118 ms·

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over

by bcherny 12d ago

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a large set of guardrails we've set up over the years (linters, typecheckers, security checks, LLM-assisted code quality checkers), and it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less and engineers think a level or two up (machine code < assembly/bytecode < source code < conversation with agent < artifact with high level design). I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. But writing and coding are different enough in a number of ways that this is far from inevitable.

PestoDiRucola 12d ago
> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. What a horrible, cold, inhumane world that would be.
- shimman 12d ago
  I mean these are cold inhumane companies and their employees reflect it. SF is truly where human ingenuity goes to die, truly a blight on the industry as a whole and holding us back tremendously.
prisonguard 12d ago
You and the AI agree, but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review. Cognitive burden increases marginally with AI assisted coding. This is why we haven't seen big projects(think browsers and browser engines) spawning in the past year.
- trhaynes 12d ago
  Indeed. I'm curious what the security team has to say about that approach, for example.
  - brabel 12d ago
    If you get an AI to review the code especially for security, it does a very good job st finding issues. Better than any human reviewers I have worked with, and getting better. As someone who works in security , I feel much less worried about security bugs on code reviewed by a AI for security issues, be it written by AI or human.
    - yehoshuapw 12d ago
      extra reviews never hurt. But trusting only the AI to both code and review security-wise? not even close to usable
- a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
  > but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review. Why are you reviewing AI code in detail? Do you also review the assembly output of GCC line by line?
  - rogerrogerr 12d ago
    I can’t remember the last time GCC emitted code that just flat out called the wrong function. If it did that occasionally, I would review it.
  - electric_toucan 12d ago
    Compilers like GCC are deterministic and the source code already fully defines the behavior. LLMs are non-deterministic and will accept ambiguity, filling in details where you haven’t. These sorts of comparisons aren’t really fair. In the case of writing, it’s like hiring someone to write a book for you vs. hiring someone to translate a book you wrote into another language. In the first case, you didn’t really define the message for readers, whereas in the second case you did, and the translator is converting that same message for another audience to consume.
swatcoder 12d ago
> it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less If you're not billed for usage, anyway. Otherwise, for the other 99% of folks, that attitude is of course a pit trap that captures code bases and makes them maintainable only through the providers -- presumably one or few -- with a rich enough model to keep up with the growing mess. Preserving a code base that's legible, organized, and fundamentally maintainable by both humans and trailing commodity models is of imminent concern for anybody who doesn't want their margin strangled by your employer once it's too late to have other options. As frontier capabilities advance, the details don't matter less; they matter more.
- user43928 12d ago
  It does not concern me. Prices are very competitive and today's SOTA is next to free in half a year. Whether code is maintainable without AI becomes less and less important.
  - AlexCoventry 12d ago
    Only if you have ready access to the hardware to run the AI models.
trhaynes 12d ago
Do your coworkers send emails and create written work product using LLMs? I'm curious what the standards and culture are within an AI org.
- rogerrogerr 12d ago
  [non-AI org] I despise this and call it out every time I see it. Some dude hooked up an LLM autoresponder to his email, sent some nauseating AI slop to a huge distribution list. I couldn’t help myself, replied and asked him for a recipe for delicious apple cobbler and hiking trail recommendations in Glasgow, which “he” immediately provided. Highlight of my career. I think my core argument is this: I have access to every bit of information your AI does, so if I want an AI answer I’ll get one myself. If that isn’t true, why are you hoarding information? Push it somewhere we can all see it. So the only reason I would send you a message is to access _your_ brain. I have no interest in talking to an AI through a worse interface.
arctic-true 12d ago
I suspect some amount of long form writing will go the way of code - long form writing for the purpose of consumption by other AIs. Writing as a means of exchanging qualitative information, with no regard for how the reader will feel about it (beyond understanding what the words mean). Not everything can be distilled into data, but this doesn’t mean it is beyond the reach of LLMs. On the other hand, long form writing for human consumption seems like it may evade LLMs for much, much longer.
- brabel 12d ago
  What makes you think it will take a long time? AI seems capable of imitating any writing style if prompted to do so already, and I think it will get better on this quickly since the AI writing style is a main focus of AI labs right now. I can see no reason at all to believe this is a matter of years still, more like a few months.
  - arctic-true 12d ago
    You can have a great “writing style” and still put together really crappy long-form work. The problem is that AI writing, particularly creative writing, is too repetitive, too predictable, too trope-laden. All of the things you say are very true in the near term for short form writing - a page or two of Claudeslop will probably be much easier to swallow in a year or two than it is now. But I don’t see a path to fully AI-generated novels or long-form investigative journalism becoming mainstream in the next couple of years.
  - ivansavz 12d ago
    The style you refer to is the "container" of the writing. The medium. Like the specific encoding of the message. What @arctic-true was talking about was the "content" of the writing, which is bounded from above[1] by the information content of the prompt. So, I'm not sure if it's a question of time at all: if a LLM text contains some piece of information beyond the information that went into the prompt, where does this "extra" information come from? [Note, I'm not thinking about facts which could trivially come from the training corpus, I'm thinking specifically as information in the sense of intended message from sender (author) to receiver (reader)] [1] cf. this comment where I explain this analogy between LLMs and noise channel in communication theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510244
bcrosby95 12d ago
You claim writing is thinking, but imply writing code isn't thinking. My opinion of LLM design review isn't that high - it seems to miss design tweaks that could vastly simplify corner cases. But if your code isn't written for human consumption maybe it doesn't matter. I'm still directly responsible for what I commit, so I can't just offload it to Claude.
- sersi 12d ago
  That's something I struggle with, I try to get LLMs to output code I don't care much about and focus on the parts I do and it kind of works but the problem is that reading code written by the LLM is even worth than reading LLM generating text. It's nauseating and you still have to read what the LLM did if you want to really work on the parts that matter.
- CamperBob2 12d ago
  I still write code, I just write it in English now. It's still rock and roll to me.
  - bigstrat2003 12d ago
    That... isn't writing code.
    - CamperBob2 12d ago
      Sigh. It's like watching somebody about to be hit by a bus. You yell, you wave your arms, but they either don't hear you, or they don't believe you. The last thing that goes through their head is a Greyhound's hood ornament.
      - JoshTriplett 12d ago
        Yes, it is. But the important question is, which person is the one standing in front of the bus?
jeremyjh 12d ago
You are just talking about the output though. If you only think at a "higher level" you aren't doing the actual thinking. Its the same with code. The output may be good enough, but over time you lose touch with the details to the extent that you can no longer serve a useful steering function for the organization. Before coding agents I'd seen this with many humans when they get promoted passed the point where they work with code directly and can't figure out how to add value there.
- a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
  Yes, of course. At some point the LLMs will also run the organization.
  - jeremyjh 12d ago
    In the meantime, they aren't capable of doing it, and neither are humans who never understand the code.
    - a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
      So, you believe that Sam Altman understands the code?
      - jeremyjh 12d ago
        No, but he also doesn't steer technical architecture & engineering, does he?
        a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
        Given that OpenAI is largely vibecoded these days, do you think anyone there really understands the code?
cweld510 12d ago
Writing is already amenable to many different levels of abstraction, though. If an LLM can expand your outline into writing, then you aren’t writing at the correct level of abstraction in my opinion; you should instead be explaining how you arrived at your chosen outline. You don’t need to explain the details because any party can generate those with an LLM; same as how many PRs today can be auto-generated and no one needs to read implementations; that is no longer the correct level abstraction to work at. This should actually free us to do work at a higher level of abstraction —- more consideration of strategy, objectives, etc and less worry about implementation details.
- daveguy 12d ago
  This only applies if LLMs aren't making mistakes 20% of the time and that's the problem. When you're only saving time on the easy part, it doesn't matter if you're working twice as fast because review of the tricky parts is still going to take 80% of what it would have taken to do the whole thing. Total effort ends up being more rather than less if you want the same quality.
lelanthran 12d ago
> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. Who or what is the audience for that sort of long form writing? If it's a human, why would they read it? They'd just give it to an LLM and get the salient points back. If the audience is another LLM, why expand it? The only use case is an audience of humans who still read and understand, and those people aren't going to be interested in a message when it is not apparent that the sender actually understands the message themselves.
- whstl 12d ago
  A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not. That's why there's so many meetings in white collar companies. Because people can't understand what is going on at those documents so they just need to "align". LLMs are amazing at generating this useless documentation that goes absolutely nowhere.
  - selcuka 12d ago
    > A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not. That's already available today. We don't have to perfect LLM writing.
    - whstl 11d ago
      True, but you underestimate the laziness of a lot of people! Those are the ones benefiting (and depending) the most from LLM advancements.
- CityOfThrowaway 12d ago
  You can imagine: 1. I have a bunch of data or research that I've gathered with a unique hypothesis 2. Having gotten my arms around that pile of information, I believe I have a compelling thesis to put forth 3. I design the narrative arc and of the thesis. The important parts, the necessary but not sufficient scaffolding. 4. An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it comprehensible. Who is this for? Well, quite possibly the human who asked for it. It's pretty informative to read back a research brief in full that you helped do the scaffolding. Also of very clear use is other AI's who did not have the same unique hypothesis and did not gather the supporting evidence. It's an interesting angle for others to build on. And of course, other humans! Most human written content gets almost zero readers today as it is. And I suppose LLM content probably pulls the asymptote closer to zero, but some pieces of content may be genuinely interesting or useful.
bigstrat2003 12d ago
> Now, the code is largely high quality... No. No it is not. Nobody who actually cares about the quality of their work is letting an LLM just turn out code without reviewing it carefully.
vorticalbox 12d ago
You could try this [0] I’ve started doing this and it’s helped a lot. 1. I understand fully the code and everything it does 2. You can pick up on mistakes super early and it can adjust the plan is it goes. 3. Faster than writing it by hand but slower than letting the LLM do it. [0] https://ankursethi.com/blog/prevent-cognitive-debt-by-manually-retyping-llm-generated-code/ https://ankursethi.com/blog/prevent-cognitive-debt-by-manual...
tomrod 12d ago
> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. I worry about AI Loopidity here though. Think about the similar analogy of email. If my set of ideas is condensable to bullet points, but I use AI to expand the content, then I add no information density and a lot of noise. Other folks then use AI to summarize the content to a list of bullet points, ideally the same but not certainly the same, and thus communication has been only partially successful.
arjie 12d ago
One could imagine a universe where the agent fills in citations and supportive points and so on, or makes a more conclusive argument but it seems you’d get better results leaving that to read time if it’s a one-shot. Steering prompts etc. with tool use to bring in other sources etc of course change this entirely. And regardless, I doubt we will read content like that directly ever again. Agents will act as per-person highly specialized adapter layers for information transmission. The entire point is what runtime you’re running your code on. A computer with any modern stack requires a lot of text for you to communicate “spin a square around on its center” to it. A human requires only that short string because they have a faster natural language interpreter. Text meant for a human can communicate “spin a square around its center” much better than any code that mimics it. In some sense, all programming is boilerplate expansion because computers have (until now) been unable to be programmed with anything approaching natural language.
- fortzi 11d ago
  > In some sense, all programming is boilerplate expansion because computers have (until now) been unable to be programmed with anything approaching natural language. Maybe sometimes, but not always. When you need to actually render the thing you have all kinds of micro decisions, like where to put the square, what color, how fast it spins, etc. You might not care about the details, but maybe you do. If it spins at 10000 rpm, will you care then? Natural language, and human communication in general, is ambiguous, and coding is in great part about disambiguation. Sure, you can use English to disambiguate as much as needed, but wouldn’t you then end up with some yaml-like spec that wasn’t much easier to create in the first place?
ambicapter 12d ago
> I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. Later > I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. So in the future, it won't be necessary for you to think?
- snk 12d ago
  Kinda. Walking the dog with me this evening, Christa saw the license plate 8531 PRI and asked me if 8531 really was prime. The 2, 3, 5 checks are automatic, and 8531-8400 = 131, which obviously isn't divisible by 7, but I would've had to check the rest of the two-digit prime factors except 97 - 8531 is greater than 90 squared, less than 97 squared, though, I reckon. So I said I don't know. But Google would know, you know? If your LLM buddy is hanging out active on your phone all the time, it can - maybe not yet, but foreseeably - answer every question, no thought required, and carry out any expressed desire.
asdff 12d ago
>(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. You get pushback for this? I saw an anthropic job post recently, and they wanted you specifically to have claude muck with your resume before applying.
- pastel8739 12d ago
  It’s Boris Cherny, in charge of Claude code, so probably not
  - asdff 11d ago
    Rules for thee not for me situation I see.
hsaliak 12d ago
Nobody is going to read that though, reading will go the way of code reviews. That’s the problem.
duped 12d ago
> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. This is just noise generation. If anyone is meant to actually read the document it should be written by you.
zkldi 12d ago
Expands into a document for _who_ to read? another LLM to re-compress? It's baffling you people are in control of such a strong product when you are obsessed with this intellectual pornography; wow - look at how smart it made my thoughts look (n.b. look, not read). Don't look too close. And certainly don't ask me what it means.
chvid 12d ago
Many programmers don't write long text; their way of getting a deep understanding of a problem domain is to build something, is to write code - in a process very similar to writing a long piece of text - it has the same reflection and externalization of thought. The widespread introduction of LLM code generation is very destructive to that. Perhaps LLMs can be brought to support human cognition in the same way writing can; but that has yet to be designed and it does not seem to be the way things are heading.
- hparadiz 12d ago
  [flagged]
  - chvid 12d ago
    But what are you writing? My bet is it is short bursts of text that are thrown away as soon as it is interpreted by your LLM.
  - Forgeties79 12d ago
    Idk man I get a ton out of gaming and other media. If I say “I’m a cinephile” no one bats an eye, it’s seen as elevated and intellectually stimulating. Your examples reflect more on the gate keeping we do with what’s considered “worthy of our time” and “art” than the value of LLM’s.
    - hparadiz 12d ago
      [flagged]
  - pastel8739 12d ago
    LLM prompts definitely don’t feel like “writing” to me in the way that writing a blog post (or even an HN comment) does or writing code used to. There is nothing to work out, you don’t really need to think. You’re _typing_ sure, but I don’t think it counts as writing maybe because the text that you write is thrown away.
ElProlactin 12d ago
> I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. You can already do this. And you can build pipelines where AI performs fact checks on what it writes, with citations a human can reference as well.
sensanaty 11d ago
> It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. Really huffing your own farts there, huh?
nameless_me 10d ago
"You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document." I am a subject matter expert in certain fields of real estate in Canada. This is how I draft my teaching materials, articles and educational content. I use it as a human amplifier of my brain as it increases my output which other people will pay money for. People who complain that LLM writing is slop have not encountered good AI-human hybrid outputs. Like visual effects in movies, the best examples are imperceptible and do not get in the way of storytelling.

by bcherny 12d ago

PestoDiRucola 12d ago

> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. What a horrible, cold, inhumane world that would be.

shimman 12d ago
I mean these are cold inhumane companies and their employees reflect it. SF is truly where human ingenuity goes to die, truly a blight on the industry as a whole and holding us back tremendously.

prisonguard 12d ago

You and the AI agree, but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review. Cognitive burden increases marginally with AI assisted coding. This is why we haven't seen big projects(think browsers and browser engines) spawning in the past year.

trhaynes 12d ago
Indeed. I'm curious what the security team has to say about that approach, for example.
- brabel 12d ago
  If you get an AI to review the code especially for security, it does a very good job st finding issues. Better than any human reviewers I have worked with, and getting better. As someone who works in security , I feel much less worried about security bugs on code reviewed by a AI for security issues, be it written by AI or human.
  - yehoshuapw 12d ago
    extra reviews never hurt. But trusting only the AI to both code and review security-wise? not even close to usable
a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
> but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review. Why are you reviewing AI code in detail? Do you also review the assembly output of GCC line by line?
- rogerrogerr 12d ago
  I can’t remember the last time GCC emitted code that just flat out called the wrong function. If it did that occasionally, I would review it.
- electric_toucan 12d ago
  Compilers like GCC are deterministic and the source code already fully defines the behavior. LLMs are non-deterministic and will accept ambiguity, filling in details where you haven’t. These sorts of comparisons aren’t really fair. In the case of writing, it’s like hiring someone to write a book for you vs. hiring someone to translate a book you wrote into another language. In the first case, you didn’t really define the message for readers, whereas in the second case you did, and the translator is converting that same message for another audience to consume.

swatcoder 12d ago

> it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less If you're not billed for usage, anyway. Otherwise, for the other 99% of folks, that attitude is of course a pit trap that captures code bases and makes them maintainable only through the providers -- presumably one or few -- with a rich enough model to keep up with the growing mess. Preserving a code base that's legible, organized, and fundamentally maintainable by both humans and trailing commodity models is of imminent concern for anybody who doesn't want their margin strangled by your employer once it's too late to have other options. As frontier capabilities advance, the details don't matter less; they matter more.

user43928 12d ago
It does not concern me. Prices are very competitive and today's SOTA is next to free in half a year. Whether code is maintainable without AI becomes less and less important.
- AlexCoventry 12d ago
  Only if you have ready access to the hardware to run the AI models.

trhaynes 12d ago

Do your coworkers send emails and create written work product using LLMs? I'm curious what the standards and culture are within an AI org.

rogerrogerr 12d ago
[non-AI org] I despise this and call it out every time I see it. Some dude hooked up an LLM autoresponder to his email, sent some nauseating AI slop to a huge distribution list. I couldn’t help myself, replied and asked him for a recipe for delicious apple cobbler and hiking trail recommendations in Glasgow, which “he” immediately provided. Highlight of my career. I think my core argument is this: I have access to every bit of information your AI does, so if I want an AI answer I’ll get one myself. If that isn’t true, why are you hoarding information? Push it somewhere we can all see it. So the only reason I would send you a message is to access _your_ brain. I have no interest in talking to an AI through a worse interface.

arctic-true 12d ago

I suspect some amount of long form writing will go the way of code - long form writing for the purpose of consumption by other AIs. Writing as a means of exchanging qualitative information, with no regard for how the reader will feel about it (beyond understanding what the words mean). Not everything can be distilled into data, but this doesn’t mean it is beyond the reach of LLMs. On the other hand, long form writing for human consumption seems like it may evade LLMs for much, much longer.

brabel 12d ago
What makes you think it will take a long time? AI seems capable of imitating any writing style if prompted to do so already, and I think it will get better on this quickly since the AI writing style is a main focus of AI labs right now. I can see no reason at all to believe this is a matter of years still, more like a few months.
- arctic-true 12d ago
  You can have a great “writing style” and still put together really crappy long-form work. The problem is that AI writing, particularly creative writing, is too repetitive, too predictable, too trope-laden. All of the things you say are very true in the near term for short form writing - a page or two of Claudeslop will probably be much easier to swallow in a year or two than it is now. But I don’t see a path to fully AI-generated novels or long-form investigative journalism becoming mainstream in the next couple of years.
- ivansavz 12d ago
  The style you refer to is the "container" of the writing. The medium. Like the specific encoding of the message. What @arctic-true was talking about was the "content" of the writing, which is bounded from above[1] by the information content of the prompt. So, I'm not sure if it's a question of time at all: if a LLM text contains some piece of information beyond the information that went into the prompt, where does this "extra" information come from? [Note, I'm not thinking about facts which could trivially come from the training corpus, I'm thinking specifically as information in the sense of intended message from sender (author) to receiver (reader)] [1] cf. this comment where I explain this analogy between LLMs and noise channel in communication theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510244

bcrosby95 12d ago

You claim writing is thinking, but imply writing code isn't thinking. My opinion of LLM design review isn't that high - it seems to miss design tweaks that could vastly simplify corner cases. But if your code isn't written for human consumption maybe it doesn't matter. I'm still directly responsible for what I commit, so I can't just offload it to Claude.

sersi 12d ago
That's something I struggle with, I try to get LLMs to output code I don't care much about and focus on the parts I do and it kind of works but the problem is that reading code written by the LLM is even worth than reading LLM generating text. It's nauseating and you still have to read what the LLM did if you want to really work on the parts that matter.
CamperBob2 12d ago
I still write code, I just write it in English now. It's still rock and roll to me.
- bigstrat2003 12d ago
  That... isn't writing code.
  - CamperBob2 12d ago
    Sigh. It's like watching somebody about to be hit by a bus. You yell, you wave your arms, but they either don't hear you, or they don't believe you. The last thing that goes through their head is a Greyhound's hood ornament.
    - JoshTriplett 12d ago
      Yes, it is. But the important question is, which person is the one standing in front of the bus?

jeremyjh 12d ago

You are just talking about the output though. If you only think at a "higher level" you aren't doing the actual thinking. Its the same with code. The output may be good enough, but over time you lose touch with the details to the extent that you can no longer serve a useful steering function for the organization. Before coding agents I'd seen this with many humans when they get promoted passed the point where they work with code directly and can't figure out how to add value there.

a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
Yes, of course. At some point the LLMs will also run the organization.
- jeremyjh 12d ago
  In the meantime, they aren't capable of doing it, and neither are humans who never understand the code.
  - a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
    So, you believe that Sam Altman understands the code?
    - jeremyjh 12d ago
      No, but he also doesn't steer technical architecture & engineering, does he?
      - a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
        Given that OpenAI is largely vibecoded these days, do you think anyone there really understands the code?

cweld510 12d ago

Writing is already amenable to many different levels of abstraction, though. If an LLM can expand your outline into writing, then you aren’t writing at the correct level of abstraction in my opinion; you should instead be explaining how you arrived at your chosen outline. You don’t need to explain the details because any party can generate those with an LLM; same as how many PRs today can be auto-generated and no one needs to read implementations; that is no longer the correct level abstraction to work at. This should actually free us to do work at a higher level of abstraction —- more consideration of strategy, objectives, etc and less worry about implementation details.

daveguy 12d ago
This only applies if LLMs aren't making mistakes 20% of the time and that's the problem. When you're only saving time on the easy part, it doesn't matter if you're working twice as fast because review of the tricky parts is still going to take 80% of what it would have taken to do the whole thing. Total effort ends up being more rather than less if you want the same quality.

lelanthran 12d ago

> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. Who or what is the audience for that sort of long form writing? If it's a human, why would they read it? They'd just give it to an LLM and get the salient points back. If the audience is another LLM, why expand it? The only use case is an audience of humans who still read and understand, and those people aren't going to be interested in a message when it is not apparent that the sender actually understands the message themselves.

whstl 12d ago
A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not. That's why there's so many meetings in white collar companies. Because people can't understand what is going on at those documents so they just need to "align". LLMs are amazing at generating this useless documentation that goes absolutely nowhere.
- selcuka 12d ago
  > A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not. That's already available today. We don't have to perfect LLM writing.
  - whstl 11d ago
    True, but you underestimate the laziness of a lot of people! Those are the ones benefiting (and depending) the most from LLM advancements.
CityOfThrowaway 12d ago
You can imagine: 1. I have a bunch of data or research that I've gathered with a unique hypothesis 2. Having gotten my arms around that pile of information, I believe I have a compelling thesis to put forth 3. I design the narrative arc and of the thesis. The important parts, the necessary but not sufficient scaffolding. 4. An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it comprehensible. Who is this for? Well, quite possibly the human who asked for it. It's pretty informative to read back a research brief in full that you helped do the scaffolding. Also of very clear use is other AI's who did not have the same unique hypothesis and did not gather the supporting evidence. It's an interesting angle for others to build on. And of course, other humans! Most human written content gets almost zero readers today as it is. And I suppose LLM content probably pulls the asymptote closer to zero, but some pieces of content may be genuinely interesting or useful.

bigstrat2003 12d ago

> Now, the code is largely high quality... No. No it is not. Nobody who actually cares about the quality of their work is letting an LLM just turn out code without reviewing it carefully.

vorticalbox 12d ago

You could try this [0] I’ve started doing this and it’s helped a lot. 1. I understand fully the code and everything it does 2. You can pick up on mistakes super early and it can adjust the plan is it goes. 3. Faster than writing it by hand but slower than letting the LLM do it. [0] https://ankursethi.com/blog/prevent-cognitive-debt-by-manually-retyping-llm-generated-code/ https://ankursethi.com/blog/prevent-cognitive-debt-by-manual...

tomrod 12d ago

> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. I worry about AI Loopidity here though. Think about the similar analogy of email. If my set of ideas is condensable to bullet points, but I use AI to expand the content, then I add no information density and a lot of noise. Other folks then use AI to summarize the content to a list of bullet points, ideally the same but not certainly the same, and thus communication has been only partially successful.

arjie 12d ago

One could imagine a universe where the agent fills in citations and supportive points and so on, or makes a more conclusive argument but it seems you’d get better results leaving that to read time if it’s a one-shot. Steering prompts etc. with tool use to bring in other sources etc of course change this entirely. And regardless, I doubt we will read content like that directly ever again. Agents will act as per-person highly specialized adapter layers for information transmission. The entire point is what runtime you’re running your code on. A computer with any modern stack requires a lot of text for you to communicate “spin a square around on its center” to it. A human requires only that short string because they have a faster natural language interpreter. Text meant for a human can communicate “spin a square around its center” much better than any code that mimics it. In some sense, all programming is boilerplate expansion because computers have (until now) been unable to be programmed with anything approaching natural language.

fortzi 11d ago
> In some sense, all programming is boilerplate expansion because computers have (until now) been unable to be programmed with anything approaching natural language. Maybe sometimes, but not always. When you need to actually render the thing you have all kinds of micro decisions, like where to put the square, what color, how fast it spins, etc. You might not care about the details, but maybe you do. If it spins at 10000 rpm, will you care then? Natural language, and human communication in general, is ambiguous, and coding is in great part about disambiguation. Sure, you can use English to disambiguate as much as needed, but wouldn’t you then end up with some yaml-like spec that wasn’t much easier to create in the first place?

ambicapter 12d ago

> I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. Later > I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. So in the future, it won't be necessary for you to think?

snk 12d ago
Kinda. Walking the dog with me this evening, Christa saw the license plate 8531 PRI and asked me if 8531 really was prime. The 2, 3, 5 checks are automatic, and 8531-8400 = 131, which obviously isn't divisible by 7, but I would've had to check the rest of the two-digit prime factors except 97 - 8531 is greater than 90 squared, less than 97 squared, though, I reckon. So I said I don't know. But Google would know, you know? If your LLM buddy is hanging out active on your phone all the time, it can - maybe not yet, but foreseeably - answer every question, no thought required, and carry out any expressed desire.

asdff 12d ago

>(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. You get pushback for this? I saw an anthropic job post recently, and they wanted you specifically to have claude muck with your resume before applying.

pastel8739 12d ago
It’s Boris Cherny, in charge of Claude code, so probably not
- asdff 11d ago
  Rules for thee not for me situation I see.

hsaliak 12d ago

Nobody is going to read that though, reading will go the way of code reviews. That’s the problem.

duped 12d ago

> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. This is just noise generation. If anyone is meant to actually read the document it should be written by you.

zkldi 12d ago

Expands into a document for _who_ to read? another LLM to re-compress? It's baffling you people are in control of such a strong product when you are obsessed with this intellectual pornography; wow - look at how smart it made my thoughts look (n.b. look, not read). Don't look too close. And certainly don't ask me what it means.

chvid 12d ago

Many programmers don't write long text; their way of getting a deep understanding of a problem domain is to build something, is to write code - in a process very similar to writing a long piece of text - it has the same reflection and externalization of thought. The widespread introduction of LLM code generation is very destructive to that. Perhaps LLMs can be brought to support human cognition in the same way writing can; but that has yet to be designed and it does not seem to be the way things are heading.

hparadiz 12d ago
[flagged]
- chvid 12d ago
  But what are you writing? My bet is it is short bursts of text that are thrown away as soon as it is interpreted by your LLM.
- Forgeties79 12d ago
  Idk man I get a ton out of gaming and other media. If I say “I’m a cinephile” no one bats an eye, it’s seen as elevated and intellectually stimulating. Your examples reflect more on the gate keeping we do with what’s considered “worthy of our time” and “art” than the value of LLM’s.
  - hparadiz 12d ago
    [flagged]
- pastel8739 12d ago
  LLM prompts definitely don’t feel like “writing” to me in the way that writing a blog post (or even an HN comment) does or writing code used to. There is nothing to work out, you don’t really need to think. You’re _typing_ sure, but I don’t think it counts as writing maybe because the text that you write is thrown away.

ElProlactin 12d ago

> I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. You can already do this. And you can build pipelines where AI performs fact checks on what it writes, with citations a human can reference as well.

sensanaty 11d ago

> It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. Really huffing your own farts there, huh?

nameless_me 10d ago

"You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document." I am a subject matter expert in certain fields of real estate in Canada. This is how I draft my teaching materials, articles and educational content. I use it as a human amplifier of my brain as it increases my output which other people will pay money for. People who complain that LLM writing is slop have not encountered good AI-human hybrid outputs. Like visual effects in movies, the best examples are imperceptible and do not get in the way of storytelling.