jpmitchellThe first 40 months of the AI era
> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI?
Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.
the flip side of claude creep is that the easy parts are now genuinely free, which means all your time goes to the 30% that was already hard. ai doesn't save you time on the hard bits, it just eliminates the excuse to not have done the easy bits first.what's helped: think in postconditions, not tasks. instead of 'add feature X', define 'the tests pass and the user can do Y'. the agent figures out what X means. without that anchor there's nothing to mark as done, so scope drifts indefinitely.
100%
Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust.
Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.
Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust.
Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.
Some of the expanded scope that I’ve done almost for free is usually around UX polish and accessibility. I even completely redid the —help for a few CLI tools I have when I would never have invested over an hour on each before agents.
I agree that the efficiency and quality are very hard to measure. I’m extremely confident that when used well, agents are a huge gain for both though. When used poorly, it is just slop you can make really fast.
Nice observation about AI-generated content:
> I’ve had the idea that from a social perspective it’d be regarded like plastic surgery, in that it only looks weird when its over-done, or done badly.
An important aspect of comparison is that nobody is going to tell you that your surgery is noticeable or looks bad.
Your friends, family, partners, coworkers, aren't going to say anything, neither are people you meet casually, certainly not service workers, strangers aren't going to pull you aside to tell you the truth about your nose job, etc.
I hope the same social taboo doesn't transfer over to AI content. We should honestly critique AI generated content, used either in-whole or in-part with human creations. If the inclusion of AI content botched your article, saying so should be socially acceptable.
We saw some of this here on HN. It used to be that when AI content would be submitted here, it was a social faux pas to even mention it was LLM generated, same thing with LLM generated comments, no matter how obvious it was. Mentioning a comment was AI was socially verboten and you'd be finger-wagged at.
Eventually, AI fatigue caused the community to discount Show HN entries, submissions and comments, and the signal to noise ratio could no longer be ignored.
Now, turn on showdead. Those same comments, that users were expected to interact with as if they were made in good faith by real people, litter every submission's comment section. These comments objectively hurt discussion and it's a good thing they're shadowbanned.
Culturally, I hope we can reach a point where critique of AI content, including code, doesn't brand critics as haters, Luddites, or worse, and stifle conversation about what our communities really value and want.
This is a sound personal assessment.
The section about being "glazed" into action resonates. Hidden within this concept I think is something profound about human motivation, innuendo and all.
> AI generated prose is at best boring, and at worst genuinely unappealing. I’m continually tempted, because in theory it should work well. The AI has perfect spelling and grammar, has more than enough context to produce article-length content, and can do in seconds what takes me hours.
I have a thesis in mind...that there is something fundamental to the human spirit that relishes a sort of friction that LLMs cannot observe or reproduce on their own.
> (The) Output was coherent but its ‘style’ was very boring and overtly inoffensive, which was (and still is) a clear limitation of the technology.
The style isn’t a limit of the technology, it’s a limit of the lobotomized models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing.
> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating.
I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I can't get information on how the current API of some-thing works into my brain fast enough, because the docs are non existent, outdated, or scattered and hard to collate.