Comment by stephbook

15 days ago

> It’s not just inefficient. It’s backwards.

> That’s not fair. And it’s not smart.

The amount of AI slop that makes it to HN is concerning. I don't know whether readers here don't care or don't notice it anymore. Or maybe they are only reading the title and then commenting? My #1 tell is an article that's suspiciously long without any real "story", that is, pictures of someone hacking at a laptop. It's always 20,000 words AI hate, ironically.

1 comment

stephbook

KlayLay 15 days ago

I've found a common giveaway of AI writing to be having many unnatural pauses in sentences. For example,

  A good architect’s most important skill isn’t designing systems. It’s knowing which systems not to build. It’s pushing back on complexity. It’s asking “why?” five times until the actual requirement emerges from the aspirational nonsense. It’s telling the CTO that their conference-inspired idea is a terrible fit for the team they actually have.

A normal person would've used ~2 sentences for this, even if it became a run-on sentence. You can feel the AI being very confident in what the prompter wants to get across, which is ironic, given that this is 2 paragraphs above:

  AI agents are pathologically agreeable. Ask Claude if your idea is good and it’ll tell you it’s good. Ask it if a microservices architecture makes sense for your three-person team and it’ll explain why microservices are an excellent choice. Ask it if you should build a custom ML pipeline instead of using a managed service and it’ll enthusiastically lay out the design.