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My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

Be the change you want to see :)

I've created myself a pre-commit harness hook to explicitly discard superfluous or too lengthy comments. Within code-review I also added comment review as blockers

Have you considered talking about it? You're in a professional environment collectively working in a new way with a group of people. It's up to somebody to have opinions about what does and doesn't suck. If you silently go along and don't say anything you're dooming yourself and all of us to a lifetime of this garbage.

My team uses a Claude Code hook that blocks any comment more than 2 lines long, and when tripped it encourages the agent to rewrite the comment more concisely and focus only on the "why" not the "what" of the code. I've found this extremely useful for code reviews.

Two very useful directives to give AI when it comes to documentation:

1) Document what's there, not the diff. Documentation of how code was removed or changed to fix a bug or add a feature is not useful and difficult to maintain; documentation should explain how code works now.

2) Documentation should live close to the source as possible. Prefer line based comments and standardized function documentation. Top-level sweeping architectural essays are not maintainable for every change.

The last will depend on your codebase. It CAN be very useful to have a human-readable spec documented for the entire program and have it updated when anything changes. But the key is again, you're CHANGING it every time. If you add a whole new disconnected documentation file it should set off alarm bells; nothing in one system is truly disconnected.

And the tests. Oh god the tests. Personal recent favorite: I asked for some changes to a Dockerfile, which it did ably, and then promptly tested by writing a pytest module that traversed up to the root, read the Dockerfile, and checked that the added lines were present.

I told someone this week, who (or whose AI) chose to do a problem the hard way that it's usually a bad sign if you need more comments than code to solve a problem, and then suggested a couple lines of code that accomplished the same thing and used, are you sitting down? MEANINGFUL VARIABLE NAMES to document the purpose of each calculation.

I wonder if I can get a MacArthur grant for this epiphany...

I have five enforcement mechanisms: 1000 line max edit, PR comment character limits (get to the point of your description), ISO 24495 conformance check, and enforced code line citation that must exist, be a function declaration for the start of all paragraphs and inline commentary must be three lines or less and inline comments contribute max 10% of the PR. Fail any of these, automatic PR denial with no human intervention.

Prune the comments? Instruct the LLM to print less comments (this one is genuinely hard though). What's really happening is that you don't have a strong enough review process (or a code standards process) to offset this. The one issue I see with this is that your team is almost certainly _NOT_ doing any kind of code review (especially if they're leaving comments like that). The other problem is that excessive comments actually harm LLM output, I've done tons of A/B testing, and pruning comments actually helps LLMs spot bugs, among other things.

I think your last sentence is getting close to the truth. You're no longer the audience for those descriptions. Other robots are.

I'm not saying that's good or bad because I don't know, but I think that's the idea of dumping all that junk into PR descriptions.

However, annoyingly, we still need to review those descriptions very closely, because the robots are trained to put a lot of weight into things they read in the documentation. And they tend tospresent loose speculation as fact. They often end up documenting some assumption that isn't true, then end up writing code as if it were.

It's like people didn't realise that it was unmaintainable before and now we have a new level of unmaintainability. The insane amount of code produced means it's only maintainable with AI.

Honestly, if you saved a ton of hours with the model coding for you, at least give me 30 minutes of your own words, show me you know what you're shipping, if you can't do that, then I don't know if I want to approve the PR. My first job we always did peer review in a meeting room when a PR looked a little too much, you can't exactly bring in GPT into a meeting so its a good time to ask simple questions about the change to ensure you understand it just as much as they do.

Congratulations: now only AI can iterate on your codebase!

It's a code review, right?

Give feedback that about the docs and block merging till the issue is resolved.

I have my agent write up a summary of the diffs that land each day in my org. If there is something you interesting I’ll ask for an html explainer with code pointers and scan the code in parallel.

I wouldn’t say “post reading code” but it’s definitely trending in that direction.

I’d rather the agents put jumbo verbose descriptions in the PR description than in code comments TBH.

You forgot the smoke tests that passed.

Honestly, I’ve stopped caring about code readability for a few months now. I want the code readable _to the agent_ not so much to me.

I don’t trust it with code anyway - every feature needs comprehensive test, and then a live deploy on a real working test system before it is approved - I mostly measure success with - after deployment is it doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s like “helping another team managing their work stream” experience rather than coding yourself.

Funny enough models seem to have personalities and the dis on each other - when I had an opus orchestrator dispatching fable workers, they would comment on how “unreliable” it was and it had “evidence to prove it” and fable thinks opus is too rigid and needs more hand holding… it really starts to feel like managing team egos and verifying work. And I code scan mostly to just spot check if it’s not doing anything super stupid. But my goal is to make sure anything shipped is easy to change and fix, and every mistake has a test behind it so it doesn’t happen again.

I ship more problems, but they get discovered and fixed quicker. Before they reach prod of course. And from time to time you do reorganisation and refactoring passes where I brainstorm how things could have been better with the help of evidence- chat sessions, tests, bugs etc.

It feels less like rigorous engineering and more like gentle gardening. Or like “project management” not “coding”.

Honestly given my age now I’m fine with that. Have enough “hard” projects under my belt (ORMs, sql parsers, etc) that I don’t feel I need to prove anything to anybody, but I don’t think that’s even relevant- the velocity change is … I guess around 5-10x for me - with provable metrics, so I try not to lent the good old days but figure out how I can now live in this brave new world and be happy with my work.

Most ai output is meant for other ai's to read, in my experience. The humans job is to compress it for humans

Am I the only one who's had Claude almost systematically remove human-written comments?

It might be touching one line of actual code in a file, and take advantage of it to remove 20+ lines of actual useful comments.

Everybody is talking about the opposite, so I'm wondering if this is rare.

I think at this point all the info added by AI which certainly would be too much to read for every PR, it just serves the purpose of context for the next action. Which it could be good or bad depending on how big of a window of context you are working on

I'm looking forward to when AI labs focus more on conciseness of code and writing.

I dump AI output in PRs, because it ads context for the AI reviewer.

With one colleague, I was leaving PR comments and he would just put my feedback into the AI and paste its response. So I decided to cut out the middleman and now I just @cursor and tell it to trim unnecessarily long comments.

> I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed.

My worry is that after several passes this compounds and starts introducing errors or biases, a bit like in the "telephone game" children play.

> My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading.

They're just helping you understand the whole picture!

> Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name.

You futilely grasp for control and it eludes you. The Way is to ride the tides of life, move with the forces that shape you. Your code base is in the hands of the Machines now.

Just wait until you see vibe contracts, vibe requirements and vibe legal documents

You use AI to summarise it! That's the way to go lol

I always as for CONCISE documentation.

still get walls of text sometimes

I address it with AI.

Write REVIEW.md.

I have CC check itself pretty well.

I also put into agent/claude/review instructions to write using simple English skill and humanizer skill. Then not to write redundant comments.

It’s not perfect but definitely catches lots of slop.

> perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass

Yes, that's the entire point. And it is extremely useful. Why wouldn't I want this?

It is extremely annoying when you have a certain problem that surely should have someone making a solution for it and then you find a blog post. And in the end blog post doesn't actually solve the issue as it does has final step. But actually never implemented the most important middle bits. Thankfully I found someone who had actually solved that middle bit in workable hack. But still those blogs are really annoying pollution.

My question is always, "Am I willing to maintain this code?"

Sometimes that's a yes, even if AI generated it and I can tell despite someone making half an effort to be a human for a minute during the PR process. But sometimes it's not.

It gets really dicey when you've kept an architecture a certain shape because there's a difficult feature you intend to slot into the negative space. There are two or three ways to implement that feature, and the one they chose just stomps all through your potential. But that's why we have code reviews. You don't have to read my mind if I just tell you. But it can be frustrating if someone asks you to do it a different way, and then has comments on how you accomplished that, and then comments on the fixes for your other comments.

I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation.

LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say.

They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1]

So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person.

Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link".

But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content.

(And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.)

> If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.

To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.

It's like when you type a search in Google and get a wall of SEO spam.

I do feel like there is some middle ground where AI helps, but there's this one guy who keeps emailing everyone with walls of dumbass text and does not integrate or understand the feedback he gets when we are telling him what he needs to do. He just runs it though the LLM and replies and then forgets half of it in the next email engagement which functions as /clear on his end apparently. Like... dude I have ChatGPT and Claude, too. Actually read your goddamn emails.

People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.

A few thoughts.

- I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection.

- I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response.

- In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify.

- The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.

What's astonishing to me is how quickly people at my workplace have adopted this habit. Six months ago my manager was vociferously complaining about his boss asking him to review a lengthy document that was clearly AI generated, saying that his boss wasn't even capable of understanding the document the LLM had created. Now the majority of technical communication I get from my manager is just a transcript exported directly from ChatGPT.

Recently on a call with a junior coworker where they asked me to look at some changes they had made, they were completely unable to answer any questions that I asked on their own. The way the conversation went was: I ask a question, they type my question into a ChatGPT prompt, we read the output together and discuss whether it makes sense. This is a person I've had great discussions with in the past, and who has frequently had really good insights, but seems to have completely tapped out.

To be fair, the outputs from ChatGPT tend to be quite good. It's the inputs people give it where problems most often arise - and people seem far too eager to charge ahead with a vibe coded solution built on invalid or incomplete inputs/assumptions. And it's shocking to see how quickly and willingly people have handed over control to LLMs.

There's an old meme tweet that goes like this:

> the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation

This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past.

But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously.

It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.

I completely agree in principle, but to play devil's advocate, if an "author's" prompting technique is better than mine such that they generate a more useful article than what my own AI session might produce on average, then maybe there's value in some generated articles.

The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.

> that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person

There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour (I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them): "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't". My more considered reaction is pretty much exactly the same.

For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI.

I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).

> If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?

You are likely not the target audience anymore and they don't care if you're going to read it.

This is why even if I ask GPT or Claude or whatever to rewrite an email, I still rewrite it by hand with my own words, what I look for is, did the AI remove sentences where I repated myself or that were too wordy? Perfect, I'll ommit those details.

You and I and everyone else need to make it clear to people who do this that we don't like them doing this and we think they are uncool.

Don't get me wrong, I loathe the AI style as the next person.

But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output.

That's an added value

Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read

To play devil's advocate here, it is possible for someone to simultaneously use AI to write and also not be a meat proxy. I'm not saying that is the norm, but I have written docs where the vast majority of the words come from AI, but I also spent multiple days on the substance and content.

Getting an AI response from folks has a very "let me google that for you" kind of feel.

If you're not familiar with the concept... https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy

maybe it's not so absolute. if someone else has the talent or takes the effort to come up with a clever prompt that got an interesting response from an LLM, I'd want to read it too. Treating LLMs as a tool, this is not so different from someone else using Blender to create an interesting animation.

AI;WR

I'd rather read something novel but AI generated, than the opinion I've seen few times already. Like yours.

It takes energy to generate the LLM response. If you read the already generated response instead of generating your own, we burn less coal.

I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that? If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

It is offensive and reviling. But people do it anyway. People are lazy. And often don’t care about you, the reader.

it’s not that it’s ai generated it’s that it’s bad.

Is Ai really any more offensive than the templated influencer slop of the past few years?

If your favourite creator is engaged in generating this style of content, then I think it says more about your tastes than their morals.

Don't smash the like button, don't share and unsubscribe.

ok, what part of the last decade led you to believe that communication decency has radically improved.?

while i might not have written it, i used my masters in prompt engineering to carefully guide its creation :)

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six

It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale.

None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself.

Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question.

Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination.

People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway.

No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.

i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc

How is this? https://claude.ai/share/99bfee0f-bab9-4593-aabb-377e71f1151d

The prompt is the whole chat history. It would be like 10~20 times longer than the final output if the author gave the slightest amount of shit.

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?

I used to do that, but the person could be bad at prompting too (which is often why the LLM couldn't give a good answer in the first place).

So the polite version I use now is: "Hey, just to get a bit more context, what was the original problem you were trying to solve?".

That gets them to distill their own problem a bit further.

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.

Somewhere in that wall of text is a single statement that might sink the entire project...

Not all AI content was created with one prompt.

I like how some people take offence at that

Yeah, my post is more than a year old at this point: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

A lot of people replying seem to be misunderstanding, though. The only point of human-to-human communication is to transmit thoughts from one brain to another. If you simply send me stuff from AI then I don't need you. I want to hear your thoughts. If you don't have any, then I don't need or want to hear from you. Your thoughts are entirely contained within your prompts. Just send me those.

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.

That implies you think the output of an LLM is only a rewording of the prompt, and that it doesn't add anything from it's corpus of training data. That's obviously untrue.

Thank you. Felt like I was stuck in a time loop.

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.

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)

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.

________________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

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.

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.

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.

It's late and you've already done what most people aren't doing — go rest.

You've addressed a load-bearing seam.

You’ve hit your session limit

You're absolutely right

Now I have the full picture

Google Gemini is experiencing high load at the moment.

This bit in particular

> 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.).

I stopped reading there.

this is based on actual measurements, not just guesswork

I get this reference

You hit the nail on the head.

I appreciate the pushback!

You closed the gap

genuinely amazing

Love the em-dash. Chef's-kiss.

That’s the shape of it

here's a honest take

that's load-bearing

and honestly—that's the seam right there.

Before LLMs came around, it took quite a bit more effort to write something than to read it. So the fact that someone had taken the time to create something was a signal that they thought it was worth that effort, and so it might be worth my (lesser) effort to read it. And even with that filter there was a lot of human-created crap out there.

I value my time. With a LLM, it takes very little effort to create a vast mountain of crap that will take a lot of time and effort to read through. True, it is also possible to use LLMs as a tool while creating things that are not worthless. But the fact that someone has not taken the time to make their thing not sound obviously AI-generated is a strong signal that it will not be worth my time.

Sourcing ideas just seems so weird… if you don’t have an idea about what to make, then just don’t ?

Then put the report in AI and have it read it . that is the only appropriate response

Even worse: cover letters, presentation letters, even CVs themselves are routinely read by AI, at least in the screening phase.

I left a comment on some of my interns, clearly AI generated code and response asking for him to please not respond with AI generated output — the response was talking about things I had known he was unfamiliar with because I had worked with him. The response itself had some particular formatting/content decisions that were generally a very odd way for anyone to write, but certainly not an intern. He responded that he did write this himself and that he was upset I would accuse him, etc.

I, of course, had no choice but to apologize. I hope I was right, but clearly there is some chance I was wrong.

Pangram does a decent job of AI detection.

Can you read something and tell when an author you like wrote it without seeing the attribution? I can. I think most of us could, because people use certain phrases or have a particular style. That doesn't make it bad.

AI writing isn't actually all that bad. But it has a very specific style, and there are MANY tells. I use Claude every single day, and it's immediately obvious to me when I'm reading something Claude wrote. "It's not X, it's Y" "That's the reframe" "The gap is" I could go on.

I too like using em dashes, and have been since I learned the keyboard shortcut over a decade ago. I've never been accused of posting ai-written text because of it.

AI is indeed trained on good writing, but it's also trained on bad writing. And it's post trained on specific things that are writing that aren't good or bad for reasons unrelated to style. What you're left with is a one-size-fits-all writing style. Doing math? Doing medicine? Doing anime waifu role play? It all starts from the same generic milquetoast style until you tell it not to. And to me (and apparently many other people) that's super easy to pick out.

I know it's AI because the laziest coworker you know just posted 400 paragraphs of text on a minor topic.

It has that feel to it. Hard to describe. It has a very consistent way of writing that gives it away, even if it's rephrase from text that was previously written by a human.

Beyond that, most AI content is WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY longer than it needs to be to get its point across and is oversaturated with unneeded "mic drop" phrases

The problem with AI writing isn’t the tics and the tells. The problem with AI writing is that it’s bad.

The typical highly voted HN AI-written post has an annoying clickbait title, then jumps into a meandering chain of “so there I was” scene-setting, assertions of dubious reliability & relevance, and supposed supporting examples. All punctuated by short, unhelpfully dramatic sentences that would interrupt the high-level narrative, if only there were one.

I’m really curious what “good AI writing” you had in mind. My personal intuition is that for almost any topic, the HN LLM-generated post du jour has a far superior cousin sitting in the archive pre-2021.

I thought the exact same. There is also a growing problem with people using AI to summarize everything instead of reading the actual text. I thought this addressed that issue by having a section for the AI to help summarize or something similar.

Only after switching to Sol did I notice how verbose and smug Claude was. Now I wonder if Claude's at least partly responsible for the AI hate.

This makes me happy to hear that someone got fired for that, but I just cannot picture that happening at my organization. Perhaps standards are too low. What sort of thing did they get fired for? Was there some warning etc?

Yup sooner or later the new heuristic will be quality of comms measured by how short a thing is rather than how long.

Much how like essay's have a word limit - and people think you should max it out.

We will go in the opposite direction - which I'll be glad about!

But they got fired for not being able to explain it, not for using it.

Big fan of "slop-jockies" as a collective term for AI spammers.

but our dwindling attention spans are caused by a deluge of material sapping our energy before we can devote it to something worthwhile. developing a fast and frugal mental filter for insubstantial walls of slop is a new prerequisite for not being so exhausted that you default to saying tl;dr to the real, good stuff.

I hope you posted this ironically.

So? This is about ovious stuff where you notice the typical annoying AI style directly in the first paragraph. After all, 99% of "regular" people use the mainstream models, and anyone who uses a local model probably knows enough about AI that they don't dump raw output on you.

There's been a few. The last one was 2007 when the iPhone changed the internet from a place you went because you wanted to be there and had a reason to engage, into an app meant to entertain you for 5min at a time between text messages and flushing.

DeepSeek v4 flash blew the doors off that fantasy. Even if we switched to tokenomics, models are getting good enough and cheap enough that there's no stopping this train.

tl;dr as the sole reply to someone IS a condemnation of what they wrote. tl;dr at the front of your message with a short summary, is an admission that the long version may not be for everyone and there's a core point for quick consumption.

I'd say that sounds about the same for ai;dr. I could see myself posting a prompt like that in front of the generated report.

I agree, likening it to "TL;DR" is much too charitable. At least when someone wrote a wall of text it was apparent they cared enough about the subject to think about and pay attention to it.

TA;DU: Too ambiguous, didn’t understand

This is LE;DU: low-effort, didn't upvote.

> Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing?

Two reasons:

1. I can't effectively engage in follow-up conversation with the "author." I can't do it with the human (principal) because they didn't write it and can't explain it--and, in fact, they may not even personally agree with all if it!

2. It shifts the cognitive burden from writer to reader. What makes writing hard, and valuable, is the effort put into translating one's raw, unfiltered thoughts into writing that is easy to comprehend, and the writer's own unique personality that is expressed in it. As ambient prose, AI-generated writing is often not only more difficult to read than human-drafted prose, but it also has this "sameness" quality that makes every "author" have the same personality.

> Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing

The purpose of writing is to communicate. The person communicating is an important part of the message.

Consider the sentence "I'm waiting for you at home." It really matters if it's said by your loving wife or an evil clown. You can extrapolate from this.

Imagine a future where 99% of text is written by 1 unpassionate person. Reading the same patterns, the same tropes, the same flow across paragraphs, over and over, would be unpleasant. It already is unpleasant.

The problem is that some people think all AI-assisted writing is prompting "write me a post about X", so they see LLM prose and assume there has been no thought or effort put into it.

Because my time is valuable and if the person who sent me something didn't care enough to write it, then I don't care enough to read it.

Bragging about it is weird, but I will use it like I use 'RTFM'.

And detectability - My AI-DAR (radar), is fairly fined tuned but not perfect, so if I make a mistake, oh well, the point is I'm protecting my time.

In one case, I could tell because the tone of the piece sounded exactly like the kind of stuff I would read after prompting an LLM and I had never heard of the author before, but I knew that they were like an intern or a new college grad and for some reason their piece was trying to persuade employees in a certain field about how they had to use AI itself. It just rubbed me the wrong way because if they did use AI, then they didn't even bother to rewrite the repetitive instances of "it's not X; it's y", and also "This isn't X".

The shape of Claude’s writing style is horrible to read and easy to spot, and that’s a ground truth.

Maybe you haven’t seen enough coworkers send you pages and pages of slop.

> If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"?

It's a reference to TL;DR. If you can understand that, you can understand AI;DR.

> Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing?

Because what the clanker produces is almost always bad output compared to what a capable human would produce. Furthermore, even an incapable human is better than a clanker, because at least humans have intrinsic value that they bring to the table. Finally, it's just plain disrespectful to refuse to take some time to answer a question and hand it off to the clanker.

You submitted thoughtless pap; of course it didn't get any traction.

Why would you think it would?

Fascinating seeing you get irate with people who are giving you feedback that your own thoughts are far superior to the regurgitated "cleaned up" version which is absolute garbage indeed.

You have some solid ideas there but they are very poorly organized. I think you would benefit from a class in writing. I had a month-long technical writing workshop back a couple of decades ago that my company sponsored and it helped me tremendously with starting with wall of consciousness, progressing to writing plan, outline and then editing. It had a very positive impact on my career in professional services where clear communication via documents is an essential part of value prop.

Yeah, I wonder why! /s

I'll take "subpar" human writing, music, art, or whatever any day of the week.

I think the main reason many people (including me), very often, lack the motivation to read content that is likely generated by AI is the suspicion that it comes from a place of intellectual laziness. Another reason, based on personal experience, is that AI content may suffer from too much verbosity, too much jargon and over-confidence, which makes the reading experience feel fake and border-line irritating. In many cases the content may have very little to no nuance, which is ultimately a waste of time.

As an anecdote, someone posted a blogpost on Linkedin on using agents to implement a driver to access PCIe devices over TCP/IP. I was intrigued because that's not an easy task for several reasons, like handling PCIe interrupts and DMA. For exmaple, how does the remote machine map the device's PCIe BARs? And when it issues I/O to the devices registers, how are these reads and writes transferred to the remote device. In the end, this is just some virtual memory. In a local machine, this is either directly mapped to the PCIe physical addresses or some IOMMU virtual address space which is then translated by the hardware upon CPU/device/VM access.

After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc.

Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.

>But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output

did you formerly hire copywriters for this task?

And how could you possibly distinguish those scenarios without wasting all your time?

The problem with copywriters is that they wrote "copy" - which turns out to be writing that I don't want to read. And the problem with AI is that much of what it trained on is copy, so it trained to write stuff that I don't want to read.

So in the end, I don't care if a human wrote it or an AI, I don't want to read it either way.

What's wrong with copyrighters? They write like corporations, not like humans (see the Cluetrain Manifesto for more on this). They sound like nobody - literally inhuman. I don't want to read that. I want to hear a human voice. If I can't hear that in your writing, I don't need to read it.

that is load bearing information, and i won't tiptoe around it.

Example from work.

I described a problem to a new hire. Symptoms, how to reproduce, etc. and asked him to go investigate it, pin down the problem and solve it. It was a non-trivial and hard to reproduce bug.

Instead of doing any of that, he sent back very quickly a wall of text. Generic advice. Nothing relevant. Along with this he sent a PR that would have broken prod.

It was useless, and basically amounted to throwing the assignment back in my face. Since I, like literally everyone else, already have Claude Code, having an expensive person use it for me (slowly and badly) is worthless. In fact, it's negative value, and a huge waste of time. ChatGPT would have given me the same wall of text for pennies.

In the end I got rid of him.

I'm sure he thought I was "intimidated", and had "ego" issues. But he's actually just redundant.

No, that’s not it. Its easy as competent engineers for us to forget how terrible most people are at prompting AI, or reviewing and correcting AI output. Raw output from typical prompts is garbage. If I start reading something that no one even bothered to edit well enough to tone down the AI speak, odds are its garbage and I don't need to spend more time engaging with it than the author did.

Admittedly a controversial take, but I think some of the AI skepticism I see is driven by status anxiety, alongside the perfectly legitimate complaints about verbosity, low-effort output, lack of a human voice, etc.

The bar for what counts as expertise is shifting. If someone with relatively little background can use an LLM to get to a reasonably informed answer much faster than before, then experience and credentials alone carry a bit less signalling power than they used to. That obviously doesn't mean the inexperienced person suddenly has the judgement, context or intuition of an actual expert, but I do think some of the hostility toward AI comes from discomfort with that change.

AI is still wrong, goes in weird circular loops, and doesn't solve the fundamental human problems around judgement, organization, learning curves, accountability, etc. But it does seem to be raising the baseline expectation for what a competent knowledge worker should produce, and I feel that shift is genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of people who based their identities around being rigorous abstract problem solvers.

Reading a copy-pasted AI response feel the same to me as reading a massive wall of text with no punctuation. It may contain valuable information, but it's harder to extract the signal out from among all the noise, and the writing style is correlated with a lack of valuable information, so I generally give up and decide to spend my time reading something else.

Is that an ego issue? Doesn't seem like it to me.

Nah its just bad writing.

Plus I’ve been seeing where AI productivity is highest and it’s been when leveraged by an expert.