what they generated, even then it would be preferable to read a human written article about how it was generated, using what tools and harnesses, etc.

I come to this website to learn stuff and converse with other people, not just to go "ooh aah" at what somebody generated with AI (if that is all they can offer).

Hope that makes sense.