Comment by bandrami
25 days ago
It's not eliminating toil, it's externalizing it from the writer to the reader.
If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader enough to just give me the prompt you used rather than the output.
In a lot of my AI assisted writing, the prompt is an order of magnitude larger than the output.
Prompt: here are 5 websites, 3 articles I wrote, 7 semi-relevant markdown notes, the invitation for the lecture I'm giving, a description of the intended audience, and my personal plan and outline.
Output: draft of a lecture
And then the review, the iteration, feedback loops.
The result is thoroughly a collaboration between me and AI. I am confident that this is getting me past writer blocks, and is helping me build better arcs in my writing and lectures.
The result is also thoroughly what I want to say. If I'm unhappy with parts, then I add more input material, iterate further.
I assure you that I spend hours preparing a 10_min pitch. With AI.
(This comment was produced without AI.)
Great example. Just give me the links you would give to the LLM. I also have an LLM and can use it if I want to, or I can read the links and notes. But I have zero interest in reading or hearing a lecture that you yourself find too tedious to write.
Performative nonsense.
You have less interest in sifting through multiple articles and wiki pages sent to you by a stranger with a prompt than the one paragraph same stranger selected as their curated point.
And pretending like you’d act otherwise is precisely the kind of “anti ai virtue signaling” that serves as a negative mind virus.
AI is full of hype, but the delusion and head in sand reactions are worse by a mile
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Because it’s not totally clear from your comment: what part are you contributing in this process?
The original comment was saying that the AI would be both the writer now and the reader, in future. That's how the toil is eliminated. Instead of reading or searching through a series of release notes, you can just ask questions about what you're specifically looking for.
> If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader
"If comprehending something is too tedious for you..."
Seriously, don't jump to indignant rhetoric before you're sure you've understood the discussion.
What's the point of the AI writer in that use case? Just send your prompt to my AI. And for that matter since prompting is in plain English, why not just send your prompt directly to me, and I'll choose to prettify it through an AI or not as I prefer.
The point is that it summarizes the context. It’s an important optimization, because context and tokens are both limited resources. I do something similar all the time when working with coding models. You’ve done a bunch of work, ask it to summarize it to the AGENTS.md file.
The more fully automated agents rely heavily on this approach internally. The best argument against it is that good harnesses will do something like this automatically, so you don’t need to explicitly do it.
Sending you the prompt wouldn’t help at all, because you’d have to reconstruct the context at the time the notes were written. Even just going back in version control history isn’t necessarily enough, if the features were developed with the help of an agent.
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In this scenario the ai _writer _ is redundant.
You might as well publish the prompt you were going to give to the writer and have the ai reader consume that directly.
Assuming you think any of this is a good idea of course. Personally I wouldn’t trust ai to interpret release notes for anything that i cared about
I responded to a similar point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584324
The original commenter was essentially describing something similar to what good agent harnesses already rely heavily on.
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