13 ms·

Warranty Void If Regenerated

• SeriousM 6mo ago
  This is such a good written fiction story. Well done. And the best part: I can see myself as Tom.
• bstsb 6mo ago
  excellent story, it was both interesting and mildly terrifying. to think that one day software could be malleable seems so wrong to me - you would think having deterministic results is important for programming - and yet with "vibe coding" that really seems to be where it's going.
  • sanex 6mo ago
    The whole reason it is called software is because of its malleability :)
• bethekidyouwant 6mo ago
  It’s a neat piece of writing, but not nearly dystopic enough for my taste. There will only be one farm and whoever is fixing it will be on the other side of the world.
  • iwontberude 6mo ago
    Dystopians are too easy. The real challenge and reward are interesting utopian novels.
    • moron4hire 6mo ago
      All good stories set in utopias are set in places that are secretly dystopias.
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 6mo ago
    I think that's the point, and it's refreshing to see. My takeaway is that even if everything goes as good as it possibly could go, there will still be a need for that human touch. Just saying that everything is going to go to shit and one or two corporations will take over everything... Maybe, but I've heard that story already.
  • Legend2440 6mo ago
    Yawn. I'm tired of dystopian fiction. We're likely to get something that is neither dystopia nor utopia, but somewhere in between.
• recursive 6mo ago
  I used to live in Marshfield WI. It's kind of jarring to see it mentioned "in the real world", the the extent that HN resembles that.
• jumpalongjim 6mo ago
  Often suggested by optimistic podcast guests these days: the as-yet-unknown new careers that will replace the familiar old ones and thus give employment in the AI era. I think your story is more a commentary on the current AI goldrush than an insight into future careers.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• hatthew 6mo ago
  A fun read! I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations. Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?
  • gunalx 6mo ago
    I also got a slight feeling of ai assistance as well (especially on the drawings), but the story was well written and really sucked me in all in all.
  • Stwerner 6mo ago
    Thanks! Yeah this was AI assisted. As an experiment I started asking Claude to explain things to me with a fiction story and it ended up being really good, so I started seeing how far I could take it.
    • dazzaji 6mo ago
      I’m pleasantly surprised this was AI assisted so deeply that inconsistencies like that slipped by you. The writing is really extraordinary. It made me want to read for fun again for the first time in decades. Thank you!
      • Stwerner 6mo ago
        Funny, I was talking to a friend the other day about some thoughts on branding and he commented "as someone with a background in marketing & advertising communications, it's wild to watch a software engineer learn the value of branding and marketing from first principles". I guess I'm also learning the value of working with an editor from first principles... over the last couple weeks before publishing I read through and made edits to this piece at least twice a day and still didn't catch this.
• cortesoft 6mo ago
  I do enjoy this sort of speculative fiction that imagines though future consequences of something in its early stages, like AI is right now. There are some interesting ideas in here about where the work will shift. However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier. The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better. We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.
  • andai 6mo ago
    Yeah, in the real world, Tom is already an OpenClaw instance...
    • Stwerner 6mo ago
      Funny I actually saw this tweet this morning about an Openclaw instance getting too advanced for the users to know how to control and fix: https://x.com/jspeiser/status/2033880731202547784?s=46&t=sAqv4O8SV8AEgeXTXGaORg https://x.com/jspeiser/status/2033880731202547784?s=46&t=sAq...
      • Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
        > Funny I actually saw this tweet this morning about an Openclaw instance getting too advanced for the users to know how to control and fix: https://x.com/jspeiser/status/2033880731202547784?s=46&t=sAq https://x.com/jspeiser/status/2033880731202547784?s=46&t=sAq... I feel like this ultimately boils down to something similar to nocode vs code debates that you mention. (Is openclaw having these flowcharts similar to nocode territory?) at some point, code is more efficient in doing so, maybe even people will then have this code itself be generated by AI but then once again, you are one hallucination away from a security nightmare or doesn't it become openclaw type thing once again But even after that, at some point, the question ultimately boils down to responsibility. AI can't bear responsibility and there are projects which need responsibility because that way things can be secure. I think that the conclusion from this is that, we need developers in the loop for the responsibility and checks even if AI generated code stays prevalent and we are seeing some developers already go ahead and call them slop janitors in the sense that they will remove the slop from codebase. I do believe that the end reason behind it is responsibility. We need someone to be accountable for code and we need someone to take a look and one who understands the things to prevent things from going south in case your project requires security which for almost all production related things/not just basic tinkering is almost necessary.
• lelandbatey 6mo ago
  Who can know what the world will look like as we "transition"? I sure don't, but I'm thankful the author here has taken a stab at it. I feel like this is one of the first stories I've seen to try to imagine this post-transition world in a way that isn't so gonzo as to be unrelatable. It was so relatable (the human-ness shining all the brighter in a machine-driven world) that I cried as I finished reading. I've felt very anxious about my own future, and to see one possible future painted so vividly, with such human and emotionally focused themes, triggered quite an emotional reaction. I think the feeling was: > If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.
  • Stwerner 6mo ago
    Thank you for this comment, I'm so glad it made you feel a little bit better about the future, if even for a little while! This is really the whole idea behind this project with Near Zero. I think there's a lot of anxiety out there around AI and the future, I was there for a while too. Ultimately I've ended up pretty optimistic about it all, and inspired by what the group at Protocolized is doing, found science fiction a great way to help express that.
• tengwar2 6mo ago
  There's a bit of a tradition of introducing engineering ideas through stories. I remember a novella which was used to introduce something like MRP II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning) in the 80's. One of the reasons I think it works is that it keeps a focus on the human elements - like why Tom fitted the switch in your story. I remember automating a lab system back in 1985, which would bring in £1000 per day. Two weeks later I found out that the reason it wasn't in use was that the user wanted an amber monitor rather than a green one. I fitted the switch. I don't know if this is what the future will look like, but this looks realistic. And if my non-existent grandson starts re-coding my business without asking, he's going to spend the next six months using K&R C.
• chse_cake 6mo ago
  this is such a beautiful essay. thank you op for posting. made my day :)
• andai 6mo ago
  I enjoyed this very much. But I have to wonder, was this written by Claude? Edit: got it right! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47419681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47419681
  • Stwerner 6mo ago
    Haha well it was me and Claude ;)
    • Syntonicles 6mo ago
      I wonder if it was de-indexed from HN for this reason. 30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.
      • Stwerner 6mo ago
        Yeah I was wondering the same thing. I didn’t realize there was any kind of rule against this kind of stuff
        • pseudalopex 6mo ago
          There was another rule you did not know seemingly. Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • cluckindan 6mo ago
        And now it’s #1 on the front page.
• ethansinjin 6mo ago
  A fun read. I was hoping for the title to have some more relevance to the story, like someone who had handcrafted a piece of software and didn’t want others messing with it! Was that ever part of a draft?
  • Stwerner 6mo ago
    Ugh yeah, I had an aside about the right-to-repair fights still going on indefinitely into the future that I ended up cutting. I kept the title because it seemed like a warning the characters would see on everything they bought, even if they ignored it. I'm sure I'll explore the idea more in the future though, I plan to explore insurance and liability and law at some point too.
• alancosmo 6mo ago
  Push back against AI slop - even if it reads well. Moreso, the author should make it abundantly clear on his website that his shit was written with the help of AI because no one really wants to read that shit.
• jamesvzb 6mo ago
  [dead]
• cactusplant7374 6mo ago
  There are always bugs in software. The question is do you have enough eyes on the data to spot them or do they linger for years.
• helle253 6mo ago
  that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting: - HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north. - not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;) - no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there - i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point. All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
  • CamperBob2 6mo ago
    I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process. Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
    • arcanemachiner 6mo ago
      Kubler-Ross process -> "A model outlining emotional responses to terminal diagnosis or loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance"
      • CamperBob2 6mo ago
        Exactly. The stages don't always occur in order, or at all, but you can see the general progression play out any day, all day on here. I'm happily surprised (frankly amazed TBH) that the submitter didn't get bawled out by people flagging the post and accusing him of posting slop.
    • 6mo ago
• Havoc 6mo ago
  This sort of article really needs at least a vague clue as to what it is about. It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about
  • acuozzo 6mo ago
    It's speculative fiction.
    • SegfaultSeagull 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • shermantanktop 6mo ago
    It's worth reading. It's about AI.
    • shermantanktop 6mo ago
      I posted this before it came out that it was AI-generated. I still thought it had some interesting stuff in it and would say I don’t regret having read it. But is it worth reading? Not as sure.
    • Supermancho 6mo ago
      Having read most of it, I don't agree that it's worth reading. A bunch of made-up technical jargon and situations that never happened to frame specific problems that are part of the made-up situations using more jargon, in a farmer-centric area. It was a waste of time and a waste of concentration to try to make sense of it. There was no learning, nor was it worth quoting, nor comparing to anything else.
      • WolfeReader 6mo ago
        I wish I remembered the source of this quote: "If you didn't take the time to write it, I'm not taking the time to read it." This saved me from reading the story.
• jjmarr 6mo ago
  Your polishing work made a difference! The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read. It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
  • ghewgill 6mo ago
    The story didn't mention what had happened to inflation in the meantime. A dozen eggs costs $32.
  • brianm 6mo ago
    Huh, I got cottage core, not dystopia!
  • ByThyGrace 6mo ago
    > The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read. Well, then, you gotta move on to reading better science fiction. Because this is pretty damn bland. I gave up after 2 minutes because of it. Kinda feel vindicated after coming to the comments. I can see it working for casual readers, which is why it's already an editorial problem. Imagine having to sift through a growing number of faux writers sending publishers AI generated prose.
    • jjmarr 6mo ago
      Hard science fiction isn't known for the quality of its prose. I'm reading something like Starship Troopers or The Martian because I believe the technology and culture depicted in the setting is interesting.
      • ByThyGrace 6mo ago
        Of course! You don't expect them all to live up to Gibson. Doesn't mean you can't look out for authors pushing themselves. Andy Weir's prose may be formulaic but effectively so. Having figured out the thriller side of it is enough of a leap. Like Stross did. More recently qntm has been dropping gems, relevant to our time. Someone like John Ringo managed to write enjoyably written hard scifi (Live Free or Die) that holds up to this day. But this submission? It feels like the writer is trying to enter a spiral which turns out a circle. Ridden with exposition and matter of facts. The dialogue is barren, soulless. I tried to pick it up again, but the more I read the more I want to get out. Its topic being brand new doesn't justify all of the monotony. I'm sorry to the author (orchestrator?); I'm just being earnest.
• girvo 6mo ago
  I will say this is one of the few pieces of prose I've read that was AI generated that didn't immediately jump out as it (a couple of inconsistencies eventually grabbed me enough to come to the comments and see your post details which mention it - I'd clicked through from the HN homepage), so your polishing definitely worked! Quite a neat little story
  • robot-wrangler 6mo ago
    I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set. Not that the writing is bad but it's just derivative. I listen to stuff like "Lost Scifi" podcast almost daily for example, but there are many similar ones which are focused on reading classic stuff from the golden-age zines because it's all public domain. The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.
    • zem 6mo ago
      i'm very familiar with that genre of story, and also not a great fiction writer, so i could well see myself consciously imitating the style if i wanted to tell this sort of story.
    • jjmarr 6mo ago
      It is a pitch perfect interpretation and I assumed that's what OP was going for. Manna (2010) read very similarly.
      • robot-wrangler 6mo ago
        Can't speak for them but FWIW it does not sound like OP is necessarily aware of the genre at all. They asked Claude to explain something via fiction, and then perhaps Claude made the "creative decision" based simply on the availability of the material.
• swordmem 6mo ago
  [dead]
• neversupervised 6mo ago
  I don't oppose reading AI generated content in principle, but because it's free to generate, I always am less likely to read super long prose that is AI generated. So the question is whether someone has taken the time to keep it as long as necessary but not longer. Or if there are ways to make it easier for me to commit to the experience, with a sort of TLDR
• andai 6mo ago
  Did this story disappear then re-appear?
  • tomhow 6mo ago
    Yes, which is why some of the comments are from a day ago but the post is only a couple of hours old. We originally downranked it due to being AI-generated. But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this. We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.
    • WolfeReader 6mo ago
      "it's boring to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this." FTFY
      • tomhow 6mo ago
        Please don’t post snarky, shallow dismissals or use internet tropes on HN. I explained thought process we went through. Nothing on HN is to everyone’s taste. Plenty of people are finding this post interesting and having a good discussion about it.
        • WarcrimeActual 6mo ago
          Please don't have human emotions that you haven't ran through and AI, errr... I mean collaborated with an AI on.
      • imp0cat 6mo ago
        I wanted to agree, but this story is really good.
    • fzeroracer 6mo ago
      > But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this. I can't say I agree, at all. This is essentially just your average post on Facebook or Linkedin made relevant on HN through telling a story about software mechanics. I don't find it interesting to 'read' collaborations between human and AI bots there and I would greatly prefer it if they don't infest HN as well.
• thin_carapace 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • AlexCoventry 6mo ago
    FWIW, I read it before I learned that it was AI-generated, and I enjoyed it and thought it's possibly insightful.
    • thin_carapace 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • Stwerner 6mo ago
    I appreciate the question and I think the answer is much longer and more nuanced than can really effectively fit into this form factor. I think this question is getting asked right now about all art forms because of AI and from a lot of different people. My short answer to “why should I care about the mathematical model output from the human artistic input” is “I think we’re all figuring that out right now!” And I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t “you shouldn’t care at all”. Especially if the mathematical model output from the human artistic input expresses what the human wants to express at a quality level that passes that human’s “Taste Gap” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI) I’m sure we could go back and forth about this a lot (and happy to keep this conversation going, I truly do feel like exploring and discussing, this is very interesting to me!) so happy to dig into any aspect with you :) I will say that I think what’s happening is that we’re seeing more people explore art forms that couldn’t before because of mechanical skill gaps, and that’s interesting in the same way that synthesizers and sampling and software instruments did to music or I imagine digital art tools did to physical art, and I imagine digital photography did to photography which did the same to painting. It’s an interesting time to be alive!
    • thin_carapace 6mo ago
      but ai doesn't bridge a mechanical skill gap in this instance. there was nothing stopping you writing this story or drawing those pictures. juxtaposing language models against synthesizers chopping up discrete samples is just not a fair comparison. by prompting ai, one does not even remotely serve to fully engage their imagination in producing creative output (the dictionary definition of art). yes you could be seen to be using a tool to make art. in this instance, using that tool is an act of outsourcing your imagination to the distilled creativity of humanity. at this point the definition of tool must be reduced to I/O alone. regarding your personal input, this is an order of magnitude less imaginative compared to tapping some keyboard keys. it's not your imagination that produced the majority of this story; it's unfair to claim any aspect of this process except your prompts. which is why i asked for the prompts. im not here to hate on your artistic expression, just as im not here to listen to the sum total of humanity's creativity that has been poked and prodded into maximising shareholder value. some people might be interested in that - frankly i doubt they would be, if they empathized with a painter or writer or producer (or had any clue how easy it is to manipulate humans). me myself, im here for your creativity and yours alone. not that of anthropic (who, like other AI companies, stole it). by pushing out this work, theres nothing stopping you from having inadvertently acted as a conduit for a corporation to deliver its message. how do you know that you havent accidentally pushed out a work with hidden messages embedded within? do you know how good llms are at encoding and decoding hidden meaning?
• nativeit 6mo ago
  > The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop. “You changed your feed tool,” Tom said. “Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?” “Everything.” He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000. Ethan looked ill. -- I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something? [Edited for clarity]
  • cluckindan 6mo ago
    The entire story is AI slop. Tasty and enjoyable slop, but slop nonetheless.
  • cello305 6mo ago
    You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written. The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out. But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts. Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two. Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
• donatj 6mo ago
  I'm trying to sort out my own emotions on this. I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling. It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable. I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.
  • jplusequalt 6mo ago
    I think its a valid emotion to feel. I genuinely resonated with the story, but when I learned it was written by Claude it kind of left me feeling ... betrayed? One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling. So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis. But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra. If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI. In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.
    • CamperBob2 6mo ago
      You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not. This is what the deconstructionists were preparing us for, I guess. The author is dead, and if not dead, then fake. It was never a good idea to tie our sense of meaning to external validation. The humanity immanent in the text came from you, the reader, not the author, and it has always been that way. Language never gave us access to the author's mind -- and to the extent that statement is wrong, it doesn't matter. AI is just another layer of text, coming between the reader and the same collective consciousness that a human author would presumably have drawn on. The artistic appreciation of that text is the sole privilege of the reader.
• furyofantares 6mo ago
  I guess I'm an expert on LLM-isms somehow, I thought they were still plentiful. They're plentiful at the start but get significantly worse near the end, so I'm guessing you spent more time polishing up the first 2/3rds or so. But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste. The story is good.
  • Stwerner 6mo ago
    Thanks! Yeah there were a couple I decided to leave in rather than try to rework as I wasn't trying to hide that it was written with AI, more trying to add more variety to the storytelling. I'm sure as I do more of these I'll be able to recognize them a lot easier. I have been toying with the idea of working them more into character's dialogue in the future, as I've already noticed some people I know speaking in LLMisms.
    • furyofantares 6mo ago
      I'm particularly allergic to LLM-isms, if you look at my comment history I'm constantly complaining about LLM-written text. I am genuinely quite surprised to have read that much LLM-generated text and been happy to do so. I am also extremely interested in thinking about where software development is going, so I really appreciated the ideas that went into this. Since you seem open to feedback, I want to add that I felt the generated images were a negative addition. Maybe they wouldn't be if they also got a little polish - the labels in them were particularly bad.
      • Stwerner 6mo ago
        Ahh cool, I'll dig through your comment history tonight :) I will say, I suspect we're only in the early stages of the LLM's writing equivalent of "autotune" while we all collectively figure out what's tasteful use, what isn't, what it might be like to use autotune as an instrument itself, and then what gets overused. So it'll probably get a lot worse before it gets better. And thanks for the note about the images, I'll take that into account! I only really just started this project and am going to keep iterating as I learn to use the tools better and I find the right visual language for it. Since you seem in the mood to give feedback ;) If you take a quick glance at the previous story, do you feel the same way about the images in that one or was it just this one's that you found particularly unpolished?
• heap_perms 6mo ago
  I liked it. It has a similar feel to an Andy Weir "The martian" type of novel.
• FarmerPotato 6mo ago
  So, in the past, your stories were warrant-eed? But no longer?
• AndyKelley 6mo ago
  it's crap. you all need to go outside
• nailer 6mo ago
  A few months ago, I asked Grok for a piece of fiction set in the cyberpunk 2077 universe. A cremated incredible story about a braindance that was actually stealthily programming the watcher through a back door in the watchers own implants to transmit a AI from beyond the black wall, allowing the AI to escape into the physical universe through the braindance’s audience. Excellent.
• benj111 6mo ago
  I'm disappointed, as the Google result showed "warranty void if regenerated" in the description and I thought HN had started serving witicisms for the desciption
• the_axiom 6mo ago
  this was a ridiculously pointless story, I stopped after the second paragraph and came here to ask politely what was the point of it what was my surprise when I read it was AI-generated
• hmcamp 6mo ago
  I can see this future happening!
• TrainedMonkey 6mo ago
  I really enjoyed fantasy part of many small farmers. It felt rustic. However based on my understanding the modern world is moving towards megacorps and economies of scale.
  • gzread 6mo ago
    Has moved.
• realaliarain74 6mo ago
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• JaxHart260 6mo ago
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• neilv 6mo ago
  When I saw this the other day -- and it just went on and on, like a good human author who was going to write this kind of story probably wouldn't -- I looked for a note that it was AI-generated, and I didn't find it. All I found was a human name given as the author. We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this. I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.
  • CiscoCodex 6mo ago
    I sadly agree with this sentiment. But to add my own thoughts, I wonder if our “human generation” (all consciously existing today) are just plainly dinosaurs. Like in three decades we’ll have a society that knew LLMs from birth. As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine. Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?
    • neilv 6mo ago
      > Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Yes, science fiction writers and readers have, since before any of us were born.
      • CiscoCodex 6mo ago
        I kindly can’t tell if you missed my point. As much as past writers and readers could imagine a version of our present, I also imagine that if they got transported here they would still be in awe of what they saw
• WolfeReader 6mo ago
  My favorite part was the illustration from inside the car. The rear-view mirror clearly shows un-mirrored store signs. Prompts in, garbage out.
• dwd 6mo ago
  "This was the mechanic’s paradox: the cheaper you were relative to the cost of failure, the more your clients needed you; and the more they needed you, the more they resisted the implication that they’d need you again." This is my common issue from building websites for SMEs. It's not until Google updates their algorithm - killing their ranking and their sales leads slow that you hear from them. There is wisdom in constantly up-selling to your customers (we offer management services, SEO and are cautiously moving in AIO), they may say no, but you have a fall back that you offered things that would have mitigated their current crisis.
• danhorner 6mo ago
  I started reading this and it gave a strong whiff of Richard Stallman’s “the right to read” - once dystopian and now a commonplace. Then I started scrolling and thought the author was just verbose like RMS. When it just kept going I was just mad to have fallen into the AI tarpit. Fun idea. 5x too long. I need to calibrate my ai spidey sense better.
• dwd 6mo ago
  That it was largely/mostly generated by Claude adds a certain poignancy to it. As an allegory it reminds a lot of one I read as a teen: Joshua by Joseph Girzone. Not a literary masterpiece but a cleaver thought-raising story.
• m3kw9 6mo ago
  with the speed of llm/ai improvement, this too maybe steamrolled
• furyofantares 6mo ago
  Nanoclaw is the first hint I've seen of new type of software, user-customizeable code. It's not spec-to-software like in the story, but it is rather interesting. You fork it and then when you add features it self-modifies. I haven't looked deeply, but I'm not sure how you get updates after that, I guess you can probably have it pull and merge itself for a while but if you ever get to where you can't merge anymore, I'm not sure what you do. As for spec-to-software - I am still pretty unsure about this. Right now of course we are not really that close, it takes too much iteration from a prompt to a usable piece of software, and even then you need to have a good prompt. I'm also not sure about re-generating due to variations on what the result might be. The space of acceptable solutions isn't just one program, it's lots, and if you get a random acceptable solution that might be fine for original generation, but it may be extremely annoying to randomly get a different acceptable solution when regenerating, as you need to re-learn how to use it (thinking about UI specifically here.) Maybe these are the same problem, once you can one-shot the software from a spec maybe you will not have much variation on the solution since you aren't doing a somewhat random walk there iterating on the result. I also don't know if many users really want to generate their own solutions. That's putting a lot of work on the user to even know what a good idea is. Figuring out what the good ideas are is already a huge part of making software, probably harder than implementing it. Maybe small-(ish) businesses will, like the farmers in the story, but end-users, maybe not, at least not in general. I do think there is SOMETHING to all this, but it's really hard to predict what it's gonna look like, which is why I appreciate this piece so much.
• nirav72 6mo ago
  Thanks for sharing. This was an amazing read. I’d love to see novels with similar style stories about speculative near future tech and world.
• rikschennink 6mo ago
  When I noticed the article header image was generated with AI my interest in reading the article itself dropped to zero.
  • BoredomIsFun 6mo ago
    You might like /r/antiai.
  • avian 6mo ago
    Can you point out what made you think the images were AI generates? I suspected they were (before reading in this thread everything is AI generated), but I couldn't find any of the usual signs. I thought they were AI because I suspected nobody would pay an illustrator/actually spend time making those illustrations for a story like this. The fact that the whole text was AI came as a surprise. I did notice that weird inconsistency about feed pricing mentioned in another comment but just thought the author made an error or I misunderstood something.
    • teraflop 6mo ago
      The combination of a "hand-drawn" art style, with text that is obviously not hand-lettered, is a dead giveaway. It would be very weird for a human to do that. If you have an eye for fonts, the text itself stands out too, at least to me. The font style of "HARTMANN SOFTWARE MECHANICS" is a particular combination of clean, bland shapes and rounded corners that you rarely see in human-designed fonts, but it's super common in AI-synthesized text. I guess it's sort of an average middle ground in the abstract space of letter forms, and the lack of distinguishing features is what creates the impression.
      • avian 6mo ago
        Thanks. That's interesting. I haven't paid particular attention to the fonts. I do draw quite a lot these days but I don't have a particular eye for fonts. I personally have on occasion added software rendered fonts into hand-drawn images. Sometimes instead of directly adding it with a text tool I would add it on a temporary layer and then trace it over by hand. This results in similar looking text with clean shapes and rough lines that fit better with the other parts of the drawing. To me the only thing that stands out in the image is the view through the laundry shop windows. The line of laundry machines doesn't look aligned at a right angle to the window - given that the tiles in front of the window clearly establish perspective lines it's a mistake that seems hard to make and would be pretty apparent in early stages when drawing this. In fact looking closely, the perspective of the building itself doesn't match the perspective of the fields behind it, but I can see myself doing something like this if it's not that noticeable and gives me better composition.
• andreybaskov 6mo ago
  Reading this was a roller coaster for me. Because of a bad habit reading comments before the link I knew it was AI. I read it regardless, and... I still enjoyed it! I'm very much not a writer or a critic, so my definition of good writing is likely very low. Yet I can't shake off this weird feeling that I truly enjoyed the writing and felt the emotions, _while_ knowing it's LLM. I'm guessing that human after touch is what made it pleasant to read. I'd love to see the commit history of the process. Fun times we live in!
• user- 6mo ago
  Around the part where Margaret explains the problem to Tom , and started to feel annoyed. I could tell it was a LLM trying to fit a sci fi novella style of writing. And it was doing a good job , it was certainly better than 90% of posts ive read in the last 6 months. Dont know why that makes me annoyed, maybe cause its the depressing seriousness of being a 'prompter' and the americana framing of it.
• rswail 6mo ago
  I'm very impressed that was written by an LLM. Does that make the OP an "authoring mechanic"? Or an "AI editor"? Douglas Adams had it right, the problem is not that the answer was useless, it was that people didn't know what the right question was.
• KnowFun 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• BatteryMountain 6mo ago
  LLM's also do well with writing parables, so try something like: "write a parable about a software engineer battle against the compiler and discovering that letting go of control and letting the compiler help him build better applications. The style can be where the developer is a toad, but also a monk, and the compiler is a snake.". You can do it with any profession ("doctor vs management", "nurse working overtime") and it can write very insightful parables.
• yaur 6mo ago
  > Tom pulled up the tool’s specification on his diagnostic display. This was always the first step: read the spec, not the code. Clearly this writer has never felt the frustration of CC telling them a feature was never a part of the plan, because it overwrote the plan and then compacted.
• misiek08 6mo ago
  It summarized the nature of humans today nicely. We are ready to pay any amount nice, but when it gets to subscription mode we are not going to pay even 10x less than the one-time.
• paul_h 6mo ago
  Awesome that LLM generated and still an engaging account. Automated testing (as a software improvement technique) is an AI blind spot. That tweak of spec is the iterative cycle, with no mention of additional automated tests is telling.
• timur100x63 6mo ago
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• ninalanyon 6mo ago
  This struck me: "The tool had changed. The domain had not. People who understood the domain and could also diagnose specification problems were the most valuable people in any industry, and most of them, like Tom, had arrived at the job sideways from something else." People my age and older arrived in the software business sideways too; in my case from physics and electronics. My background in physics was a great help to me later when programming in the domain of electrical machines because I could speak both languages so to say. Much grander people than me came into software sideways as I was reminded when reading Bertrand Meyer's in memoriam of Tony Hoare; Tony Hoare's first degree was classics at Oxford. So perhaps we aren't entering a new phase, merely returning to our roots with new tools.
• saint-evan 6mo ago
  I really <i>REALLY</i> enjoyed this article and the direction it took me in. I went in with zero preconceptions, just read it straight through, and only after opening the comments did I realize it was largely AI-assisted. Even then, I was very pleasantly surprised. The piece takes you by the hand and leads you through a very deliberate and directed journey. Sure, there are moments where things wobbled a bit like some explanations around specific failures get a little tangled and even contradictory, but none of that registered as “this must be AI.” I’m only noticing those things now, in hindsight, like oh, that’s what that was. The images hit that sweet spot too. Just enough and few in between to support the plot without getting in the way, just enough to like visually clarify without over-explaining. It all worked together even with minor contradictions around labelling. The inconsistencies wasn't sticky enough to disrupt the plot at all. Over the MY years I’ve seen an idea play out in movies, books, articles, short stories, that the “humanity only unites when faced with an alien intelligence”. What gets me is how people can enjoy something like this, then immediately recoil once they figure it was actually AI-assisted enough to be largely Ai generated. Does that actually diminish the substance of what they just experienced? I don’t think it does but I'm not gonna argue such a subjective stance. Someone in the comments suggested tagging AI-assisted work with sth like an “LLM:” prefix, similar to “ShowHN:”. That feels weird to me. LLMs might not be sentient, but they’re clearly capable enough that the output should stand on its own, alongside the intent and effort of whoever’s guiding it. Pre-labeling it just bakes in bias before anyone even engages with the work. It’s not that far off from asking human authors to declare their race or nationality up front. 'cause really if nothing about my direct experience changed, why should my judgment? In a tech-forward space like HN, I’d expect a stronger bias toward judging things on merit alone. Just read the thing. Let it speak first. I sincerely hope this isn't gonna be an 'LLM vs Humanity' thing 'cause personally, I find the idea of a different kind of intelligence extremely interesting.
  • wedg_ 6mo ago
    I had the exact same experience. It's probably the first time I've read something that (besides the images, which I think are pretty obvious) I didn't think was AI. And while I did feel a little tricked learning it was AI, ultimately it was actually just quite good? I understand why people feel like they need more transparency around these things. Reading for me is intentional, and I feel cheated when I put in the effort to read something for which the author put in little. I would like to think the author put in a lot of effort for this story despite AI assistance, and so it was worth me putting effort in. But whether that's true or not I still felt like I got something out of it (hard not to as a software engineer wondering about their place in the world), and that's something.
• froh 6mo ago
  I very much enjoyed the read would you be open to share the process?
• dawdler-purge 6mo ago
  The LLM-ness isn't a hard problem to fix. Break it into sections, run each through an LLM a few times to catch logic issues, use different AIs to double-check. For the writing style, if the author just read it carefully, they can definitely spot the things Claude keeps repeating, and tell it not to do that. But honestly, the ideas here are really good. The cascading failure from a weather model update, the spaghetti problem with forty tools nobody designed as a system, the $4 toggle switch being the most important tool --- that's sharper thinking about AI than most serious essays on the topic. A lot of people who publish regularly can't write to this level of thinking. The prose could be cleaner, sure, but it made me think, which is more than most stories do.
• keiferski 6mo ago
  This was good, but I think it could have been 10% as long and still conveyed the ultimate metaphor you were going after. The specifics about intricate farming details (which are apparently wrong in multiple places, according to other commenters) are ultimately kind of unnecessary IMO. Interesting work, nonetheless. I’d check out Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms for more of what I mean. They are very short, yet very metaphorically dense.
• fishbacon 6mo ago
  The (very clearly AI-generated) watercolors were an immediate sign to be wary of this. But I read it because I liked the first paragraphs. The prose is decent, I like the premise, thought provoking idea. One issue though: I had to use firefox' reader mode, because the contrast between text and background was terrible.
• krater23 6mo ago
  I stopped to read because I had the feel that the writer has no plan about what he was writing. It's completely bullshit. Software regenerating, changing Requirements in a product thats delivered and comes without source. Completely bullshit. When I now read here that it's AI, I'm happy to see that AI is still not capable of writing senseful texts.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• lordleft 6mo ago
  One thing I'll note about this is that the writing reminds me of the much contested "MFA workshop" style that has launched a thousand think pieces. --- The story was decent! I thought it was insightful and it made me reconsider some aspects of AI use. I am skeptical that an AI could write something on par with the Iliad, or Anna Karenina -- but perhaps I will be disabused of that notion someday. Still, this is a level of quality I am surprised to see to come out of an AI (though, as in your story, the LLM seemed to require its own "choreographer" in the form of your editing and polishing). Very thought provoking.
  • Stwerner 6mo ago
    That's a great point about the choreographer. Hopefully I'll be able to afford one some day...
• hmokiguess 6mo ago
  Folks labeling "AI generated" might be jumping the gun considering OP described his process took him the last couple months and then some for this project. Call it what you want, but I think this sits better with "AI assisted" and, perhaps, really well supervised full of the human intent behind of it. Then again, labels are strange, we call algorithmic and synthesizer assisted music "electronic" music these days and we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft. I could definitely feel the connection between the human author side of this post, thank you for sharing it!
  • petcat 6mo ago
    > we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft. There are still plenty of purists that will not consider this a "craft". But it's always been that way. The electric guitar itself was a controversial music transition. Bob Dylan was famously criticized heavily for going electric. But that was a long time ago, and people got over it. And they will again this time.
    • wbl 6mo ago
      Dylan going electric was not about instrument choices. It was about abandoning the radical folk music tradition that Seeger, Guthrie, etc. had revived.
      • petcat 6mo ago
        It absolutely was about the instrument choice. Because folk music had strong norms about acoustic authenticity. Going electric at the time was seen as "commercialized" and "mass produced". We see the parallels with what some perceive as "slop" today.
        • Throaway1975123 6mo ago
          Dylan went electric for money purposes. That was the big betrayal.
• MagicMoonlight 6mo ago
  I was going to say the author should try writing fiction because it’s quite engaging, then I realised it’s just AI slop. It explains why it kind of lost its way towards the end. Another thousand hours of everyone’s time wasted by a slop poster.
• p-o 6mo ago
  This is a neat experiment, and I read the story before joining the conversation here and realizing it was written the way it was. Many people here already chimed in on the emotion of being caught reading something that might not have felt AI so I will offer another angle. Akin to many The New Yorker article in the past, I felt disconnected with the article for a good portion at the beginning. So much so that I had to skip most of it. The piece that got me very hooked was when he drove to Carol Lindgren’s farm. I read the remainder of the text and thought the content was engaging and thought provoking, in some sense. I loved the idea of manual override that logged into the system and changed the system behaviour over time. That's something that got me thinking about AI, actually. Now, I would be curious which part of the author's genesis made it into the final text and how much of that couples with what I found to be intellectually engaging.
• deskamess 6mo ago
  I had no idea it was AI assisted (as another comment put it). However I am fine with this... I would certainly enhance my long form content like the author described. The author mentioned the use of world bible and style guides, and it shows through in the consistency and tightness of the article. And that is key... to take something AI generated (based on a prompt) and rework it systematically in an iterative human-in-the loop. The end result was a great read.
• lencastre 6mo ago
  man, what a nice novella, llm warts and all
• DiscourseFan 6mo ago
  Its good but it still has a bit of that LLM-sound to it and it really drives the point home after like 2 or 3 paragraphs and kind of keeps repeating itself over and over again. But it is still interesting, from an artistic perspective, to see a work that does the thing it is, so to speak: it is showing and doing. Of course, there is a certain art to writing: the ruthless, violent practice of editing; which, perhaps is even more important than the original text that is always, like a model output, just an unconscious stream that has not quite taken shape.
• jerf 6mo ago
  Reacting to the story itself, I've been on the same thought line but came to the opposite conclusion. Precisely because the generation of the code is unreliable, one of the metrics we will be using in the future to determine the value of the code is precisely how much it has been tested against the real world. Real-world tested code will always be more valuable than what has just been instantiated by an AI, and that extends indefinitely into the future because no AI will ever be able to completely deal with integrating with all the other AI-generated code in the world on the first try. That is, as AIs get better at generating code, we will inevitably generate more code with them, and then later code must deal with that increased amount of code. So the AIs can never "catch up" with code complexity because the problem gets worse the better they get. This story is itself the explanation of why we're not going to go this route at scale. It'll happen in isolated places for the indefinite future. But farmers are going to buy systems, generated by AIs or not, that have been field tested, and will be no more interested in calling new untested code into being for their own personal use on their own personal farm than they are today. The limiting factor for future code won't be how much AI firepower someone has to bring to bear on a problem but how much "real world" there is to test the code against, because there is only going to be so much "real world" to go around. (Expanded on: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ ).
• stevetron 6mo ago
  If I understand this, the owner of the text is the tool? If I used a pencil, the writing was authored by the pencil. If I used a typewriter, the writing was authored by the typewriter.
• AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
  This comment thread sure is a wild ride It’s really been interesting since 2022 watching the gesticulations of the population around this idea of content generation aka “AI” If one thing shines clear through it’s human irrationality and incoherence It’s really just an infinite repeat of Chris Farley‘s reaction to the coffee crystals prank (1); millions of comfortable software engineers sitting in their well manicured spaces not starving to death, not struggling to survive, all morally offended when they learn something that they enjoyed turns out was not generated by a human. 1: https://youtu.be/VdQKVDUBu2g https://youtu.be/VdQKVDUBu2g
• Sky_Knight 6mo ago
  I loved the story... It felt comforting in a way I haven't experienced in quite a while. With everyone around me stressed about becoming obsolete... I mean - thank you! It was a bit difficult to read, but it never felt generated to be honest. There is a big difference between one shot generated stories and this. People tend to forget that as much as we don't want to admit - we, as humans, are simply generators of actions, reacting on much larger context... LLMs are not yet even close to us, but are actually way ahead of some of us. When someone spent so much effort on context preparation, the least I would do is congratulate you for the effort and in the end - a very nice story.
• vovavili 6mo ago
  I am surprised to learn that we live in times where people can write fictional stories this good with the help of AI, this is the first one to me. The future of fiction and story-telling looks very promising.
• dsunds 6mo ago
  I really enjoyed it and I would like to know more about the editorial process used and how similar it is to the feedback loops and constraints being used for software development. How much of this plot was generated versus specified.
• maxothex 6mo ago
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• PaulHoule 6mo ago
  'the concept of “broken software” had been replaced by the concept of “an inadequate specification,”' represents a fundamental misunderstanding which has been a source of trouble in the industry for a long time. That is, a lot of "broken software" has always been rooted in "an inadequate/incorrect specification" If problems in the spec are discovered up front they are cheap to fix, the further along you go in development or deployment, the more expensive they are to fix. AI doesn't change that. Like maybe with AI it is 20% faster to fix [1] across the board but it is still more expensive to fix things late -- you might think you are done with waterfall but waterfall is not done with you! [1] My 20% is pessimistic but if you think you are 10x as productive with AI at putting functionality in front of customers in the long term with a universal scope I believe you've got the same misunderstanding about product life cycle that I'm talking about
• samman 6mo ago
  For the specific process that generated this story, I think a generous comparison could be made to something like photography. Yes, the machine is producing the resulting work, but under the guidance and curation of an artist that sets an appropriate parameters and context to the machine. I’d submit that this can result in varying levels of authorship, much like the difference between a snapshot (one-shot?) and a carefully controlled studio photograph, depending on the depth of preparation, iteration, and curation the photographer performs.
• dormento 6mo ago
  Two things: 1) Bravo. This was actually a fun, enjoyable read. Thank you fellow writer. 2) Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments on this. As one of the authors, I must confess it was not my intention when I wrote that tvtropes wiki page that was ingested by that dodgy script with that weird user agent string and a bad attitude, then added to the data set that eventually made the LLM weights just right for this beautiful story to be possible. I'll be working on more wiki pages soon, so you can look up to more of my stories in the future.
• WarcrimeActual 6mo ago
  First thing on the page is an AI slop image. Domain blocked.
  • Halian 6mo ago
    Based. I need to use domain blocking more.
• Halian 6mo ago
  AI slop must be crushed.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• SoloEnt_ai 6mo ago
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