Warranty Void If Regenerated
2 days ago (nearzero.software)
As an experiment I started asking Claude to explain things to me with a fiction story and it ended up being really good, so I started seeing how far I could take it and what it would take to polish it enough to share publicly.
Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.
I'm trying to sort out my own emotions on this.
I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling.
It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable.
I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.
Maybe it's because I think your comment throws away a lot of relevant context from OP's submission on HN.
He says he spent months on this piece and then some, I think it's safe to assume here that this was well supervised, guided, thoughtful and full of human intent despite the AI-assisted part.
In short, I think calling it "AI generated" takes all the human effort that went into these months and the ingenious creativity of OP towards crafting this piece!
Anyways, I enjoyed it. :)
Reading it, I get the feeling the author worked the story the way Tom Hartmann works those agricultural machines. The AI gave input, but the author was tweaking it with human knowledge and wisdom.
1 reply →
It's a major bummer. When I first read the story (a few days ago, maybe?) I thought it was an interesting metaphor that didn't quite line up with the observed details of software development with AI. I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.
Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.
Surely you see it's somewhat unreasonable? As if it was written by the author you disliked, and until you knew of the fact, you quite enjoyed it.
Quite honestly, I do that sometimes too -- but I _know_ that it's unreasonable.
7 replies →
What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you? It's the same story, down to the same delicate details. When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now?
I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel like the current attitude towards AI generated art will suffer the same fate—but I'm really not quite sure.
47 replies →
I also had no idea this was LLM generated. After reading your comment, I had a similar emotional reaction.
Thinking deeper, it seems prudent that we tag submissions like this with a prefix. Example: "LLM: ". This would be similar to "Show HN: ". While we cannot control what the original sources choose to disclose, we can fill that gap ourselves.
My point: I agree with you: It is misleading that the blog post does not include a preface explaining it was written by an LLM (and ideally, the author's motivation to use an LLM). However, it is still a good blog post that has generated some thoughtful discussion on HN.
> preface explaining it was written by an LLM
why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.
41 replies →
For a while, people found solace in denial: "it's not good, it will never be good, and i will always be able to tell"
next stop will be to ask for some sort of regulation
People don’t want to self-disclose their use of AI I’ve noticed, especially the ones that put the least effort into using it. So this will only work for a small portion of the AI content.
We really need to stop thinking that every AI assisted thing is bound to be slop. "Shit in Shit out" often Applies in reverse aswell.
Humans build friendships and relationships on shared experiences. There is an element of relationship-through-experiencing-a-thing. Whether it's going for a walk together or the classic first date template of dinner and a movie. The shared experience is the thing.
With stories that shared experience is between author and reader. Book clubs etc will try to extend that "shared experience" but primarily it is author <-> reader relationship.
Remove that "shared feeling with the author" and what meaning does it have?
You can look at a tree and feels things by yourself. Also there's the shared readership.
...and what meaning does it have?
It means, "Wow. Cool. I'm a member of a species that taught rocks to think. Holy fuck. That's pretty insanely fucking awesome. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Fuck."
That's about all it means. Nothing was removed from your life, but something optional was added.
8 replies →
There is an interesting dichotomy where we express an uncanny-valley revulsion to AI-generated text, art, video and music; yet we seemingly go with the AI-generated code.
Personally I have an uneasiness with it and are correspondingly cautious. Often after a review and edits it loses that "smell". I kind-of felt the same about NPM and package managers for a long time before using it became obligatory (for lack of a better word).
Are we conditioned to use other people's code unthinkingly, or is it something else?
It's because code isn't a way to communicate ideas, it's a way to specify behavior. Text, drawings, video, and music are means for brains to connect with each other. When you read or view or listen to something generated you're not connecting with any other brain. No idea has been transmitted to you. The feeling is analogous to speaking on the phone and only realizing several minutes later that the call was dropped. It's a feeling that combines betrayal, being made to waste time, and alienation.
8 replies →
I had a similar experience a few days ago with some music on Spotify. It was an Irish Pub song, rendering some political satire that seemed pretty consistent with what I figure is a predominant Irish viewpoint. Since I holidayed in Ireland a while ago and adored the public there, I really liked it. I reveled in the fact that somewhere in Ireland, there was a band singing messages in pubs that resonated strongly with me. And then it was pointed out that it was AI. I was crushed. I went from feeling connected to some people across the pond, to feeling lonely.
And yet, in ironic counterpoint, there is a different artist I follow on Spotify that does EDM-fusion-various-world-genres. And it’s very clearly prompt generated. And that doesn’t bother me.
My hypothesis is that it has to do with how we connect/resonate with the creations. If they are merely for entertainment, then we care less. But if the creation inspired an emotion/reasoning that connects us to other humans, we feel betrayed, nay, abandoned, when it comes up being synthetic.
I've gotten pretty good at identifying AI-genned music. There are two tells that I've noticed so far.
The most quantifiable is the presence of a high frequency component that sort of sounds like someone tried to clean up our restore a highly compressed track. It almost sounds kind it's going to start doing that warbling sound that happens when a teleconferencing call has a bad connection but it's just not bad enough to lose connection completely. I guess it's the sound of being highly noise gated.
The other is more qualitative. The song is boring. Like you said, on paper the song should be something I enjoy. But I suddenly notice that there is no... variation or never hook or anything to make it interesting. Anything to make it something other than the result of a machine. The aural equivalent of eating at Applebee's or reading The New Yorker. The songs just kind of plod onward without ever really getting to a point.
It feels kind of like a vivid dream when you're on the edge of lucidity. You can tell something is wrong, but there is something messing with you faculties. You're trying to see where things are going, how things will resolve, and it never happens. It just keeps going and going in a particular mode. If it does change, it's not to resolve, it's to start on a new thread that is an alternate universe version of the previous thread. With no attempt at establishing continuity, no resolution is ever found.
The connection is often with other people experiencing the same thing even if they thing is AI generated. You can see this clearly on Youtube with comments which just quote a line from the video. They get lots of upvotes, probably from other people who felt that line was special too and enjoy seeing others sharing the same feeling. Of course if all those comments are AI too, you would lose that connection.
I didn't know either, but wasn't surprised to find out. The writing was too... polished, in a way I'm starting to recognize more and more. The knowledge doesn't really impact my experience of having read it, but I'm looking forward to a day when AI agents can be trained out of the servile mentality. It directly affects everything they make.
It's full of AI generated imagery. Why would it not be AI generated?
Blog posts like this have been full of genAI images for years, even if the text is actually written by a human. So just because the images are obviously generated doesn't really tell you much about the text.
Good rule of thumb is if it was posted on HN, it's almost certainly AI slop.
Interesting. I didn't realise it was LLM generated either, but only came here after the first section to find out if it was worth reading the rest.
Maybe the summary of the first section wouldn't have landed without the example but "People who would spend $50,000 on elective surgery without blinking would balk at a $200 annual wellness check. The fix was always cheaper than the failure, the prevention was always cheaper than the fix, and somehow the money always flowed toward the crisis rather than away from it." explained the problem far more succinctly than the rambling prose before it.
I did notice something else AI about it - I really liked the art style for the illustrations, and had mixed emotions as my thought process was "I'd really like to learn how to draw like this, but I guess there's no point spending my time doing that because now I could just get an AI to generate it, and I guess that's the point of the article".
The duality of generated content.
It feels great to use.
It feels terrible to have it used on you.
[dead]
Well contrary to many, myself was not convinced and suspected the content being LLM generated from very beginning with the images and even background. Something in the writing also didn’t hit right.
I can't remember the exact phrasing, but I read somewhere long ago that what you read now, you become in 5 years from now. As in, right after reading something, you think and deliberate about it, but in 5 years from now that becomes part of your subconscious and you can't activity filter it.
The thing is, if you want to convey a social/political message via fiction, you have to be a genius to make it non boring or uncanny.
Very few humans have managed this. This text is at the average level of "i want to pass the message and i'm trying to write professionally".
I have the same issue with AI generated music : it can be quite good to say the least.
But I deeply feel that art only matters if there is an artist. The artist wants to convey something.
What makes you uneasy (if you are like me) is that a machine deliberately created emotions in your brain. And positive emotions, at that. It’s really something I can’t stand.
I different way of reframing this point is looking at some of the modern art that's highly celebrated, without the human component of what it represents, the art itself isn't that good.
So, the guy who suspends buckets of paint with a hole in the bottom to make patterns has an idea of what he's creating. The guy who just put a few strips of electrical tape in different colours had an idea of what he was trying to convey. The guy who flings paint against a wall also has an idea of what he's creating. The guy who made all the white paintings. All that art is trivial to copy in the same style, maybe even an exact copy for the electrical tape, but it's the artist's intention that makes it worth more than a toddler's painting.
Personally, I think most of that abstract art is pointless, because I don't really see how the artist's vision is represented by whatever the mess they've created is, but I definitely understand that at least they had an idea that they wanted to convey. A machine creating the same thing has no meaning behind it, it's just a waste of paint and canvas.
I think its a valid emotion to feel. I genuinely resonated with the story, but when I learned it was written by Claude it kind of left me feeling ... betrayed?
One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.
So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.
But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.
If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.
In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.
You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.
This is what the deconstructionists were preparing us for, I guess. The author is dead, and if not dead, then fake. It was never a good idea to tie our sense of meaning to external validation.
The humanity immanent in the text came from you, the reader, not the author, and it has always been that way. Language never gave us access to the author's mind -- and to the extent that statement is wrong, it doesn't matter. AI is just another layer of text, coming between the reader and the same collective consciousness that a human author would presumably have drawn on. The artistic appreciation of that text is the sole privilege of the reader.
1 reply →
It's treachery, a betrayal of trust. It's the same feeling as when you get sweet-talked into overpaying for something. This time, you overpaid with your attention.
Well, FWIW, LLMs are specified to infer and fill in the blanks of books. It makes the headlines now and again that publishers put AI companies on the hook for unauthorized use, The New Yorker included.
My $.02 is that in the domain of software engineering LLMs have largely automated the process of copy-pasting from StackOverflow and existing parts of the codebase. Architecture and product management is still very necessary. In the same fashion they can also automate writing a novel. The issue is that prose is sometimes much more important in literature than it is software (because, after all, users use software, they don't read the code). I say "sometimes" because this clearly doesn't apply to stuff like schlocky bestsellers that one buys in airport stores and reads like movies.
When ChatGPT first came onto the scene I actually started using it to write something in this vein - a techno-thriller starring a former fashion model trained in Krav Maga working as a nuclear physicist who discovers a sinister government conspiracy to alter the foundations of quantum mechanics and enslave humanity with assistance from extraterrestrials. And, of course, only she can stop them with the help of a gruff-but-sensitive retired Marine who has since opened a ranch where he teaches orphaned puppies calculus. I only got 20 pages (so one gunfight and a car chase) in but it was as riveting as anything. Context limit cut my efforts short. Perhaps I'll revisit it soon.
I say all this to say that if words themselves are distantly secondary to narrative then I don't see anything particularly wrong with leveraging an LLM to help crank something out.
I suspect (but don't know) that this had to be edited somewhat heavily or generated in isolated chunks: I've generated a lot of fiction with Claude and it has a chronic issue of overusing any literary device one might associate with good writing once it appears in the context window
I think if you left it to its own devices, some of the narrative exposition stuff that humanized it would go off the rails
Yeah, there's a lot more work and personal touch that went into this (and the previous piece) than just "write prompt -> copy/paste into substack".
It's really interesting to hear about others that have been exploring generating fiction with Claude. I clearly need some more work based on some of the comments, but it has been really interesting discovering and coming up with different techniques both LLM-assisted and manual to end up with something I felt confident enough about to put out.
I'd be curious to hear more about your experience!
Yeah, there's often a heavy instruction and recency bias that just squeezes all of the nuance and subtlety out if it.
Whether people know it or not, when they engage with art they are assuming a person not just made it but experienced it. I'm going to blow past the discussion of "what is art" here, but where something came from and how it was made has always mattered to me (you could draw parallels to food here if you wanted). One thing that has been on my mind a lot is a particular photograph I saw in the past few years (and I'm sure it's easy to find online): it's a POV shot taken by a person sitting atop a skyscraper with their feet dangling over the edge. There is just no way that anyone could in good faith claim that the same photo produced by "AI" could possibly have the same emotional impact as knowing someone actually went and did that. I think that for a lot of people they may not even realize that when hey see a painting or even a photo as innocuous as a tree, their mind goes to that the person who produced this went to this that place the tree was in an had an experience and chose to document that particular perspective. If they were to see a painting or drawing of something that is clearly "fantasy," they know that a person made this up in their crazy mind and experience their feelings on it (good or bad). "AI" (heavy quotes) is trying to trick us and rob of us this basic knowledge. Some see this as progress. I personally think it's fucking disgusting, but I've been wrong before.
Of course this has always been a bit of a problem with digital art trying to mascarade as the real thing... I always think of programmed drums using real drum samples. In my adult life I found out that an album I loved as a teenager that listed a real drummer as the performer was actually 100% programmed (this was an otherwise very "organic" sounding heavy guitar album). I always had my suspicions since it was so perfect but I experienced exactly what you are describing. I also never got over it.
> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project…
> After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
There is a substantial amount of work here, comparable to how long a human writer would take to write from scratch, definitely not slop. I think we can call it AI-assisted, not AI-generated. Even the illustrations are well above average.
Absolutely the opposite here, after reading a few paragraphs I was a bit bored. Then I saw the length of the piece, noticed the AI imagery, quit, came here. I read your comment and it makes sense. I'm not reading a story that somebody couldn't be bothered to write.
Yup. There should be a disclaimer or a "food tag". The implicit assumption in society is some human had written the text you read.
I also did not gin to the fact that it was AI, but I did have the distinct feeling that I was reading something not that great. It bothered me because the message was something I could appreciate but the delivery felt anathema to the message.
It felt like it was written by someone trying to quit an addiction to Corporate Memphis content spam. Like it came from some weird timeline where qntm was a LinkedIn influencer. It straddles an uncanny valley of being a criticism of the domination of The Corporation over human culture while at the same time wallowing in The Corporate Eunuch Voice, not because it's a subversion of form, but because it knows no other way.
I then came to the comments section and found the piece that brought the picture into focus.
It's just... hard to explain the specific kind of disappointment. Perhaps there is a German phrase-with-all-the-spaces-removed kind of word that describes it succinctly. I feel like I exist in this Truman Show kind of world where everyone is trying to gaslight me into thinking LLMs are important, but they aren't very good at it and whenever I try to find out how or why, it all evaporates away. I was very reluctant to say that because I'm sure it's going to come with a heaping side of Extremely Earnest Walruses ready to Have A Debate about it and I just don't have the energy for it anymore. That's the baseline existence right now. It's like a really boring version of Gamergate.
And then this thing comes along. And yeah, it's a thing. You got me. Ha. Ha. Joke's on me. I lost the shitty, fake version of the Turing Test that I didn't even ask to be a part of. And it reminds me of the Microsoft Hololens: a massively impressive technological achievement that was ultimately a terrible consumer experience. Like if you figured out Fusion Power but it could only power Guy Fieri restaurants.
Ever since the pandemic I've been keenly aware of the complete destruction of every enjoyable social structure around me. The meetups that evaporated. The offices we essentially squatted in that suddenly turned Extremely Concerned about what people were doing. The complete lack of any social interaction at work because we're all so busy because we're running at half-workforce and pretty sure the executive suite is salivating at the bit to lay the rest of us off. The lack of care about how this is impacting open source software. The lack of concern for people.
I feel like my entire adult life was this slow, agonizing, but at least constant push forward into recognizing the humanity in others and creating a kind and diverse world and then over night it's all been destroyed and half the people I see online are cheering it on like it's Technojesus coming to absolve them of their sins of never learning to invert a binary tree. Where the blogs and books and startups of the early 2000s were about finding the hidden potential in people--the college dropout working as a barista who just needs someone to give them a chance to be a programmer or a graphic designer or an artist or whatever--the modern era seems to all be about the useless middle management guy who never had any creative bone in his body no longer having to write status reports to his equally mendacious boss on his own anymore.
We might be restarting old coal plants, but at least Kevin in middle management gets to enjoy "programming" again.
Actually, I was waiting for a punchline, twist or climax of sorts.
This had the feeling of reading someone's diary: today happened, same as yesterday.
The only difference is that the routine, and almost identical, stories is set in in a fictional place.
Some journal/found footage fiction can be good (Dracula for example), but this was not that.
you're saying qntm is NOT an influencer? what a miscalculation i have made
1 reply →
> She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, holding a cup of the adequate coffee
and other stuff... it's not that good.
[dead]
Folks labeling "AI generated" might be jumping the gun considering OP described his process took him the last couple months and then some for this project.
Call it what you want, but I think this sits better with "AI assisted" and, perhaps, really well supervised full of the human intent behind of it. Then again, labels are strange, we call algorithmic and synthesizer assisted music "electronic" music these days and we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft.
I could definitely feel the connection between the human author side of this post, thank you for sharing it!
> we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft.
There are still plenty of purists that will not consider this a "craft". But it's always been that way. The electric guitar itself was a controversial music transition. Bob Dylan was famously criticized heavily for going electric.
But that was a long time ago, and people got over it. And they will again this time.
Dylan going electric was not about instrument choices. It was about abandoning the radical folk music tradition that Seeger, Guthrie, etc. had revived.
6 replies →
How about "AI ghostwritten"? That's a much closer parallel, and some commercially successful musicians similarly are "ghost produced".
Ghost produced isn't a good parallel here, the "ghost" in ghost produced comes from the NDA when acquiring a track from a different producer, which, most often is a human.
2 replies →
I guess I'm an expert on LLM-isms somehow, I thought they were still plentiful. They're plentiful at the start but get significantly worse near the end, so I'm guessing you spent more time polishing up the first 2/3rds or so.
But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste.
The story is good.
Thanks! Yeah there were a couple I decided to leave in rather than try to rework as I wasn't trying to hide that it was written with AI, more trying to add more variety to the storytelling. I'm sure as I do more of these I'll be able to recognize them a lot easier. I have been toying with the idea of working them more into character's dialogue in the future, as I've already noticed some people I know speaking in LLMisms.
I'm particularly allergic to LLM-isms, if you look at my comment history I'm constantly complaining about LLM-written text. I am genuinely quite surprised to have read that much LLM-generated text and been happy to do so.
I am also extremely interested in thinking about where software development is going, so I really appreciated the ideas that went into this.
Since you seem open to feedback, I want to add that I felt the generated images were a negative addition. Maybe they wouldn't be if they also got a little polish - the labels in them were particularly bad.
3 replies →
I would have preferred to see a disclaimer at the top about how this story was Put Together[tm], but I also agree that it is a pretty fine piece of writing overall. Which brings me to my initial point...
> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project [...] about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
The amount of work and walltime expended sounds about right. You have discovered / stumbled upon the relatively well known but little appreciated job of a publishing editor. It takes a lot of nitty-gritty work and built up domain knowledge ("world bibles") to direct a piece of writing - and its author - to a level where you confidently believe that you have captured the intent and desired tone of the piece, while keeping it sufficiently tight, engaging and interesting / non-patronising enough for its audience.
Disclosure: did ~decade of freelance writing around the turn of the millennium, and have had the privilege of being schooled by a small group of good old-school journalists. And then had a publishing editor assigned for a separate project, from whom I learned even more about writing.
What about you share your full prompt story in a footnote?
From my growing tedious experience communicating online, most of you lot detect 14/10 of the LLM-isms you think you find.
that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
Kubler-Ross process -> "A model outlining emotional responses to terminal diagnosis or loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance"
1 reply →
> As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about.
Can you elaborate on this?
1 reply →
> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop. “You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.
“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”
“Everything.”
He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.
Ethan looked ill.
--
I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?
[Edited for clarity]
It divided one of the costs for milk by 100, hence the farmer selling for less than cost of production.
The error is that the LLM should have have said that the costs went lower, not higher.
It got the overall logic correct, but had a nonsense sentence in the middle.
The entire story is AI slop. Tasty and enjoyable slop, but slop nonetheless.
You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written.
The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.
But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.
Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.
Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
I will say this is one of the few pieces of prose I've read that was AI generated that didn't immediately jump out as it (a couple of inconsistencies eventually grabbed me enough to come to the comments and see your post details which mention it - I'd clicked through from the HN homepage), so your polishing definitely worked! Quite a neat little story
I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set. Not that the writing is bad but it's just derivative. I listen to stuff like "Lost Scifi" podcast almost daily for example, but there are many similar ones which are focused on reading classic stuff from the golden-age zines because it's all public domain.
The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.
It is a pitch perfect interpretation and I assumed that's what OP was going for. Manna (2010) read very similarly.
1 reply →
> I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set
Which is totally fair, I'm honestly not! I haven't read much of that myself
i'm very familiar with that genre of story, and also not a great fiction writer, so i could well see myself consciously imitating the style if i wanted to tell this sort of story.
The only thing I noticed is that the melody of the words was not equal to the quality of the writing and story arc.
It was the text equivalent of hearing a singer whom you know has perfect pitch sing atonal playground songs.
Take this sentence:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible.
Perfectly fine, a nice set up for a next sentence, but then you get hit with this:
He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years.
Bad. The rhythm is all off. Minor improvement:
For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield.
Minor change, really, but the fluidity of the language matters a lot and just that one sentence written that one way breaks the flow.
It's almost as if a second person interjected and wrote that sentence like a friends annoying girlfriend who won't let him finish a story without adding in her parts.
But two notes does not a music make, so let's compare that 1 minor change with a before and after of all three opening sentences:
Original:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
Modified:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
It was pretty obvious to me, but the train of thought was something like this:
* this is a good attempt at a work of art, but written in a generic style that detracts from it * nobody making genuinely good attempts at art like this would also write so generically * and if they were making it generic on purpose, they wouldn't be able to do it so flawlessly * oh, it must be AI
I guess I can discern the presence of a human artist, but only in the idea, which just means it was a good prompt.
I really <i>REALLY</i> enjoyed this article and the direction it took me in. I went in with zero preconceptions, just read it straight through, and only after opening the comments did I realize it was largely AI-assisted. Even then, I was very pleasantly surprised. The piece takes you by the hand and leads you through a very deliberate and directed journey. Sure, there are moments where things wobbled a bit like some explanations around specific failures get a little tangled and even contradictory, but none of that registered as “this must be AI.” I’m only noticing those things now, in hindsight, like oh, that’s what that was.
The images hit that sweet spot too. Just enough and few in between to support the plot without getting in the way, just enough to like visually clarify without over-explaining. It all worked together even with minor contradictions around labelling. The inconsistencies wasn't sticky enough to disrupt the plot at all.
Over the MY years I’ve seen an idea play out in movies, books, articles, short stories, that the “humanity only unites when faced with an alien intelligence”. What gets me is how people can enjoy something like this, then immediately recoil once they figure it was actually AI-assisted enough to be largely Ai generated. Does that actually diminish the substance of what they just experienced? I don’t think it does but I'm not gonna argue such a subjective stance.
Someone in the comments suggested tagging AI-assisted work with sth like an “LLM:” prefix, similar to “ShowHN:”. That feels weird to me. LLMs might not be sentient, but they’re clearly capable enough that the output should stand on its own, alongside the intent and effort of whoever’s guiding it. Pre-labeling it just bakes in bias before anyone even engages with the work. It’s not that far off from asking human authors to declare their race or nationality up front. 'cause really if nothing about my direct experience changed, why should my judgment?
In a tech-forward space like HN, I’d expect a stronger bias toward judging things on merit alone. Just read the thing. Let it speak first. I sincerely hope this isn't gonna be an 'LLM vs Humanity' thing 'cause personally, I find the idea of a different kind of intelligence extremely interesting.
I had the exact same experience. It's probably the first time I've read something that (besides the images, which I think are pretty obvious) I didn't think was AI. And while I did feel a little tricked learning it was AI, ultimately it was actually just quite good?
I understand why people feel like they need more transparency around these things. Reading for me is intentional, and I feel cheated when I put in the effort to read something for which the author put in little. I would like to think the author put in a lot of effort for this story despite AI assistance, and so it was worth me putting effort in. But whether that's true or not I still felt like I got something out of it (hard not to as a software engineer wondering about their place in the world), and that's something.
I think I come at this from a very different angle. I grew up around books, so I default pretty hard to being reader-first. I don’t really factor in the author’s effort when I decide if something was worth reading. It’s almost entirely about whether the work holds my attention and/or gives me something.
So the idea of feeling tricked based on how much effort went into it feels foreign to me. If I got something out of it, that's enough. Even if it took the author and a model no time at all.
The ‘feeling tricked’ part, to me, suggests a kind of adversarial framing with AI outputs that I think is curious. I’m just engaging with the text in front of me, whether it’s a story, a README, or a wall of technical writing. If it communicates clearly and has substance, I don’t think much about where it came from. I think much of this just comes down to what people think they’re engaging with when they read, the work itself or the mind behind it.
And tbh, filtering what’s worth the attention has always been on the reader. There’s plenty of human written slop too. I tend to judge everything the same way on my way to deciding whether to keep reading or drop it.
A fun read!
I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.
Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?
Thanks! Yeah this was AI assisted. As an experiment I started asking Claude to explain things to me with a fiction story and it ended up being really good, so I started seeing how far I could take it.
I’m pleasantly surprised this was AI assisted so deeply that inconsistencies like that slipped by you. The writing is really extraordinary. It made me want to read for fun again for the first time in decades. Thank you!
3 replies →
I also got a slight feeling of ai assistance as well (especially on the drawings), but the story was well written and really sucked me in all in all.
When I noticed the article header image was generated with AI my interest in reading the article itself dropped to zero.
Can you point out what made you think the images were AI generates? I suspected they were (before reading in this thread everything is AI generated), but I couldn't find any of the usual signs.
I thought they were AI because I suspected nobody would pay an illustrator/actually spend time making those illustrations for a story like this.
The fact that the whole text was AI came as a surprise. I did notice that weird inconsistency about feed pricing mentioned in another comment but just thought the author made an error or I misunderstood something.
It seemed to be a common AI style, so I was suspicious. Zoomed in on the laundromat window sign and it says “vioice”, so yea.
Looking at it again now, things like the electrical wires not being aligned, or going nowhere are always obvious tells. The outlines on the A in “laundromat” are okay but for some reason the vertical line on the R isn’t open.
It’s impressive that this can be generated with AI. I just wish it would come with a “generated with llm-name” label.
The combination of a "hand-drawn" art style, with text that is obviously not hand-lettered, is a dead giveaway. It would be very weird for a human to do that.
If you have an eye for fonts, the text itself stands out too, at least to me. The font style of "HARTMANN SOFTWARE MECHANICS" is a particular combination of clean, bland shapes and rounded corners that you rarely see in human-designed fonts, but it's super common in AI-synthesized text. I guess it's sort of an average middle ground in the abstract space of letter forms, and the lack of distinguishing features is what creates the impression.
1 reply →
The main building's roof doesn't make any sense (we should be able to see the top). The font choices are odd. Some straight lines look like digital line tool, and others look free hand. The perspective of the signs are wrong in a strange way.
You might like /r/antiai.
'the concept of “broken software” had been replaced by the concept of “an inadequate specification,”' represents a fundamental misunderstanding which has been a source of trouble in the industry for a long time.
That is, a lot of "broken software" has always been rooted in "an inadequate/incorrect specification" If problems in the spec are discovered up front they are cheap to fix, the further along you go in development or deployment, the more expensive they are to fix. AI doesn't change that. Like maybe with AI it is 20% faster to fix [1] across the board but it is still more expensive to fix things late -- you might think you are done with waterfall but waterfall is not done with you!
[1] My 20% is pessimistic but if you think you are 10x as productive with AI at putting functionality in front of customers in the long term with a universal scope I believe you've got the same misunderstanding about product life cycle that I'm talking about
I had no idea it was AI assisted (as another comment put it). However I am fine with this... I would certainly enhance my long form content like the author described. The author mentioned the use of world bible and style guides, and it shows through in the consistency and tightness of the article. And that is key... to take something AI generated (based on a prompt) and rework it systematically in an iterative human-in-the loop. The end result was a great read.
I do enjoy this sort of speculative fiction that imagines though future consequences of something in its early stages, like AI is right now. There are some interesting ideas in here about where the work will shift.
However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier.
The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better.
We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.
>>There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing.
For the exact same reason why there is absolutely no technical reason why two departments in a company can't talk to each other and exchange data, but because of <whatever> reason they haven't done that in 20 years.
The idea that farmers will just buy "AI" as a blob that is meant to do a thing and these blobs will never interact with each other because they weren't designed to(as in - John Deere really doesn't want their AI blob to talk to the AI blob made by someone else, even if there is literally no technical reason why it shouldn't be possible), seems like the most likely way things will go - it's how we've been operating for a long time and AI won't change it.
Yeah, in the real world, Tom is already an OpenClaw instance...
Funny I actually saw this tweet this morning about an Openclaw instance getting too advanced for the users to know how to control and fix: https://x.com/jspeiser/status/2033880731202547784?s=46&t=sAq...
2 replies →
> The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems.
Or you can ask the agent to do this after each round. Or before a deploy. They are great at performing analysis.
[dead]
I loved the story... It felt comforting in a way I haven't experienced in quite a while. With everyone around me stressed about becoming obsolete... I mean - thank you! It was a bit difficult to read, but it never felt generated to be honest. There is a big difference between one shot generated stories and this. People tend to forget that as much as we don't want to admit - we, as humans, are simply generators of actions, reacting on much larger context... LLMs are not yet even close to us, but are actually way ahead of some of us. When someone spent so much effort on context preparation, the least I would do is congratulate you for the effort and in the end - a very nice story.
For the specific process that generated this story, I think a generous comparison could be made to something like photography. Yes, the machine is producing the resulting work, but under the guidance and curation of an artist that sets an appropriate parameters and context to the machine. I’d submit that this can result in varying levels of authorship, much like the difference between a snapshot (one-shot?) and a carefully controlled studio photograph, depending on the depth of preparation, iteration, and curation the photographer performs.
The LLM-ness isn't a hard problem to fix. Break it into sections, run each through an LLM a few times to catch logic issues, use different AIs to double-check. For the writing style, if the author just read it carefully, they can definitely spot the things Claude keeps repeating, and tell it not to do that.
But honestly, the ideas here are really good. The cascading failure from a weather model update, the spaghetti problem with forty tools nobody designed as a system, the $4 toggle switch being the most important tool --- that's sharper thinking about AI than most serious essays on the topic.
A lot of people who publish regularly can't write to this level of thinking. The prose could be cleaner, sure, but it made me think, which is more than most stories do.
This struck me:
"The tool had changed. The domain had not. People who understood the domain and could also diagnose specification problems were the most valuable people in any industry, and most of them, like Tom, had arrived at the job sideways from something else."
People my age and older arrived in the software business sideways too; in my case from physics and electronics. My background in physics was a great help to me later when programming in the domain of electrical machines because I could speak both languages so to say.
Much grander people than me came into software sideways as I was reminded when reading Bertrand Meyer's in memoriam of Tony Hoare; Tony Hoare's first degree was classics at Oxford.
So perhaps we aren't entering a new phase, merely returning to our roots with new tools.
I'm very impressed that was written by an LLM.
Does that make the OP an "authoring mechanic"? Or an "AI editor"?
Douglas Adams had it right, the problem is not that the answer was useless, it was that people didn't know what the right question was.
Reacting to the story itself, I've been on the same thought line but came to the opposite conclusion. Precisely because the generation of the code is unreliable, one of the metrics we will be using in the future to determine the value of the code is precisely how much it has been tested against the real world. Real-world tested code will always be more valuable than what has just been instantiated by an AI, and that extends indefinitely into the future because no AI will ever be able to completely deal with integrating with all the other AI-generated code in the world on the first try. That is, as AIs get better at generating code, we will inevitably generate more code with them, and then later code must deal with that increased amount of code. So the AIs can never "catch up" with code complexity because the problem gets worse the better they get.
This story is itself the explanation of why we're not going to go this route at scale. It'll happen in isolated places for the indefinite future. But farmers are going to buy systems, generated by AIs or not, that have been field tested, and will be no more interested in calling new untested code into being for their own personal use on their own personal farm than they are today.
The limiting factor for future code won't be how much AI firepower someone has to bring to bear on a problem but how much "real world" there is to test the code against, because there is only going to be so much "real world" to go around.
(Expanded on: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ ).
Two things:
1) Bravo. This was actually a fun, enjoyable read. Thank you fellow writer.
2) Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments on this. As one of the authors, I must confess it was not my intention when I wrote that tvtropes wiki page that was ingested by that dodgy script with that weird user agent string and a bad attitude, then added to the data set that eventually made the LLM weights just right for this beautiful story to be possible. I'll be working on more wiki pages soon, so you can look up to more of my stories in the future.
Reading this was a roller coaster for me.
Because of a bad habit reading comments before the link I knew it was AI. I read it regardless, and... I still enjoyed it!
I'm very much not a writer or a critic, so my definition of good writing is likely very low. Yet I can't shake off this weird feeling that I truly enjoyed the writing and felt the emotions, _while_ knowing it's LLM.
I'm guessing that human after touch is what made it pleasant to read. I'd love to see the commit history of the process. Fun times we live in!
This is a neat experiment, and I read the story before joining the conversation here and realizing it was written the way it was.
Many people here already chimed in on the emotion of being caught reading something that might not have felt AI so I will offer another angle. Akin to many The New Yorker article in the past, I felt disconnected with the article for a good portion at the beginning. So much so that I had to skip most of it.
The piece that got me very hooked was when he drove to Carol Lindgren’s farm. I read the remainder of the text and thought the content was engaging and thought provoking, in some sense. I loved the idea of manual override that logged into the system and changed the system behaviour over time. That's something that got me thinking about AI, actually.
Now, I would be curious which part of the author's genesis made it into the final text and how much of that couples with what I found to be intellectually engaging.
Around the part where Margaret explains the problem to Tom , and started to feel annoyed. I could tell it was a LLM trying to fit a sci fi novella style of writing. And it was doing a good job , it was certainly better than 90% of posts ive read in the last 6 months.
Dont know why that makes me annoyed, maybe cause its the depressing seriousness of being a 'prompter' and the americana framing of it.
There's a bit of a tradition of introducing engineering ideas through stories. I remember a novella which was used to introduce something like MRP II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning) in the 80's. One of the reasons I think it works is that it keeps a focus on the human elements - like why Tom fitted the switch in your story. I remember automating a lab system back in 1985, which would bring in £1000 per day. Two weeks later I found out that the reason it wasn't in use was that the user wanted an amber monitor rather than a green one. I fitted the switch.
I don't know if this is what the future will look like, but this looks realistic. And if my non-existent grandson starts re-coding my business without asking, he's going to spend the next six months using K&R C.
I enjoyed this very much. But I have to wonder, was this written by Claude?
Edit: got it right!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47419681
Haha well it was me and Claude ;)
I wonder if it was de-indexed from HN for this reason.
30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.
3 replies →
Nanoclaw is the first hint I've seen of new type of software, user-customizeable code. It's not spec-to-software like in the story, but it is rather interesting. You fork it and then when you add features it self-modifies. I haven't looked deeply, but I'm not sure how you get updates after that, I guess you can probably have it pull and merge itself for a while but if you ever get to where you can't merge anymore, I'm not sure what you do.
As for spec-to-software - I am still pretty unsure about this. Right now of course we are not really that close, it takes too much iteration from a prompt to a usable piece of software, and even then you need to have a good prompt. I'm also not sure about re-generating due to variations on what the result might be. The space of acceptable solutions isn't just one program, it's lots, and if you get a random acceptable solution that might be fine for original generation, but it may be extremely annoying to randomly get a different acceptable solution when regenerating, as you need to re-learn how to use it (thinking about UI specifically here.) Maybe these are the same problem, once you can one-shot the software from a spec maybe you will not have much variation on the solution since you aren't doing a somewhat random walk there iterating on the result.
I also don't know if many users really want to generate their own solutions. That's putting a lot of work on the user to even know what a good idea is. Figuring out what the good ideas are is already a huge part of making software, probably harder than implementing it. Maybe small-(ish) businesses will, like the farmers in the story, but end-users, maybe not, at least not in general.
I do think there is SOMETHING to all this, but it's really hard to predict what it's gonna look like, which is why I appreciate this piece so much.
I liked it. It has a similar feel to an Andy Weir "The martian" type of novel.
Its good but it still has a bit of that LLM-sound to it and it really drives the point home after like 2 or 3 paragraphs and kind of keeps repeating itself over and over again. But it is still interesting, from an artistic perspective, to see a work that does the thing it is, so to speak: it is showing and doing. Of course, there is a certain art to writing: the ruthless, violent practice of editing; which, perhaps is even more important than the original text that is always, like a model output, just an unconscious stream that has not quite taken shape.
One thing I'll note about this is that the writing reminds me of the much contested "MFA workshop" style that has launched a thousand think pieces.
---
The story was decent! I thought it was insightful and it made me reconsider some aspects of AI use. I am skeptical that an AI could write something on par with the Iliad, or Anna Karenina -- but perhaps I will be disabused of that notion someday. Still, this is a level of quality I am surprised to see to come out of an AI (though, as in your story, the LLM seemed to require its own "choreographer" in the form of your editing and polishing). Very thought provoking.
That's a great point about the choreographer. Hopefully I'll be able to afford one some day...
Who can know what the world will look like as we "transition"? I sure don't, but I'm thankful the author here has taken a stab at it. I feel like this is one of the first stories I've seen to try to imagine this post-transition world in a way that isn't so gonzo as to be unrelatable. It was so relatable (the human-ness shining all the brighter in a machine-driven world) that I cried as I finished reading. I've felt very anxious about my own future, and to see one possible future painted so vividly, with such human and emotionally focused themes, triggered quite an emotional reaction. I think the feeling was:
> If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.
Thank you for this comment, I'm so glad it made you feel a little bit better about the future, if even for a little while!
This is really the whole idea behind this project with Near Zero. I think there's a lot of anxiety out there around AI and the future, I was there for a while too. Ultimately I've ended up pretty optimistic about it all, and inspired by what the group at Protocolized is doing, found science fiction a great way to help express that.
When I saw this the other day -- and it just went on and on, like a good human author who was going to write this kind of story probably wouldn't -- I looked for a note that it was AI-generated, and I didn't find it.
All I found was a human name given as the author.
We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.
I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.
I continue to resonate with the Oxide take when I hear this kind of sentiment expressed about AI prose
"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"
https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers
I sadly agree with this sentiment. But to add my own thoughts, I wonder if our “human generation” (all consciously existing today) are just plainly dinosaurs. Like in three decades we’ll have a society that knew LLMs from birth.
As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine.
Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?
> Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets?
Yes, science fiction writers and readers have, since before any of us were born.
2 replies →
Awesome that LLM generated and still an engaging account. Automated testing (as a software improvement technique) is an AI blind spot. That tweak of spec is the iterative cycle, with no mention of additional automated tests is telling.
Your polishing work made a difference! The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.
It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
> The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.
Well, then, you gotta move on to reading better science fiction. Because this is pretty damn bland. I gave up after 2 minutes because of it. Kinda feel vindicated after coming to the comments.
I can see it working for casual readers, which is why it's already an editorial problem. Imagine having to sift through a growing number of faux writers sending publishers AI generated prose.
Hard science fiction isn't known for the quality of its prose. I'm reading something like Starship Troopers or The Martian because I believe the technology and culture depicted in the setting is interesting.
The story didn't mention what had happened to inflation in the meantime. A dozen eggs costs $32.
Huh, I got cottage core, not dystopia!
This was good, but I think it could have been 10% as long and still conveyed the ultimate metaphor you were going after. The specifics about intricate farming details (which are apparently wrong in multiple places, according to other commenters) are ultimately kind of unnecessary IMO.
Interesting work, nonetheless. I’d check out Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms for more of what I mean. They are very short, yet very metaphorically dense.
LLM's also do well with writing parables, so try something like: "write a parable about a software engineer battle against the compiler and discovering that letting go of control and letting the compiler help him build better applications. The style can be where the developer is a toad, but also a monk, and the compiler is a snake.". You can do it with any profession ("doctor vs management", "nurse working overtime") and it can write very insightful parables.
"This was the mechanic’s paradox: the cheaper you were relative to the cost of failure, the more your clients needed you; and the more they needed you, the more they resisted the implication that they’d need you again."
This is my common issue from building websites for SMEs. It's not until Google updates their algorithm - killing their ranking and their sales leads slow that you hear from them.
There is wisdom in constantly up-selling to your customers (we offer management services, SEO and are cautiously moving in AIO), they may say no, but you have a fall back that you offered things that would have mitigated their current crisis.
I really enjoyed it and I would like to know more about the editorial process used and how similar it is to the feedback loops and constraints being used for software development. How much of this plot was generated versus specified.
I really enjoyed fantasy part of many small farmers. It felt rustic. However based on my understanding the modern world is moving towards megacorps and economies of scale.
Has moved.
Thanks for sharing. This was an amazing read. I’d love to see novels with similar style stories about speculative near future tech and world.
I am surprised to learn that we live in times where people can write fictional stories this good with the help of AI, this is the first one to me. The future of fiction and story-telling looks very promising.
> Tom pulled up the tool’s specification on his diagnostic display. This was always the first step: read the spec, not the code. Clearly this writer has never felt the frustration of CC telling them a feature was never a part of the plan, because it overwrote the plan and then compacted.
If I understand this, the owner of the text is the tool? If I used a pencil, the writing was authored by the pencil. If I used a typewriter, the writing was authored by the typewriter.
A fun read. I was hoping for the title to have some more relevance to the story, like someone who had handcrafted a piece of software and didn’t want others messing with it! Was that ever part of a draft?
Ugh yeah, I had an aside about the right-to-repair fights still going on indefinitely into the future that I ended up cutting. I kept the title because it seemed like a warning the characters would see on everything they bought, even if they ignored it. I'm sure I'll explore the idea more in the future though, I plan to explore insurance and liability and law at some point too.
Often suggested by optimistic podcast guests these days: the as-yet-unknown new careers that will replace the familiar old ones and thus give employment in the AI era. I think your story is more a commentary on the current AI goldrush than an insight into future careers.
This is such a good written fiction story. Well done. And the best part: I can see myself as Tom.
It summarized the nature of humans today nicely. We are ready to pay any amount nice, but when it gets to subscription mode we are not going to pay even 10x less than the one-time.
I started reading this and it gave a strong whiff of Richard Stallman’s “the right to read” - once dystopian and now a commonplace.
Then I started scrolling and thought the author was just verbose like RMS.
When it just kept going I was just mad to have fallen into the AI tarpit.
Fun idea. 5x too long. I need to calibrate my ai spidey sense better.
I very much enjoyed the read
would you be open to share the process?
That it was largely/mostly generated by Claude adds a certain poignancy to it.
As an allegory it reminds a lot of one I read as a teen: Joshua by Joseph Girzone. Not a literary masterpiece but a cleaver thought-raising story.
This sort of article really needs at least a vague clue as to what it is about.
It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about
It's speculative fiction.
[dead]
[dead]
It's worth reading. It's about AI.
I posted this before it came out that it was AI-generated. I still thought it had some interesting stuff in it and would say I don’t regret having read it. But is it worth reading? Not as sure.
Having read most of it, I don't agree that it's worth reading. A bunch of made-up technical jargon and situations that never happened to frame specific problems that are part of the made-up situations using more jargon, in a farmer-centric area. It was a waste of time and a waste of concentration to try to make sense of it. There was no learning, nor was it worth quoting, nor comparing to anything else.
1 reply →
The (very clearly AI-generated) watercolors were an immediate sign to be wary of this. But I read it because I liked the first paragraphs.
The prose is decent, I like the premise, thought provoking idea.
One issue though: I had to use firefox' reader mode, because the contrast between text and background was terrible.
It’s a neat piece of writing, but not nearly dystopic enough for my taste. There will only be one farm and whoever is fixing it will be on the other side of the world.
Yawn. I'm tired of dystopian fiction. We're likely to get something that is neither dystopia nor utopia, but somewhere in between.
I think that's the point, and it's refreshing to see. My takeaway is that even if everything goes as good as it possibly could go, there will still be a need for that human touch.
Just saying that everything is going to go to shit and one or two corporations will take over everything... Maybe, but I've heard that story already.
Dystopians are too easy. The real challenge and reward are interesting utopian novels.
All good stories set in utopias are set in places that are secretly dystopias.
My favorite part was the illustration from inside the car. The rear-view mirror clearly shows un-mirrored store signs.
Prompts in, garbage out.
I used to live in Marshfield WI. It's kind of jarring to see it mentioned "in the real world", the the extent that HN resembles that.
So, in the past, your stories were warrant-eed? But no longer?
excellent story, it was both interesting and mildly terrifying. to think that one day software could be malleable seems so wrong to me - you would think having deterministic results is important for programming - and yet with "vibe coding" that really seems to be where it's going.
The whole reason it is called software is because of its malleability :)
this is such a beautiful essay. thank you op for posting. made my day :)
I can see this future happening!
man, what a nice novella, llm warts and all
I don't oppose reading AI generated content in principle, but because it's free to generate, I always am less likely to read super long prose that is AI generated. So the question is whether someone has taken the time to keep it as long as necessary but not longer. Or if there are ways to make it easier for me to commit to the experience, with a sort of TLDR
This comment thread sure is a wild ride
It’s really been interesting since 2022 watching the gesticulations of the population around this idea of content generation aka “AI”
If one thing shines clear through it’s human irrationality and incoherence
It’s really just an infinite repeat of Chris Farley‘s reaction to the coffee crystals prank (1); millions of comfortable software engineers sitting in their well manicured spaces not starving to death, not struggling to survive, all morally offended when they learn something that they enjoyed turns out was not generated by a human.
1: https://youtu.be/VdQKVDUBu2g
There are always bugs in software. The question is do you have enough eyes on the data to spot them or do they linger for years.
AI slop must be crushed.
with the speed of llm/ai improvement, this too maybe steamrolled
this was a ridiculously pointless story, I stopped after the second paragraph and came here to ask politely what was the point of it
what was my surprise when I read it was AI-generated
I was going to say the author should try writing fiction because it’s quite engaging, then I realised it’s just AI slop.
It explains why it kind of lost its way towards the end. Another thousand hours of everyone’s time wasted by a slop poster.
A few months ago, I asked Grok for a piece of fiction set in the cyberpunk 2077 universe. A cremated incredible story about a braindance that was actually stealthily programming the watcher through a back door in the watchers own implants to transmit a AI from beyond the black wall, allowing the AI to escape into the physical universe through the braindance’s audience. Excellent.
I stopped to read because I had the feel that the writer has no plan about what he was writing. It's completely bullshit. Software regenerating, changing Requirements in a product thats delivered and comes without source. Completely bullshit. When I now read here that it's AI, I'm happy to see that AI is still not capable of writing senseful texts.
I'm disappointed, as the Google result showed "warranty void if regenerated" in the description and I thought HN had started serving witicisms for the desciption
it's crap. you all need to go outside
[dead]
[dead]
Did this story disappear then re-appear?
Yes, which is why some of the comments are from a day ago but the post is only a couple of hours old. We originally downranked it due to being AI-generated.
But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.
We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.
> But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.
I can't say I agree, at all. This is essentially just your average post on Facebook or Linkedin made relevant on HN through telling a story about software mechanics. I don't find it interesting to 'read' collaborations between human and AI bots there and I would greatly prefer it if they don't infest HN as well.
1 reply →
"it's boring to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this."
FTFY
3 replies →
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
I appreciate the question and I think the answer is much longer and more nuanced than can really effectively fit into this form factor. I think this question is getting asked right now about all art forms because of AI and from a lot of different people.
My short answer to “why should I care about the mathematical model output from the human artistic input” is “I think we’re all figuring that out right now!” And I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t “you shouldn’t care at all”. Especially if the mathematical model output from the human artistic input expresses what the human wants to express at a quality level that passes that human’s “Taste Gap” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI)
I’m sure we could go back and forth about this a lot (and happy to keep this conversation going, I truly do feel like exploring and discussing, this is very interesting to me!) so happy to dig into any aspect with you :)
I will say that I think what’s happening is that we’re seeing more people explore art forms that couldn’t before because of mechanical skill gaps, and that’s interesting in the same way that synthesizers and sampling and software instruments did to music or I imagine digital art tools did to physical art, and I imagine digital photography did to photography which did the same to painting. It’s an interesting time to be alive!
but ai doesn't bridge a mechanical skill gap in this instance. there was nothing stopping you writing this story or drawing those pictures. juxtaposing language models against synthesizers chopping up discrete samples is just not a fair comparison. by prompting ai, one does not even remotely serve to fully engage their imagination in producing creative output (the dictionary definition of art). yes you could be seen to be using a tool to make art. in this instance, using that tool is an act of outsourcing your imagination to the distilled creativity of humanity. at this point the definition of tool must be reduced to I/O alone.
regarding your personal input, this is an order of magnitude less imaginative compared to tapping some keyboard keys. it's not your imagination that produced the majority of this story; it's unfair to claim any aspect of this process except your prompts. which is why i asked for the prompts. im not here to hate on your artistic expression, just as im not here to listen to the sum total of humanity's creativity that has been poked and prodded into maximising shareholder value. some people might be interested in that - frankly i doubt they would be, if they empathized with a painter or writer or producer (or had any clue how easy it is to manipulate humans). me myself, im here for your creativity and yours alone. not that of anthropic (who, like other AI companies, stole it).
by pushing out this work, theres nothing stopping you from having inadvertently acted as a conduit for a corporation to deliver its message. how do you know that you havent accidentally pushed out a work with hidden messages embedded within? do you know how good llms are at encoding and decoding hidden meaning?
FWIW, I read it before I learned that it was AI-generated, and I enjoyed it and thought it's possibly insightful.
[dead]
First thing on the page is an AI slop image. Domain blocked.
Based. I need to use domain blocking more.