As someone from outside the Anglophone cultural sphere, when I first learned to write in English, the kind of writing that AI now often produces was taught to me as “formal" writing.
But these days, when I write in that formal style, people sometimes say it sounds like AI. That has been a difficult and frustrating point for me.
I still find the subtle difference hard to understand.
I was raised and educated well inside the Anglosphere (USA) and was also taught to write formally in that way.
Do the people who say you sound like AI give you any specifics?
Also, if you don't mind, what was your English education like? I understand that quite a few Americans work in South Korea as teachers but I have no details about how that manifests.
That used to happen to me more often. When I first came to HN, and even now if I am not careful, my comments can get flagged. Also, when I translate from Korean using DeepL and paste the result, people often say it sounds flagged, awkward, or unnatural.
I studied English more seriously in graduate school, although I dropped out. In Korea, there are quite a few Americans who teach English. Public schools often have native English-speaking instructors, but in my case I learned English more seriously at graduate school, and universities also make students study English almost semi-compulsorily.
In Seoul, there are probably many teachers who mainly teach middle and high school students, but a lot of that is through private education rather than the public school system.
Unsure of this really tracks tho. How are you evaluating for the bias that they’re not merging it because you’re “their leader of 1000 people org” and not because you’re actually an engineer deep in the trenches that knows the second or third order effects of slop?
This is a genuine question btw, I see plenty of instances of this in my own org.
1. I am also on the receiving end of this. My boss often codes and vibecodes, and no one feels like they have to merge their stuff. We only merge it if it meets the high quality standard we have. And there is no drama for blocking a PR in our culture.
2. I am fairly deep in the trenches myself and I know when my PRs are high quality and when they are not. And that does not correlate with use of AI in my experience.
I don’t understand the kind of mentality that takes to put out genuine slop like this. Use the LLM or the agents or the fancy way to call a markdown file a skill to do your job; but stop pretending that it makes you in any way exceptional.
The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.
People who were very bad 0.01x devs (or not devs at all) that now feel competent because they can produce something when previously they could produce nothing.
I, on the other hand strongly resonate with this post. I am not a programmer by profession, but a programmer by need - I write tools to get stuff done, and this is exactly the missing link. I am able to craft algorithms, architectures and focus on the UI, and llms (mostly Claude) allow me to write the low-level that needs to be written that I inspect. What used to take days takes hours and allows us to solve issue we were previously not able to in our org.
LLMs will have the same effect that outsourcing had on tech jobs i.e. some effect but not meaningful for people that truly know what they’re doing and can demand the money for quality to distinguish themselves from random text generator (AI) slop.
Explain to me how you think a sophisticated random text generator will take all jobs. Especially since it’s trained on existing corpus of data on the internet created by? Guess who, existing engineers. I’m genuinely curious on the backing of these “trust me bro” style statements.
In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.
I have built web services used by many Fortune 100 companies, built and maintained and operated them for many years.
But I'm not doing that anymore. Now I'm working on my own, building lots of prototypes and proof-of-concepts. For that I've founding LLMs to be extremely helpful and time-saving. Who the hell cares if it's not maintainable for years? I'll likely be throwing it out anyway. The point is not to build a maintainable system, it's to see if the system is worth maintaining at all.
Are there software engineers who will not find LLMs helpful? Absolutely. Are there software engineers who will find LLMs extremely helpful? Absolutely.
What are the likely impacts over the next 1, 5, 10, 20 years. People getting into development now have the most incredible technology to help them skill up, but also more risk than we had in decades past. There's a continuum of impact and it's not 0 or 100%, and it's not immediate.
What I consider inevitable: humans will keep trying to automate anything that looks repeatable. As long as there is a good chance of financial gain from adding automation, we'll try it. Coding is now potentially at risk of increasing automation, with wildcards on "how much" and "what will the impact be". I'm extremely happy to have nuanced discussions, but I balk at both extremes of "LLMs can scale to hard AGI, give up now" and "we're safe forever". We need shorthand for our assumptions and beliefs so we can discuss differences on the finer points without fixating on obviously incorrect straw men. (The latter aimed at the general tone of these discussions, not your comment.)
And I never said both can't exist at the same time. Are you certain you are not the one fighting straw men and are tiring yourself with the imagined extreme dichotomy?
My issue is with people claiming LLMs are undoubtedly going to remove programming as a profession. LLMs work fine for one-off code -- when they don't make mistakes even there, that is. They don't work for a lot of other areas, like code you have to iterate on multiple times because the outer world and the business requirements keep changing.
Works for you? Good! Use it, get more productive, you'll only get applause for me. But my work does not involve one-off code and for me LLMs are not impressive because I had to rewrite their code (and to eye-ball it for bugs) multiple times.
But what you'll probably find is that people that are skilled communicators are currently getting a decent productivity boost from LLMs, and I suspect that the difference between many that are bullish vs bearish is quite likely coming down to ability to structure and communicate thoughts effectively.
Personally, I've found AI to be a large productivity boost - especially once I've put certain patterns and structure into code. It's then like hitting the N2O button on the keyboard.
Sure, there are people making toy apps using LLMs that are going to quickly become a unmaintainable mess, but don't be too quick to assume that LLMs aren't already making an impact within production systems. I know from experience that they are.
> I suspect that the difference between many that are bullish vs bearish is quite likely coming down to ability to structure and communicate thoughts effectively.
Strange perspective. I found LLMs lacking in less popular programming languages, for example. It's mostly down to statistics.
I agree that being able to communicate well with an LLM gives you more results. It's a productivity enabler of sorts. It is not a game changer however.
> don't be too quick to assume that LLMs aren't already making an impact within production systems. I know from experience that they are.
OK, I am open to proof. But people are just saying it and leaving the claims hanging.
My last project made millions for the bank I was working at within the first 2 years and is now a case study at one of our extremely large vendors who you have definitely heard of. I conceptualised it, designed it, wrote the most important code. My boss said my contribution would last decades. You persist with making statements about people in the discussion, when you know nothing about their context aside from one opinion on one issue. Focus on the argument not the people.
Indeed, your blaming of me being arrogant is like a school yard indeed. You started it, you got called out, and are now acting superior. I owe you no grace if you started off the way you did in the other sub-thread.
Go away, I don't want you in my replies. Let me discuss with people who actually address the argument and not looking to paint me as... something.
All the programming for the Apollo Program took less then a year and Microsoft Teams is decades in development obviously they are better than NASA programmers.
the programming for the NASA program is very simple; the logistics of the mission, which has nothing to do with programming, is what was complex
You're essentially saying "the programming to do basic arithmetic and physics took only a year" as if that's remotely impressive compared to the complexity of something like Microsoft Teams. Simultaneous editing of a document by itself is more complicated than anything an Apollo program had to do
I want to not like this comment, but I think you are right! There's a reason people like to say your watch has more compute power than the computers it took to put man on the moon.
