Comment by ilikehurdles
4 hours ago
matt-bornstein's commits in that repo do often start off with ai-generated descriptions which he then edits down. there are notes on some commits that say things like "AI GENERATED NEED TO EDIT". the other contributors' changes don't have these tells.
while it should come as no surprise to have software written by llms, if these books are in fact just picked by llms then what's the point of this list?
I don’t see any evidence the LLM picked the list of books, it instead was used to update/add descriptions of the books and series.
That's almost more damning. The list was created by humans, who presumably read the books, but then couldn't be bothered to summarize the very books they read? Either the human is really lazy ("read" the book but can't be bothered to write a short summary) or really really lazy (didn't read the book but felt a summary was necessary). Either way, it makes this list less interesting, at the very least because it doesn't need to exist at all if someone can just ask an LLM "list and describe books that A16Z might think are valuable to read" and get the same quality output.