Hi HN,

To my pleasant surprise, I’ve been noticing a sort of revival of posts related to writing here and on the web at large. This is either due to my own return to the craft of writing, or it really is a broader trend of AI power users realizing that AI is really, really bad at generating good prose.

Regardless, I’ve found AI to be a useful tool for filling in the gaps in creative writing craft and terminology that I never learned in school. I am an engineer by training and trade, so most of the writing “skills” we learned were for technical writing, lab reports, and the like.

This site was also heavily inspired by the “Laws of Software Engineering” post that was quite popular a few weeks back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47847179

except AI writing is near 100% detectable. check out something like pangram. no matter what you generate, the cadence of their word choices, sentance structures, etc. are always the same and often blantently visible in the prose. in fact i doubt an LLM of any size now and into the future can properly write without a "fingerprint". real writing, in almost any language, given the possible combination of writing even just a few sentences, even given valid grammar, already exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. because LLMs are transformers, they will always leave behind clues.

Its wild to me that the concept of working 80% (1 day off a week) or even 60% (2 days off a week) isn't even a concept in the US, while in europe such part time situations make up a huge share of the work force.

In short, people have been having the day off for decades now. It's called part-time work.

There are also widely accepted standards to written word.

The best example is when an abbreviation can be expanded to more than one phrase, and both are widely used.

> The world doesn't make sense. It's always been this way, so we don't even know another way to exist.

This is the main line for me. Even around the bonfire with fellow grugs if you got eaten by a tiger, I'm not sure you fully would understand that either. So I'm not exactly sure what this post is getting at? That human history so far is "bad" and we "did it the wrong way"? I'd argue 99% of human adults are just folks trying to do their best to provide for their family. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist though.

Agreed. Do we have any information on what these "vulnerabilities" actually are? Every vulnerability is typically immediately reported to CVE or NIST... are these "so destructive" they have to be kept behind closed doors? Give me a break...

I don't see the problem - everything the author describes has, and will always be, true. You can't vibe code anything of value in a weekend exactly because anyone _else_ with the same level of experience can do the exact same thing in the same weekend! This has always been true across all trades and technologies. Once again, the domain expertise, wisdom, and simply _time_ of doing something always win. LLMs literally don't change that at all.

Have you used gemini models for code work? Claude and Codex are miles ahead in terms of quality and how thorough they are

this is extremely strawman - with this your basically saying any software ever that has parts written by automation or cron jobs (even before llms) is not a product worth using? foolish.

Your response reads much more like a strawman than my original comment.

I’d challenge you to identify where in my post I said I wouldn’t use software that employs automation?

It is pretty clear I am not talking about running CI for automated and predictable signals or cron jobs. I am talking about using AI to write code and also fix tests.

It is exceedingly clear in practice that the volume of code produced by LLMs is too much for the humans using these tools to read and understand. We are collectively throwing decades of best practices out of the window in service of “velocity.” Even the FAANG shops I know of who previously had good engineering cultures seem to be endorsing the cult of: AI generated everything with stamp approval.

Cron jobs are not capable of flat-out deceit.

Lots of hate for NextJS in here so im wondering what people use as an alternative framework...

Gatsby? I used to use that one until the updates basically ceased to exist.

Vite with <insert your favorite here> - looks good, but at initial glance seems to favor just pure speed for any other feature support like MDX, advanced SEO, etc.

Roll your own with React and webpack? Good luck, and you'll probably end up with something that looks like the others I've mentioned above.

Just surprised many comments are just stating complaints about Next and not providing any counter examples, its very un-HN.

This stood out to me as well. The level of discourse is incredibly low compared to other topics. Huge amount of "next/vercel sucks" without any constructive or deeper argument made.

There is a similar vibe on the Next.js subreddit, just enormous amounts of shallow negativity. Very strange.

(I'm not saying there aren't valid reasons to dislike the framework or company but the way it's expressed is consistently incredibly juvenile for some reason)

Eh, it's been rehashed over and over again. People experienced with Next.js and other frameworks don't need to read the same constructive, deeper arguments being made ad infinitum. It's like when people say microslop or micro$oft, everyone knows what they're talking about.

Astro, Nuxt, SvelteKit, SolidStart, React Router (prev. Remix), among others

Vite has plugins for MDX, SSR, etc. You can easily build your own framework if you want in a few hundred lines of glue code.

The criticisms of Next / React are so ubiquitous you can metaphorically gesture in their direction and most people know what's up. It's like wondering why someone said "ai slop" and didn't provide an expose on the quality of AI writing.