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67% Positive

Analyzed from 895 words in the discussion.

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#slop#why#don#nobody#should#where#something#writing#article#understand

Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ChrisMarshallNY•about 1 hour ago
> But a demo is not a system. A demo is controlled. The input is clean, the edge cases are removed, and the happy path is selected in advance. Real work has missing data, unclear requests, old records, broken integrations, private context, bad formatting, vague instructions, and exceptions nobody wrote down.

This has been the case for decades. LLMs are just magnifying it.

That's why I feel that an important part of any engineer's development, should be working on shipping product; where they can have firsthand experience with its use "in the wild."

It can be sobering; sometimes, downright depressing.

But it's a great lesson.

ngsevers•about 1 hour ago
This is definitely the case with ERP/accounting systems. AI can make the demo look better, but someone inside the company still has to own each process.

I’ve found that no matter what systems companies implement, behind the scenes they usually still run on spreadsheets. Moving people away from that is where the pushback starts.

pjm331•about 1 hour ago
Nothing teaches you like maintaining something for a decade
killiancarroll•about 4 hours ago
Well put, and I think the problem extends beyond agentic systems to regular software. Someone in an organisation whips up a useful product, publishes it and is now on the hook for bug fixes, feature requests and operations. The maintenance cost is often much larger than the cost of building it now that producing an MVP is so easy.
munchler•about 3 hours ago
It actually extends to all automation, even before computers. Replacing oxen with tractors? Now you have to keep the tractors running.
shibaprasadb•about 4 hours ago
Writing about the operating cost of AI tools while the whole article is a complete AI slop. :)
pjmlp•14 minutes ago
Yes, but I hear devs cannot live without Claude!

The irony.

baxtr•about 2 hours ago
Genuinely curious: How do you know?
N_Lens•about 2 hours ago
So many easy tells, AI, particularly Claude, has a characteristic writing style (Can be alleviated by using smaller/local models).
falcor84•about 1 hour ago
Your comment would've been more valuable if you actually included at least one actual example of evidence.
N_Lens•about 2 hours ago
The promise is AI slop, the reality is HN front page!
8-prime•about 4 hours ago
Whether written with AI or not, I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment that it's AI slop. We too often only categorize between no AI used and AI slop.

Does them using AI to write the article invalidate the points stated in any way? I personally don't think so. I too am weary of constant bombardment with AI but at the same time being against something just because AI was in the loop isn't much better, if at all.

shibaprasadb•about 4 hours ago
I see no issues in articles where AI was in the loop or made the article better than it otherwise would have been. Why not?

But if 100% is generated by AI - and you just prompted it - then I would like to avoid that piece. Personally.

8-prime•about 1 hour ago
Thats a fair take. I think it still holds some value because an opinion does not lose validity simple because its being presented poorly, but I also understand that the importance an opinion has for you, should inform the amount of effort you spend, to share it with others.
hennell•about 2 hours ago
People have always judged ideas on their communication. if u rite lk this bro - I'm probably not going to pay much attention. Conversely if you write in a really formal way for a young audience you probably won't get far either. It's a shortcut of importance; if it's not important to you to communicate your message well, then it's probably not that important a message.

And this article is such Ai slop. You see the sentences? All short. All 'punchy'. All with repetition. All for maximum 'impact'. Constant unrelenting impact.

And the lists! The lists, the rolls, the lineup, the rows, the enumeration, the catalogue of examples that goes on too long for comfort, logic, joy, readability or attention.

I'd love to know how many people actually read all of this. I suspect most started skimming as it's just awkward to read, the pacing is just so Ai-y it's exhausting.

I'm never really sure the author reads things like this - I think they wrote something, asked a Ai to punch it up then skimmed it and said 'lgtm'. If you care so little why should anyone else?

8-prime•about 1 hour ago
I agree with your points, I just struggle with the stance that something is bad simply because AI was in the mix (which tbf is not what you are saying). The writing style is a little too much for my taste as well. At the same time, many of the stylistic choises that LLMs make are not far from how someone who can write well, would express their opinions.
kombookcha•about 3 hours ago
If it wasn't worth writing for the author, it won't be worth reading for you and I. If you have a point to make, putting it into words is part of how you structure and understand it yourself. I would much rather read a point imperfectly made by a person, than a bunch of algo-noise around the fuzzy outline of a point that nobody has thought through.

If you value your finite human time and attention you have to somehow sift through the deluge of slop and the simplest, most effective filter is to immediately ditch anything that fails the slop sniff test. You are not owed readers.

everybodyknows•about 1 hour ago
> slop sniff test

An unexpected challenge being that our sense of smell requires continual readjustment: Heavy use of em-dashes was formerly a "tell", but the AI-masters retrained them, and now they do the opposite. Indeed, there's a general scarcity of any punctuation other than the period.

owebmaster•about 4 hours ago
> We too often only categorize between no AI used and AI slop

We do not. You might have not noticed but we don't discuss the use of AI when nobody notices that AI was used.

8-prime•about 4 hours ago
Yeah of course not. When nobody notices, then there is nothing to discuss. Otherwise it would just be conjecuture. And by that logic anything where AI is noticable would be categorizable as AI slop. Which is exactly what I'm criticizing
Alien1Being•about 2 hours ago
More AI written slop...

Just skip it.

Not worth reading.

jagged-chisel•about 1 hour ago
Flag it
DarkNova6•23 minutes ago
Why didn't I think of this sooner? You are completely right, there needs to be a a way to punish slop. If anything, it should lower the rating for website in the future as well.
aetherspawn•about 2 hours ago
Came here to figure out why this Ad has 30 upvotes…
wseqyrku•about 2 hours ago
If I were working in marketing and I wanted to increase utilization of the nuclear power plant next door, I would wipe 50 years of computer science and introduce "agent programming" and pretend it's the future. What are the odds people would buy it? Hit send.
falcor84•43 minutes ago
There's a lot that could be said against agentic programming, but I don't understand how it wipes away anyway about CS - everything about this is a massive tower built on top of (and effectively utilizing) everything that we've learned about CS fundamentals and engineering over these decades.
wseqyrku•11 minutes ago
>but I don't understand how it wipes away anyway about CS

Because transformers is a mathematician's take on programming. Not your CS graduate.