Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.
Tangentially I also hate if someone answers with a voice message.
I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those exceptions are of course fine, but if you post a voice message or god forbid a video message in a group chat you are forcing everyone to take the time and sit through it.
The WhatsApp voice message is very common in Spain. I always find it jarring when I'm there, mostly because I'm not used to it, but also because it seems to defeat the purpose of the messaging app: I can't listen to your voice message on the bus, for instance.
It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each other voice recordings on WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, and I just haven't been to them yet.
I used to answer this with "I'm not listening to that, not even my parents send me voice messages" but it was called uncivil by some people, so now I just say "I can't listen to that right now" and never listen, eventually ppl send a text message.
Yeah, the perceived friction in a voice message seems to be immense. I sent one voice massage in the past year because I wanted to get a big idea over to someone as I was walking into a meeting, so I recorded a 20-second message and sent it. She ended up responding 9 hours later with "I finally got around to listening to this, thanks!"
Same here in Uruguay but only for certain interactions (like contractors). Thankfully there’s a transcription feature that catches 90% of the message generally.
The way I handle those, especially with the people who leave me 8 minute long voice notes, is to have WhatsApp transcribe the voice note for me. Or, if that’s not possible, either ignore the voice note or listen to it at 2x speed.
I can't understand why whatsapp does not provide tgat out of the box. Telegram has it on the paid plan, which is nit ideal but at least somewhat out of the box solution.
It’s funny to me how I judge some cultural aspects as being worse. Of course it’s my own cultural bias, but I think the following things are “bad” for cultures to do:
1) long voice memos over succinctly typed notes
2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc
> 2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc
Also even queueing can have different norms. Here people rush to a newly opened supermarket checkout like their life depended on it. I feel that should be a lot less sociably acceptable than it is, especially for those with overfilled carts that will add huge delays for anyone behind them.
You just gave me strong memories of using voice messages for a couple of months some years ago. In my defence, I had dropped a circular saw blade through the tip of my finger which slowed down my typing for a while. (I did manage to get surprisingly fast as a nine-finger touch typist, sans the left index finger.)
Fortunately my colleagues were very understanding, and I reverted back to text once I could type reasonably well and with minimal pain again.
God forbid...? Our technology has led us to compartmentalize information exchange and relational interaction. We just don't have time for the latter. But in text, tone and context are often lost, and it is also less accessible to type for many people. I'm interested in what it looks like when we normalize the actual friction of being in relationship, not just prioitize the "time savings" to recipients of communication by boiling it down to the information conveyed only by the words.
I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either
I always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.
I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself).
So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.”
Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.
I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun.
I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word.
It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.
The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched.
Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.
Well my coworkers are the ones sending me the AI text and it's always garbage. And they're using Claude on the newest models. And they're all drastically more enthusiastic about AI than me.
So yeah, maybe every single person in my company sucks at Claude, or maybe Claude just actually sucks at writing and you don't know what bad writing looks like
Claude does suck at writing. No argument here. It's for coding, and it's good at that.
So if the goal is "writing" and they are using Claude, then they do in fact suck at it.
Its like using a butter knife instead of a screwdriver. It might work if you waste enough effort, but will never do the same quality of work a screwdriver can.
> Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.
I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget).
I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with.
> Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good...
I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance.
That doesn't mean I like them.
And no, they really are not good at writing.
When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.
Claude might be the problem here. It really is bad at writing and ticks all the boxes you mentioned. It's much better at code.
I don't mean to be defensive, just to point out that most of the statements you made are provably and obviously untrue... And given that you admit bias that's the most likely explanation.
I hadn't considered that you have experience, but only with one that is legitimately bad at this particular thing because someone forced it onto you. Fair enough.
Agreed and it’s more than that. Comprehension, understanding, and validation. It also erodes trust in the person pasting the information.
You asked a human for their advice- based on their judgment. If they don’t take the time to validate the answer provided by ai, they literally have no judgment. A transparent proxy has zero value.
They're acting as a meatbot being piloted by the AI. Could call them skroders.
It should be the other way around-- you give the AI instructions and it does stuff. Any time the AI is giving you instructions and you do stuff, that should be a big red flag.
I've been thinking about the Blight and [spoilers!] the skroderiders a lot lately. If you have read Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, I have also been thinking a lot about "goodlife" when I see some of the things that get posted. If you haven't, you might like them.
This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. Because if you want 100 people to read it, then every second you waste for the reader is worth you fixing up your message for over a minute.
It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type.
I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks.
I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.
> This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster.
You can also teach those people about text expansion software. macOS and iOS have it natively, though if I’m not mistaken it doesn’t work properly in non-native apps such as Slack. Alternatives like Alfred should work anywhere. That way they can keep using their abbreviations to type faster, but others won’t have to deal with them.
> It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader
Can confirm. Not using proper punctuation and capital letters makes reading less fluid. I’ve stopped caring about posts and comments that do that—if you don’t care enough about what you wrote to do the most basic of courtesies (and sometimes even fighting the auto-capitalisation that’s done for you) then why should anyone else expend the effort?
Tell that to ios’ autocorrect that seems to really suck at it lately. I’d like to have an llm that doesn’t screw up and replace actual words with what it probabilistically thought I was saying.
Except that it will get it wrong infrequently but often enough that you should really proof-read the result properly. All of which you end up taking more time than if you wrote proper if the first case.
No, it takes less time. This is the same kind of take as the teacher's "writing a cheat sheet is so much effort that you might as well spend it to learn the material". Lol, no it takes less time, that's why people do it.
I want to use this as internal AI guidelines, I am so tired of people in my workplace simply copying and pasting whatever garbage AI gives them and expecting everyone to just go along with it and try to decipher what crap they were provided.
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
I think your linked chat demonstrates quite well why you are wrong.
The sender's burden is a few lines of text "Write me $FOO, conclude with $BAR".
The recipients burden is an order of magnitude greater, trying to find your conclusion in hundreds of lines of text.
After all, your initial line:
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
Is concise and clearly understandable in 21 words . I understand your point even if I don't agree with it.
The linked chat has 1424 words. Your point is in there somewhere, but now you want the recipient to play "Where's Waldo" to find your point.
(BTW: I can't believe just how effectively you argued against your own point! I have never seen someone do it as effectively as this in all the time I have been reading HN)
OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good.
Indeed. Further, that neither human nor AI output is inherently good or bad. The crucial factor is whether a competent, thoughtful human has been involved in one way or another - to guide, review, steer, etc...
Moreover, that a thoughtful human can know their own tendencies and limitations, and have the AI help mitigate them.
> OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good.
And yet, he was unable to do the same (see his link). He demonstrated that he was able to more clearly articulate his point than the LLM he conversed with.
>But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
Not the same burden.
The value of the person is digesting and giving the materially important stuff in the answer (including their expertise and opinion). Not the AI diarrhea.
I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading.
You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying.
The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.
>I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading.
Theoritically yes. In practice:
- AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise, and who know to edit AI responses and not just paste them.
- I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it.
We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, how can it be bad?".
Until their boss sat down and forced them to read the verbal diarrhea and they finally admitted that it was 90% hallucinations and AI-filling-the-blanks.
I was agreeing! You said it yourself: "Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing".
The people complaining are talking about vibe-writing or heavily-AI-assisted writing.
EDIT: My point is, most people taking the "anti-AI" stance here wouldn't have a problem with Grammarly or AI to double-check spelling. It's a gradient.
EDIT 2: I wrote a lot of stuff without double-checking. Just editing to clarify what I mean. :D
> - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea
Evidently the people you are communicating with are not good writers/thinkers. That's the prerequisite for effectively using AI for writing help. Just as its the prerequisite for using it to produce code. If you can't code, you can't get Ai to produce good code.
So the real issue here, perhaps, is "vibe writing" rather than "Ai assisted writing".
> I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
Agreed. But if people who don't understand the issue are feigning competence via AI then that's a fundamental problem of not just competence across many domains, but also character. As I said in another comment, the policy should be something to the effect of "you're paid for competence, integrity etc. If you don't have that, we don't need you. Take that into account when you use Ai"
I don’t agree. I have seen many knowledgeable people fall into AI so hard that they are happy that they are not writing code, reading things and using their brains to understand or produce something.
These people know (or knew) what they were talking about so well, and was very passionate about their area as well.
Not knowing something is alright, but surrendering their whole knowledge and passion to a statistical model is not.
It's sad that this has happened, but having knowledge/skill doesn't mean you have wisdom, integrity, discernment, etc... Those are an entirely different plane of understanding, and are what guard against our worst impulses and temptations. Unfortunately there isn't much focus on these things anymore (and, in fact, they're often denigrated and attacked). The result that you've observed is inevitable.
I genuinely worry even more about young people, who are being formed in this anti-thinking, anti-responsibility environment. I'm sure there's some who are strongly resisting it and seeking out genuine knowledge and connections. But surely most are happy to just vibe their way through school and life.
To a degree I can't even blame them. It seems we as a society largely reward those who cheat, steal, and scam, and don't reward integrity and hard work the same way. So "why bother?" I can see it being. It doesn't end well, but none of the anti-intellectualism does.
Maybe I am an outlier, but I never looked to external affirmation as a guide or a goal for my actions.
I have a simple rule: Do whatever makes you sleep in peace with yourself. IOW, My only guiding principles are my own ethics and conscience. I don't care what others are doing. I also don't compete with others. I do what I do and own the consequences of my actions. I might not have a mansion or a fleet of luxury cars, but this is not what makes me happy, anyway.
> The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner.
While I agree with your overall distinction, I believe the scenario you portray is so unrealistic that you will never encounter it.
Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years.
The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback, but an AI will at best have some memory/skill/prompt nudge for next time that might have a shallow/localized band-aid effect, but will never stop doing similar mistakes elsewhere.
> The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback,
For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea.
The people arguing that round-tripping their thoughts through AI still means that it's their thoughts apparently also believe that the game of telephone always results in perfect comms.
It's not just AI; adding more hops to a route changes the message when each hop is a human too, it's just that we notice it more when the hop is an LLM because of just how different they write compared to humans.
I don't think you quite realize the implications of what you're saying.
Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?
If someone is feigning competence via AI, that's the problem. Not Ai.
If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
My point is that it is still a problem, regardless whether they are asking an AI to write it for them or a human to write it for them.
Round-tripping a message through a 3rd party changes the message; in this specific context ("Don't Paste the AI, please"), there is no pretense of understanding or review from the human.
In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.
> In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.
Um, I've literally said throughout this entire thread that I regularly get Ai to assist with my writing, to great effect. It often helps me be more concise and certainly more kind - I have a tendency to be neither in writing, especially online.
It is also helpful in formatting, say, a github issue. Though, I do need to be careful with that as it is very easy for it to just appear as an Ai slop post, even if lots of thought went into it all.
To be very clear, at no point have I ever supported/advocated for thoughtlessly copy pasting whatever Ai writes for you. This thread has been about using it judiciously, as we can/should be doing for coding or anything else.
> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
They don't though; I have never seen this happen. I have seen many people claim that's what they do, but not convincingly.
>Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?
Nothing they said implies that.
What they said is they want the understanding of the person to be revealed in the communication. Not masked via AI.
>If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.
> For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea
It doesn't say the (level of) understanding of the person, but that they understand the idea. They might have misspoken, but they already replied to that comment and didn't object to my framing or further clarify.
> Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.
Well, this entire thread is me saying this happens in the real world, and people objecting to it
> if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years.
Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs.
As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. You might say that the "can't be bothered" part is the entire issue, and I'll again say that what matters is the final result - a master chef or chief architect is not doing all the grunt work...
Having AI do the work for you doesn't increase your writing skills, in fact, the opposite!
Instead of seeing the errors and thinking about what changes the draft needs ('improving' your writing skills'), you're letting someone else tell you what changes to make.
Because you aren't internalizing the corrections, guess what happens next time: your writing gets worse, AI comes to help...rinse and repeat.
> Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up.
Isn't this contradictory? Why do you need to take over if it's doing such a good job?
Because it can’t do a great job without frequent expert input, that’s the point.
Expert types prompt into Claude
, Claude produces fundamentally flawed but close output. Don’t take that output and give it to anyone — first refine it until it’s not flawed, then pass it on.
No, you were claiming that no one has ever used Ai to help produce better writing. I was objecting to that, because it is an absurd statement. Ai could have told you that if you asked.
> No, you were claiming that no one has ever used Ai to help produce better writing. I was objecting to that, because it is an absurd statement. Ai could have told you that if you asked.
Maybe take your own advice and ask your LLM if I did claim that.
This is what I claimed:
> Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years.
This means that if I get Claude/LLM output, I would need to edit it/write myself to make it correct/better/distilled into relevant parts. I do not get LLM output I would want to post as is without numerous roundtrips, at which point vi is faster.
You then reply to claim that as a skill issue, while also later on stating that you iterate over it or take over a draft to edit it, which I then point out is a contradiction.
For me, being quite "dyslectic" - LLM generated sentences have the advantage of being spelled correctly and being grammartically correct.
I rather prefer iterating over LLM text than writing it by myself.
Example: Typing this simple text above by myself was not straight forward.
Agreed that’s a good practice but for some very hardline people even that’s not considered acceptable. It’s very hard to understand what people consider right and wrong so I’ve just stopped listening.
No tolerance policy for 77 of 10k lines, but exceptions made for language with unashamed use of large swaths of LLM code because it’s popular with the author. People just aren’t being consistent at all. Even when they draw hard lines.
Well, those people would be opposed to using spellcheck and grammar tools, too, I guess. I don’t think there’s a reasonable argument against using AI to spellcheck/check your grammar other than that it’s hugely inefficient.
The argument as I've heard it explained to me by someone with a banhammer: "One use of AI no matter how benign is not acceptable because usage is infectious; after even the most minimal use of AI, we can't tell what was AI and what wasn't, therefore the only acceptable position is no AI whatsoever"
Surely we can all agree that banhammer people are generally not a good standard to go by? Still, if you value participating in that space, you have no choice but to follow their rules
Sure. For small changes it would work. However, for larger documents the effort increases a lot. LLM speeds things like "making use of terminolgy" in the document consitent.
Restructuring, combine parapgraphs etc. a lot faster.
In the old days it would take me weeks to get a good document out of door. Now a it is days.
While the absolute number of iterations polishing is higher.
There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case. There's something profoundly disrespectful about forcibly scraping the human corpora without asking for permission first, or considering compensation in anyway, or just setting out that "yeah, we're doing this, and damn the consequences". There's something profoundly disrespectful about then taking this device running on investor money chasing the promise of a value that just can't conceivably be delivered, and employing it to do all the unethical things you could imagine just because you can engineer the "No" out of the model.
Of course the level of moral disengagement that's rife around here generally precludes any recognition of such things, as that might be construed as "harshing the vibe on the innovation, man". So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect until this type of thing hits enough of a critical mass that a societal ethics framework begins to manifest around it and not be ignored.
> So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect
Nope. Because the individual end user still and already has a choice. A choice to write an email (or whatever) on their own. Be it supported by AI research or whathaveyou, or not.
Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something.
Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
> I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
I agree with everything here, and do the same, but in my experience people will still interpret doing this as “profoundly disrespectful towards the receivers”. The sibling to your comment seems to express that sentiment:
“There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case.”
Yeah, Ive had similar negative responses a few times to things that are obviously Ai assisted, but also obvious that human thought was guiding it. Frankly, it says more to me about that person than it does about me - they seem to be the same sort who were/are staunchly anti-ai for coding, which reveals someone who has little ability for judgment, discernment etc. Just black and white.
Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate.
I had such an experience last week, and in hindsight I probably should have written the issue differently. I used Ai there primarily to help me be more thorough and have the whole thing be better-formatted than I would have otherwise done myself (ain't no one got time for markdown tables etc).
I should have made it less thorough and more plainly formatted, because it did, admittedly, scream AI. That undermined an otherwise thoughtful and important issue. Though, the people who actually mattered didn't take exception and replied thoughtfully - perhaps partly because I had already gained some degree of trust with them, via thoughtful, useful issues and PRs.
In the end, Ai is a magical tool that can be enormously helpful with almost anything. But we have to use it consciously, like anything.
> Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate.
I'm at the point where I don't even want to interact with that mentality. I get it, as I too don't like to see endless slop so there's got to be a quality bar and standards. But when the standard is set to zero tolerance, the whole vibe of the community plummets as the example I pasted shows.
Originally I was for the policy, as there was a lot of low quality content.
But now people are finding their way around the tools and they have gotten a lot better, none of that can be appreciated. Instead, people post a project, they get hissed at, and banned. It can cause a lot of hurt feelings, the rules are fuzzy and don't match how they're applied while the mods say they're crystal clear and even handed.
Meanwhile you go to a programming language community that is pro AI and people are just talking about programming languages and AI. There's not all these weird witch hunts and purity tests. I'd rather just stay away from all that, I prefer AI slop to that.
Not to mention the coolest people I've met in the past 2 years have all been hacking away at AI tech. Creative, enthusiastic, chill people I'm happy to associate with.
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
From my experience, AI tends to sugarcoat and be very verbose in its' responses. Theses two combined mean I need to peel away a lot of text before I can get to the "real" point as a reader.
So while I could use AI to craft a response, and then rework it to be more concise, I wonder if it wouldn't be faster (and more rewarding) to simply type it myself.
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
I think it can be OK if AI is used to polish up one’s message or to help structure it. Basically help with grammar, formatting, and wording.
But copy pasting an AIs response to a question? Not at all. People earn a reputation over time. TRUST is earned. An AI cannot earn trust. If you copy paste an AI response verbatim, i need to read everything in your message with a big grain of salt. Imagine doing this all the time as a reader? Exhausting and a waste of others time. If i want to read raw AI output i’ll ask the AI directly, thanks.
If you write something in your own words, or at least synthesize an AI response before sharing it with me, then i know i’m reading something that has at least passed the smell test.
It’s the difference between reviewing a pull request from an intern and a principal software engineer.
I don't disagree at all. But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.
Though, I think such a writing partner can only really be useful if you know how to write yourself, which also requires knowing how to think (because writing is really just thinking).
So, again, in the end all that really matters is whether you are effectively communicating what needs to be communicated, Ai-assisted or not. It's quite apparent to other thinking people when someone is not doing that, and that hurts their reputation, undermines trust and ultimately leads to losing your job, connections etc...
So, again, the policy really should just be something to the effect of "you're being paid to help us be effective and correct. If you can't do that, we don't need you. Take that into consideration with regards to the tools that you use.". That's obviously not an adequate policy - Ai could surely be helpful in polishing it! But it most definitely couldn't get to the root of the matter on its own.
> But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.
There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email.
You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.
Indeed. And if someone then shares that output verbatim, they'll undermine their own credibility. They can guide the AI to tidy it up, or do it themselves. The issue is not in using AI for writing, but in not using it consciously.
Well, I'd say concision is not the key - sometimes you should be verbose or something else.
In fact, my tendency is to be far too long-winded, with lots of perhaps-unnecessary parantheticals etc. Ai is often shockingly useful at reining me in and focusing on the issue at hand, as well as removing my worst tendencies towards meanness etc...
Im a good writer, when I want to be. But having Ai review, edit, write drafts etc undoubtedly makes me a better writer/communicator. But only because I'm actively thinking about it all, rather than just saying "respond to this" and then providing copy pasta.
To be fair, there is a different way to get to Mohg. You can talk to Varre at the Rose Church in the Lakes of Liurnia, and he gets you on the quest line that gets you there. You basically have to invade 3 (i think) people's worlds, PvP, doesn't matter if you win or lose, or there is one NPC that you can do an invasion on in Altus Plateau. Then he'll give you an item that just needs to be soaked in the blood of a maiden (and it's made explicit what you need to do, not just left for you to figure out). After that you get the letter and he will take you to Mohg.
I'm lucky enough to be able to send my child to day care where he doesn't get any screen time (obviously), so typically his only time he gets to watch something is when we are out and about, and even then we have a rule of timers before he can watch, or if we are at a tap house or something, we've made him actually have to sit and talk to people/friends, ask them how they are doing, introduce himself, etc. Once he does that, he can choose a Pixar movie of his choice or a live concert video to watch.
And even with all that, I still feel guilty due to the reddit mob telling me it's going to destroy his brain.
Yup, the advice is geared towards being very conservative, rather than lenient. An example I like to give people is that here in Wisconsin, drinking culture is huge. A friend of mine's father had pancreatic cancer and went to see his doc and wasn't given too much time to live. He was a big fan of having a nice glass of scotch with his fish fry, so he asked if it was still okay to have it, especially with how much time he was given. The doctor was like: "I have to tell you no, it's not okay. But the reason why is because if I tell my other patients that they can have a drink on "special occasions", well, suddenly, Monday becomes a special occasion, and Tuesday becomes a special occasion, and you see where this is going."
I think that'd be cool, but I'd say that Claude Code/Codex is often used for this exact thing and they do a decent job of it (at least in my experience with R). Usually once I've kind of wrapped up my model or data work I'll just ask "okay, now organize this so it makes sense", and it usually does a great job at organizing the helpers, etc.
Not that TIOBE or PyPl are the end all be all, but R was in the Top 10 for the first time since 2020 and PyPl has it at #4. A lot of people use R in 2026, because it's still great for data science work, "tidy" language is still fantastic for working with data, and also it's caught up to Python in almost every way when it comes to putting models into production. Both are great "orchestrator" languages, and I've put both into production on sites that get hundreds of thousands of hits a day.
In my opinion, RStudio is still the best data science IDE and it's not even close. I've been using Positron a bit more lately just for Claude Code reasons, as I prefer having the pane itself rather than using the terminal, but man it's really tough to shake RStudio. Even with the work put into configuring VSCode to get it kind of close to it, it still just always feels a bit janky.
Emacs + ESS is superior IMO. RStudio has a bunch of frills I don't care about and doesn't let me configure files as I'd like. ESS showing the function signature in the minibuffer to me is the killer feature. Wish I could get that for EVERYTHING.
Yeah, once you move onto legitimate business evaluation metrics (where Precision@k or Recall@k don't actually fit your business model without modification), GPTs just seem to suffer without context, and hey, knowing the context is part of what gives a data scientist his value.
I still feel like they are in an incredible position when it comes to AI because of their hardware integration/advantage across all of their devices. I think they see immense value in getting things on-device and not having to rely on any of these other companies.
When it comes to AI, there's ~5 trillion dollars of datacenter revenue Apple could be competing for, but isn't. That's not good.
Now, maybe it would be justifiable if there were great local AI experiences on iPhone, or an easy $5 trillion to be made elsewhere. Until then, Apple is bleeding money hand-over-fist by refusing to sign the CUDA UNIX drivers and sell the rackmount Mac as a cutting-edge TSMC inference box. The Grace superchip is absolutely eating Apple's ARM lunch right now.
