While I appreciate and agree with the key points of the post, Claude's writing style fingerprints are all over it and I guess it's even more exhausting to read someone's AI written article.
The writing style, if not AI, is at least a bit tryhard.
Turning to the substance of the article: why do people feel the need to run this fast? I have certainly experimented with letting coding agents run amok. The first few times you try it, it feels like a superpower. Then you start examining the icky choices they made in a codebase that is now a dense forest. Then you have to expend a bunch of effort beating it back into submission. Or I guess you can YOLO and throw more AI at it, but then I agree with the person quoted saying "at that point, what am I still doing here?" This is not a satisfying or sustainable way to build, and there really is no reason other than hype and FOMO to do it.
I am with you but I inevitably think it's a skill issue. Some devs put a lot of work into the harness. I tried doing this, felt like running in place to me. the lack of RFC-tier standardization and ever-shifting api is demotivating as well since you might have written a harness that will be obsolete with next model gen/version bump
There probably is a correct way to do this, but your average "vibe coder", or even a competent solo dev just yoloing a project, are not implementing such harnesses. In the former case, they may not be able to; in the latter, you're probably better off in 1:1 human to agent workflow due to indeterminate/bad outputs and the amount of back-and-forth in prompts/specs/reviews required to get high-quality work
Then again, I saw Matz harness for his compiled ruby project was just like perms.allow find and grep. No skills, no agents.md or anything like that. Would love to see those prompts! I'm sure the fact that it was Matz had a lot to do with that working, though
This attitude gets people to willingly engage in abusive crunch practices such as in the games industry. I think the people who are like this are the ones who later talk about crunch like it was good in some way or necessary.
Basically a bad relation to labor and sustainable lifelong work.
I agree with you completely and I push for saner work-life balance anywhere I work. Unfortunately this unhealthy work culture is really entrenched most places
This happens all the time, even before LLMs. And it happens even when there is no threat. A lot of the time the race to the bottom is driven by anxious people running from imaginary threats. Which is why its often useful to have a person in a group who tells people not to panic (this is often an older person).
But of course the AI guys are preying on this anxiety in order to dominate. They are all over HN, either personally or with their bots. Which is why HN is no longer a place that you could go to get mainly unbiased anecdotes and experience. That is still available but it is being drowned out by FUD because the average HN user is now the mark.
If you switch on the 'Supporting Evidence' on that site, it seems to be basing it's opinion on three things:
- Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally.
- Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI.
- Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used in that context in the article.
I don't think you should put much stock in the output of pangram.com.
Pangram's "Supporting Evidence" feature is misleading and you should ignore it. It's entirely separate from the classifier that determines whether text is AI; it just takes text that's already been classified as AI and looks for some hardcoded AI tells in it. I kind of wish they'd get rid of it, but nontechnical users really like it.
> I don't think it is AI, but I bet it has been through editing/review to match a corporate style. LLMs were trained on this.
My standard reply to claims like this is: post a pre-2022 link with an LLM style that matches your claims.
Usually people claim "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how people write". Your claim is only a little different: "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how corporate writes".
You may be correct, but I'd still like to see a pre-2022 link confirming this.
I just made chat gpt list all the key indications that this article was LLM generated. I'll spare you the details, it's a very long list.
It's actually possible to counter some of this stuff with skills and guard rails. The author clearly has not mastered how to do that and sound more authentic.
It's all a bit stunted, cringe, long winded, repetitive, etc.
I think it was written mostly by AI, but with a lot more human intervention than the average AI written article, so it doesn't bother me as much as usual.
This very well may be AI written. Then again, the stuff our PMs output, all pre-AI, now would all qualify as "AI written".
There are certain writing styles, which even if you wrote them all yourself, most people will now attribute to AI. The all-too-common em-dash, yes sure. Guess what, it's a thing that was actually taught as "the thing to use if you write properly". So guess what lots of folks consciously put into their writing to sound more professional even before AI. Bingo!
Similarly CVs. A lot of the stuff that lots of us complain about post-AI was "good practice to do" pre-AI. But most people didn't bother. Couldn't be bothered. Now that AI was trained on it and people ask their AIs to write CVs, it's all over the place.
A cover letter that actually picks up on the actual job description posted and connects it up to your CV? That used to be hard work and most people didn't bother. It made you stand out. Now it "reeks of AI" :shrug:
I’m sure—pretty sure—we can use em-dashes w/o setting off the slop bells.
And try to substitute them, you may; but the bell might still ring.
(Yeah it stinks we have to adapt to avoid sounding like a model, especially for the best writers who were probably ripped off a lot more than the rest of us.)
I have started honing a method of trolling where i intentionally write like a crappy AI, but, do it by hand, just to prank my anti-AI friends. Gotta get my kicks somewhere. It's not just fun-- it's annoying. :-)
"It's not" only has two matches; the third is "It's noticable". The other two are a whole paragraph dedicated to "it's not X, it's Y" which is a little more than you'd normally expect.
Firefox doesn't seem to discriminate between em-dashes and hyphens using ctrl-F so I'm not sure about those.
Having said that the tone REEKS of AI generation, so meh.