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- Hacker News
- AI—DRby pavon
- Love the em-dash. Chef's-kiss.by Applejinx
- I get this reference
- Google Gemini is experiencing high load at the moment.by sethops1
- Now I have the full pictureby hamdingers
- You're absolutely rightby armanj
- You’ve hit your session limitby GPerson
- It's late and you've already done what most people aren't doing — go rest.by phito
- You've addressed a load-bearing seam.by orc00
- One of the ways I think about this is to treat AI as if it were another person. If I want to give information to Bob but I think Alice might do a better job of writing something, I'm not going to ask Alice and then copy-paste her response to Bob. I'd either tell Bob to ask Alice, or loop Alice into the conversation. Me being the middleman between Alice and Bob can cause several issues including delayed communication, miscommunication, and obscured provenance.
Alice being AI or a real person doesn't change those factors much.
by hatthew - I think this is a reasonable position, I prefer when people separate their words from their agent's words clearly, but I don't have a problem with reading stuff other people's agents wrote if the input to the writing was really good. I don't need to see the prompt, not having your agent Cyrano me is enough.by CuriouslyC
- 3 years ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35638229by slybot
- For me the bar is still quality. Sure it bothers me if I search for something and find a crappy AI written tutorial that answers none of my questions, but if I found a high quality well written, insightful, and informative tutorial, I would not care if it were AI written.
I guess the same thing goes for articles written by humans. I don't really read the articles that are "Shower thoughts that I think are profound" or "The way I do things is the way everyone should do things"
There is a fairly common wisdom that the way you get good at writing is by writing a lot, I'm prepared to cut people a lot of leeway at people putting all of the stuff out there before they are good at writing. It's just the path you have to take. That's OK, because I don't have to read it.
And I'm fine with people making crappy AI generated tutorials while they figure out how to make better AI generated tutorials. I am not fond of people who are creating bulk content by volume without any regard to quality or improvement. Some may be doing this to make money, and maybe that works, I suspect for the most part it doesn't. I don't appreciate it though, whether it be AI or human produced bulk content.
I'd spare a thought for those who feel that they are producing high quality content when they are not. Everyone has a poor perspective on something sometimes. Usually the harshest punishment they will face is the feelings their future selves experience when they look upon their work with a more balanced perspective.
by Lerc - I agree, but a lot of people don't.
I have coworkers who say they will stop reading something if they believe it is AI.
For them, it's not about quality, it's laziness disguised as righteousness.
by jappgar - Don’t be a meat proxy [0] is another one I like
- If some text is AI written as a response to a much shorter prompt, then the prompt and/or sources used to make the text should be published instead (or at the very least together with the text).by sega_sai
- The infinite monkey theorem[1] can be applied to show that AI is not incapable of producing quality output. However, expecting your audience to sort through the output from a very large quantity of monkeys is not respectful. I think the best approach would be:
"Here is the prompt and model I used, here is the portion of the output that stuck out to me as relevant and useful, and here, in my own words, is why I think that is so."
i.e. Highlight the good part of the output for me and, preferably, explain why you think it's good. Otherwise it's the same thing as posting slop, only with extra steps. You thought it was worth posting and I thought that made it worth looking at, but now I'm sorting through a bunch of monkey garbage looking for what made you think that. Being a different person, I may not find that hidden gem and I may become quite frustrated with you.
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by beloch - I wish I could do a "right-click -> view page source"-like "right click -> view prompt" or like the dark mode toggle (prompt <-> ai slop (expanded)), depending on my mood (although almost everything is in constant dark mode, so I believe I'd look mostly at the prompts)by bessbd
- Funnily enough, for me AI writing is usually the summarizer rather than expander. I would usually give Claude 2-3x the amount of data in notes, context, braindump etc; when doing person-to-person communication, using AI to _expand_ the context rather than shrink it is doing everyone a disservice.by zirkonit
- I think of a prompt more like a tweet. The medium does matter. If someone was only willing or able to put an abbreviated amount of thought and effort into something, it's not worth a disproportionate amount my time or attention.
- "please walk our observability stacks, our IaC code and config, our cloud account, and our application codebases to gather an RCA for for any errored out request responses we've been producing this week. include a tabulated breakdown."
~actual prompt i sent in to claude last week. doing what you propose would be basically impossible / nonsensical, and further undo the entire exercise, sending all the money spent on the tokens down the toilet.
put differently, if you use agents in any actually useful manner, the principle you describe erases whatever value they did end up providing. though since the whole underlying premise is that ai never provides any value, maybe that's the intended result and is as expected. in which case, i'd argue such a desire is more than a bit demagogue.
by perching_aix - I had to do this with my boss. He sent an email saying he asked AI about an assignment he gave us, then sent us the reply from the LLM. It was verbose and lacked any and all awareness of the constraints we have within the company. The assignment was poorly defined from the outset, and I asked for the prompt he used, because I thought that would be far more useful to understand what he was looking for rather than what AI decided to spit back.
It turned out his prompt was equally uninspired... 1 or 2 sentences. That was the thought he put into it, which then had us spending hours trying to figure out the AI reply. He could have saved the whole team a full day by just sending the prompt... or nothing at all.
by al_borland - by jannyfer
- Thank you. Felt like I was stuck in a time loop.by Fantosism
- > Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.).
Sounds like this isn't everyone, but rather, it's people who have nothing to say, and -- even after they've "sourced ideas" -- they don't know how to reason about it, nor how to communicate it.
This isn't everyone. This is people engaged in generating noise, for the sake of noise.
by neilv - I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.by cortesoft
- Many people use many prompts and revisions or prompts or combinations or human and AI writing. Its not a simple as just making a single prompt and copying the output as the blog post.by paulpauper
- Somewhere in that wall of text is a single statement that might sink the entire project...by hinkley
- i personally prompt to produce a baseline then re-prompt to tweak then re-re-prompt to re-order, then re-re-re-prompt to expand certain parts, then re-re-re-reprompt to properly cross reference internally , then re-re-re-re-reprompt to proof read and add missing references . so there is no single prompt that produced the document and if i were to start from scratch the path would likely be different.by coderatlarge
- Would you prefer a 10k word discussion with an agent about a hypothesis with back and forth over data sources and such, analysis, etc, or a 2000 word AI essay condensate with the rough edges smoothed over manually?by CuriouslyC