One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everything they write has almost no signal.
Over a mid sized AI generated codebase that means I’m reading like 500 words to figure out what a module is even doing.
Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is garbage" but what about the people, as pointed out many times in this thread, that simply do not care? Does that not count as "good enough"?
Taste seems to imply an art, but I don't think we're at the point of cleverness, of LLM innovating a new beautiful programming paradigm or pattern out of immaculate taste for code. We're just talking more basic, even bad devs have more terseness, more clear intent in their prose and code, etc.
It's "good enough" for many use-cases, but it could be better, even before expecting the most beautifully clear code from the best devs out there, it has not reached the level of the average one in readability and clarity of expression (both code and prose). That annoys the author, he has to intervene manually to trim all the fat, and therefore not "good enough".
Aside from the "amateur" qualifier, the Booch quote below provides insight to those questions:
The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic,
some sensational method or tool whose application promises
to render software development trivial. It is the mark of
the professional software engineer to know that no such
panacea exist.[0]
So "good enough" depends on the stakeholders' definition of that valuation.
IOW, if a person tasked with delivering a solution can instead deliver garbage and still get paid for it, then it is "good enough" for some definition of same. If the people approving a person's remuneration are not satisfied with this type of work product, then the answer as to whether it is "good enough" or not will be quickly answered.
The amateur is the one who hones a tool’s edge until it’s razor sharp, and cuts away all unnecessary detail until they’ve found the essence of what they’re trying to achieve. The work of an amateur is often highly impractical and uneconomical, but sublimely beautiful.
LLMs are also useful as a natural language interface. They're pretty useful for search (as RAG and autoresearch, not the glue-on-pizza Google search crap). They're good for filtering and classification against rules that can be specified in natural language instead of special syntax or by training dedicated models.
If this is an acceptable definition of software engineering productivity, where "quantity over quality" is prized, then hire me.
Because I guarantee I can produce dozens of PRs daily, each having tens of thousands of LoC deltas (pick any language you desire), none of which having research and/or understanding underpinning them, and all easily quantified as being "brute force."
I think it was from a Chinese person, as they took manufacturing of cheap things, low quality stuff, but managed to scale it to mass quantities.
I agree with that, it may not be reliable, full featured, well designed, ergonomic, etc. But quantity enables things and thus is a quality in itself. It allows use-cases that benefit from accessible cheap software. Those use-cases were not viable prior, because cost/time was prohibitive.
I can guarantee that you cannot produce such PRs in the same quantity/quality than a modern LLM. The speed at which today's LLMs output code is superhuman.
To quote the parent commenter:
> They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem,
but not long term
No quality large scale project can exist without it. And any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.
Execute fast or get nowhere, a series of small wins get you to live long term.
If you need examples, look at game dev. There's plenty of games that have good execution but aren't fun to play or they're a confusing mess because there wasn't good overall direction.
… but does it work? Someone comes along, reviews it, "this is garbage, and does not do what it says it purports to do". Perhaps it even gave an output: the script computed … something, but it's just GIGO.
But that "check if this works" friction is the same friction that is what people try to avoid by generating it with an LLM in the first place. If you're too lazy to write the script, you're practically by definition too lazy to verify it.
I literally can't imagine generating a script with an LLM without testing it at all.
Bash is one of those situations where LLMs can do really well. No human on Earth can remember all of the commands and even fewer humans can remember all of the switches for all of the commands.
This kind of remembering, searching, and assembling is exactly what LLMs are good at - as long as you're not writing a gigantic build system with hundreds of moving parts, in which case you should probably be using something more streamlined anyway.
Programming is no longer skilled labor. Quality is a hobby.
But I mean they’re not good enough to do the things I need them to. Not enough that any difference can be chalked up to “taste”.
Put it this way, if you hired a very good handyman to build you a cathedral, you wouldn’t stand looking at the smouldering wreckage of the construction site saying “oh well that’s just a matter of taste”.
How come humans consuming their own output gets better over time, but llms and any other form of ai consuming their own output only get worse?
AI is not inaugurating an age of taste. It is shortening the half-life of taste and commoditizing software. What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive advantages anymore? If you ask me, it looks like business did in the 90s. We'll probably see the return of department store software in the next few years.
1: for the record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh
This is the question I've been thinking about. All can be copied very easily and in scale these days.
True taste is interesting because is more like a worldview, a modus operandi, a continuous process… those are harder to replicate.
People treat their computers like any other appliance. They don't care if it's riddled with bugs, they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page at infinitum to get it to work.
I think it's also why marketing and designers get more of a say in the software than engineers. UI polish matters more since it increases sales.
This is the hardest thing to come into terms with in this industry.
They won't gladly do it. They'll do it begrudgingly because there is nothing better, or they have no choice, and they need to get their work done.
Just because people use your AI-vomited garbage programs doesn't mean they like it.
Surely there is more to software than CRUD apps
Slower load times means user won't use the product, won't click the buy button, or will simply leave.
I hate it when visual designer do a product design or ux design job.
I hate it when marketing just imagine some fake use case in their head.
Market Research is real research. UX study is a real study.
now everybody just vibe their job
Ironically, though, I had written a post that had people debating whether I put any intuition or judgement into. Would've been real ironic to instead add a post-scriptum that said "Yep, none of it matters. I just slopped something in 5 minutes and it easily went to the frontpage. Look how easy it is!" but unfortunately that is not why I write, not what I intended to achieve, and not something I am equipped to do. I care about my work, which is why I care about your comment as well.
I've spent a day fixing a feature my very junior colleague pushed, and which was merged by my should-have-known-better colleagues who have almost as much experience as me.
We have access to the same models. Why did her version suck and my features don't need fixing?
There's still something there, thankfully.
https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1rhug58/mcd...
so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"
The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps where the code is straight up horrible.
It’s hard to give something like “vibe coding” a rigid definition, but I think we can all agree that it’s inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more I examine the code while building, the less the activity is about vibes.
So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble anymore, but it's also not so much of a vibecoding tool anymore either.
is Lovable used internally to create and improve Lovable product itself ?
so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"
The author seems to be advocating for choosing to "carry the burden" of one's taste (or aesthetics, judgement, standards, etc) while bemoaning that the market may not sufficiently reward for doing so.
IMHO, the core flaw is in mixing these two things 1) the market rewarding what it chooses to reward; and 2) individuals choosing to pursue some external/internal rewards.
I broadly agree with the premise that Gen AI has lowered the cost of software development and, as a result, the quality of the idea and its execution have become more salient differentiators than just the ability to bring an idea to reality. I also agree that pursuing one's own sense of taste/judgment or "objective function" is often intrinsically rewarding and worth it. But ultimately, an individual has to decide how much they want to (or need to) play for the external market rewards vs their own intrinsic rewards/motivations.
But I don't think it's coherent to argue that the market "ought to" reward one for their oh-so-special but mysterious, amorphous, and unmeasurable way of doing things, or that pursuing one's own taste/judgement is somehow automatically an exercise in greatness.
Yes, previously the person who didn't understand shipped faster. It was a long standing problem. The people who crapped, got the bonus, and ran were much faster than the patient engineer of quality.
By the way, what were the essays that formulated Claude Style? if the author was indeed formed by them, I'd like to read them - or at least enough of them to understand.
And honestly: I've been tired of an age of engineers that are beat down, that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious. It often is still very sensible and practical and what you should shoot for! But there are also people wandering around now trying much harder! And I am excited for those frontiers! I think it will challenge and shake the foundations that we've accepted as true, as There Is No Alternative, in exciting bold and fun ways.
I am however pretty unconvinced by the article. There's a lot that doesn't quite work for me, that isn't building the case I'd like, whose takes are off from my read.
> The output is good enough—that is the problem. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output.
Agreed about the rationing of output. I do think that the article though continues to show a magical thinking. That we have these things now and they autonomously do the thing. That the LLM's have solved it all.
The article itself goes on at length about how nebulous and abstract taste is:
> Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument
But this contrasts so distinctly to me against "the output is good enough". Is it? That depends. That depends on your taste. The proximate first results come quick. But the technics underneath? Those themselves, in my view, rely enormously on engineering taste to support and advance. I think we see a very similar sort of magical delivery thinking, very clearly on display here:
> When the factories came, they could suddenly make everything—cheaply, uniformly, by the thousand.
As if there was some magical "good enough" transition where suddenly the aliens came and gave us this box that just does the thing. As if we discovered the right formulas and math and now: we had production. Again I think there's just an enormous amount of work and taste that is still actively required inside the factory box, that building the industrial processes is incredibly intense & difficult, even though we have reliable industry-line production and now robots doing the labor.
There's still so many gems, so much lovely material for thought. I love the provocations here, and I think there's a lot of great calibration.
> The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum.
Makes me think of yesterdays @apenwarr banger,
> Every slow prototype started out as a fast prototype, I think that’s how it goes https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca/post/3msemlo4rds2h
I would like to comment on this, though:
> that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious.
I am always aiming for simple. If it's simple, it's maintainable and can be easy to reason about. Doing that is hard work, though. I used to spend three iterations to achieve it: functions are simple, easy to reason about, properly named and composable.
It's the opposite of blunt, though, so it might be that you meant something else with the term "simple" :)
Given the recent "moving to a farm" ... 7 days later ... "leaving the farm" posts, it's hard not to read this as someone clearly struggling with the burnout which is all too common in our industry, and resultingly giving in to the false promise of a machine that can just handle the thinking for you.
> I do write like this sometimes. The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines—all of it. It’s just the way it is.
> That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it.
> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one
Either the author is doing this on purpose, or this is some kind of art project. I don’t buy the “just a coincidence” story at all.
The wall is the point, if you want to truly know the truth of something. I still believe there is no royal road. Taste isn’t the answer to why you would choose a bump allocator over a slab when designing a system. It is experience, wisdom, and the long hard road of trying yourself and failing. Taste comes after.
There is much joy in suffering when the result is knowing.
Too many people have tried to declare victory over software engineering prematurely and it shows.
I think the core still leads back to human agency and the ability to consider aspects that wouldn't fit into an LLMs limited context window or be able to be vectorized into a DB, including ultra-long-term consequences (especially those with great thinking abilities).
I still happen to think that AI/LLMs will never be able to "fully" replace humans, because the evolutionary process that led to our cognitive abilities and the way we train LLMs are vastly different thanks to different pressures, but maybe that's just me defending the last bastions of our collective humanity as a human; I don't know what else to root for.
Do your friends actually believe that AI can't automate these parts of their work? I think my answer would be that I'll just have to learn to do something else.
> I still happen to think that AI/LLMs will never be able to "fully" replace humans
Do you mean replace humans completely or just replace all the tasks humans don't want to do? I would hope that humans will still have a reason to live even if all the work is done by computers, and that the computers wouldn't intentionally wipe us all out.
It will soon no longer require taste. Or at the very least be 95% of the way there on the first run.
BTW, when was the last time Tesla driver died due to FSD fault?
Anyway, I completely agree and the past several years have been an absurd journey into borderline psychosis with some people.
But the advent of design systems and software like Sketch and Figma pretty much automated the job away. You didn’t need the raw Photoshop skills anymore - any CMU grad could be a top tier designer now.
I see the same thing basically happening here. Taste will matter for a while but eventually people are just choosing the most accepted/expected optimal choices and anything that falls outside the trend will be “not good” in the same way skeuomorphism in design is no longer good.
So we’re lucky we’re in a taste era - it’s a lot of fun. You (yes you!) can still change it, shape it, establish the status quo of tomorrow
You can’t do product design without visual design - and many designers don’t. They’re picking from UI libraries like Tailwind or MUI, which is really something any developer could do, and many do. That’s why the job mostly died.
Even the most abstract of painters, fine artists, and so-on should have good fundamentals. They’ve gone through the discipline and developed taste, they don’t choose it from a library.
The CMU grad (using this as a stand-in now for any so-called educated hack, sorry CMU) is skipping all that and asserting personal authority without proving or living anything. And that shows IMO.
My probably unpopular opinion is that using AI can be very creative and you can get into flow states, and the quality of outputs vary by skill of the user.
Now that creation is cheap, the scarcity has moved to adoption. Things built without taste are less likely to be adopted, to survive. At least that is what I'd like to believe.
You need a long term, persistent abundance to develop and even have a use for taste.
I don't see why would software be any different.
In hindsight, I have worded this rather poorly and let some phrases do a lot of heavily lifting for me in the post. Ultimately, I agree with you. Knowing, for this instance, is not half the battle.
Still, I like better when we actually do try to name what we're talking about. We've probably all read the motorcycle guys take on quality and things like that right? I guess the theme some are going with is that quality can't be objectively quantified and to define it is futile but I've never liked that take. If we think LLM generated code is low quality then it certainly makes sense to start our attempts to define or at least describe what makes the quality needle move, because language is how we encode lots of information and information is what feeds LLMs.
People also like to rag on uncle Bobs takes, clean code, etc but I like how at least he tried. I've been a fan of his for awhile but I'm not big on objects so don't care about his pushes on that sort of thing. The best take that offered hints that I would call quality is "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout, there is plenty of stuff in this short little book that was very satisfying to me, like for instance where Bob wants short/small functions, Mr Ousterhout was much more flexible on this, like for instance maybe some functions can be bigger if the need arises, things like that.
How convenient it is that we’re all so awesome according to the one metric that can’t be measured
Every AI-frustrated (but LLM-written, sigh) blog post about the loss of taste and craft and hard work in development sounds like we've given up the interaction with the machine. Like human work is sitting back in your chair and shitting on stuff.
That's obviously not true! That's not how any of this works!
It's hard and weird to develop with the LLMs because they just do stuff. Lots of it is good, some of it is OK, some of it's horrible. Unpacking what it's done is hard and weird because software isn't just lovely UX, it's also data structures that scale and performance and privacy and enterprise controls and SOC 2 and onboarding and accessibility.
If you want to build real software, all that stuff has to get done. Today you're working on the feature, tomorrow you're making it scale. It's long-term and iterative and complex and hard to pack into a prompt or a markdown spec.
The work is the work, done at and with the computer, and it's way more than just "taste."
Actually I think it is possible to reconcile Kant's third critique with the statement "LLM is possible to make aesthetic judgement" (with certain generous application of principle of charity, naturally).
Reading text, it can either grab me or it doesn't. I've asked about that to an AI and there's some reason for that. Some text is more compatible with me, due to the rhythm or combination of chars/words used, how they actually look/feel, it's not just about the content. So I'm assuming some writers are going to be more compatible with me while others will make me dismiss them quickly or just skim.
I like to think I have the correct objective taste in music, but everybody thinks that about themselves.
Reductionism is hard to apply to intuitions, and we often fool ourselves.
I personally call this the obviously test: smart people correctly notice something and say it is obvious. It is a rather rarer skill to understand and explain why. I have particularly noticed it with coaching (which adds the next levels of difficulty in getting someone to grok what you've seen).
But toil is not gone. We have still have code owners, lawyers, physical hardware, thousands of configurations that we can't test them all.
And notably: we will still be asked to write software we can maintain in the future.
Sure, there are short-lived non-critical software projects where LLMs will rule.
But for many big complex projects, you can't land code without reviews. You can argue its because taste is already being enforced in the name of maintainability.
Why do you think orgs are pushing less reviews? Token-maxxing increased PRs but stupid meat brains are a constraint. So of course, remove that constraint and you’ll have your features faster!
Then we'll need to accept that coding is better when it's done by computers, and we'll start telling everyone it's actually the prompts and context that steered the machine that really matter.
All this doesn't necessarily translate to sales though. Because, to evaluate those things requires attention, trust, time and effort.
This is a significant barrier because a lot of software will appear to meet all of these superficially.
After 1 day of usage, a piece of software may appear to be intuitive, reliable, secure, performant and useful... But then after some time (sometimes a whole week or longer) you run into a critical scenario and discover that it cannot be solved with that software... Or performance drops off sharply after you created the 1000th record in the software... Or a hacker takes months to find that one endpoint which allows full remote code execution.
Even in an optimistic scenario, 1 week is a long time to evaluate a piece of software. I've encountered software which took 6 months and large teams of people to realize that it wasn't suitable. That's how long it took to hit the critical limits. It's a very long evaluation loop.
So you cannot judge new software efficiently by just looking at it. Even industry consensus is problematic if the software is very new and complex... Plenty of trends have fallen off a cliff in the past. You need to understand who is behind the software... And even that's not so easy; social proof can be misleading when it comes to deep technical ideas. The people who are good at social networking aren't necessarily good with tech.
I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. And the irony of it is that the solutions already exist... What doesn't exist is the mechanism to identify those solutions. But even the mindset needs to be corrected first.
I'm seeing the same thing. Of course, it's always possible that AI capabilities grow significantly from here and this worry is moot (and there will be other things to worry about, like whether I'll have a job). But seriously, after a while AI generated codebases really fall apart.
It's a bit of cope from me that this problem won't be solved in the future, but I'm also really disappointed with how many people really do not care about writing high-quality software that is easy to understand, performant, and resilient to bugs. Like, why did you decide to work on software in the first place?
I think we're going to see some pretty careless mistakes in the future that will result in a lot of pain...
The point being more that the development does weigh more heavily on having fun ideas to ask AI to build
I think there's probably also a place for people to make guides for AI-assisted programming or even personal essays on their views of "taste" or what they want code to look like?
I see pop up frequently objections to vibe coding (different from mere AI assistance in coding - vibe coding being creating things without looking at the code at all) that it doesn't account for architectural descisions, cybersecurity decisions, edge cases, and other such things. So to me it looks like a next step might be in identifying these things "vibe coding" doesn't do well, that people can learn more manually, so they can do at least AI assisted coding well.
There will be no mass job layoffs for antying but relatively automatable stuff.
Doesn't that mean guaranteed failure in the market if you use taste as your guiding star? Therefore, there's really no way to enter the market anymore.
I don't know how you then ship software or monetise it...? The market will just clone it.
So... Don't share stuff publicly? Only share with closed groups? Where does this leave small-time software development...?
If taste is maintainability, etc.. the no quite the opposite.
The startup that has no taste and vibecodes mindlessly might end up with a codebase they can't maintain or refactor. A product that can't advance.
But honestly, I don't feel like the toil is gone. Landing code in big projects remain hard.
Maybe software moves to this after it's commoditized? Users might prefer an artisanal one vs ordering it off the shelf or using an agent themselves.
We still have a metric for good taste, and it is $. Solve a problem that people care about? They give you $. Solve problem no one care about? No $.
It is not perfect, but I challenge you to find a better metric that is as effective and simple.
I think there is almost a split between people who have read ZAOMM and people who have not.
I recently made a post in my circles about how "meaning" is what human quality is. If you look at classical art a lot of it could look objectively nonsense and have technical mistakes, but just because the machine can make a picture does not mean that it attributes any meaning or communicate any intention. The difference between human-made classical artwork and machine-made classical artwork is the meaning and symbology behind it
This conclusion may be unwelcome here, since it implies that AI can acquire "taste".
[0]: https://www.jamesshore.com/Articles/Quality-With-a-Name.html
The only difference I see between what happened to master craftsmen during the Industrial Revolution and what is happening to programmers today is that I belong to the latter group, so for the first time, the coming employment crisis feels personal.
My best guess is that it's a pointer not to any actual concept but to latent semantic space between concepts. Either a very novel or very Buddhist phenomenon, depending on how you look at it.
I’m pretty sure it was not technology that killed the web it was the kind of toxic crap like that, that we’re seeing from communities and that’s nothing new
Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best things to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.
I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript function, automatically converting all the arguments and the return type. Then I left the company. How did my successors find it? No idea. Maybe they pulled out all the automation complexity and replaced it with manually operated boilerplate.
It's also a sign of refusal to learn an editor or IDE deeply. Most of the ones I know have mechanisms (or plugins) for generating the boilerplate.
Although back to the language, usually the biggest boilerplate killer are macros and so many developers seem to really have a problem with them.
My goal when writing a software is always to reach a point where modifying a business rule is as easy as writing it in plain english. Which means abstracting the essential complexity (while being pragmatic).
This is true, but I was mostly referring to framework boilerplate (Spring, React, etc.) or plumbing boilerplate. If you've ever written code professionally, you know that most code that you write is just making your thing fit with someone else's thing.
If your consumer or your provider made bad engineering decisions, you have to absorb them. If your company mandates the use of a framework, you have to absorb that, and so on. So I think it's great that AI can write all the dumb shit I didn't come up with anyway.
Following form of the words I just read: these 100% animous filled HN threads about how everyone is bad and everything deserves mocker have to be some elaborate power game to undermine hope and human will, I genuinely do not understand how genuine human people could think it good to "comment" like this.
There's just such a ridiculous pile on of people with such enormous overwhelming negativity underneath this ocmment. This off-gassing is almost never engaged with the material. Now there's an excuse to write off any material we don't like instantly, to accuse it of fakeness. But I still do not see a realness enscribed upon people who so actively work to tear down & prevent thought & consideration.
To engage with the post: I do think the definition of fashion is interesting, and a real power dynamic to be aware of. But do think there's a lot of things that take off in the world because they are good and interesting and nice, especially in technology and products, that the world wants nice things, and will happily support you for doing that. And especially in tech, the technical decisions we start from and build underfoot steer us towards success in subtle compounding ways, that matter, and that taste is crucial, where fashion is not a factor.
Again, at a meta level: my distress & frustration at the top is less from seeing this comment, and far more from seeing everything down thread trying to out-do one another with how cynical and anti-meaning anti-trying they can be. But I think this post definitely started on an all too familiar note, blood in the HN waters that all too often gets us so sharky.
I'm a firm believer in not engaging with or promoting the content of misrepresented AI.
The first is an XKCD 605 (Extrapolating). The author makes bold predictions for the future as though they're inevitable, but gives zero evidence, because there is none, we're still at T=0. IBM is still in business. Wake me up when it's been taken out by someone vibe-designing a mainframe in kicad. Or even, let's see a dropbox clone get off the ground. Should be easy, right? (It's an HN tradition, after all.)
The second mistake is mistaking a large multiplier for infinity. The cost of code has not "collapsed to almost nothing" as the author claims. Talk to your CTO/CFO if you want the real story. They're probably freaking out over AI spend. But the point is, yes, AI has made things cheaper, but they didn't become monotonically zero.
AI had also raised the bar. You can't ship "good enough" anymore, it has to be great. And great still takes time. Time in QA, time obsessing over every workflow, time talking with customers and planning features.
Taste hasn't even entered the picture, and the analysis is already wrong.
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
The reason is simple: Short sentences are punchy. They hit hard, carry emotional weight.
P.S. As evident, clearly I'm having some fun with this, but the point stands.
> The reason is simple. Short sentences are punchy. They hit hard. But they carry emotional weight.
Does this stem from you believing that there is value in making logical errors, or is your angle more towards believing that nobody should waste their time interacting with someone who makes logical errors?
If we assume that it is LLM generated, as suggested, apparently a lot of people, as the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write).
You might find it to be unusual because you probably have never read anything written by most people. Only peculiar characters tend to get noticed.
This is likely because the individual measures being averaged like "femur length" were not independent from one-another, even where they had the benefit of being normally distributed.
In fact, I find no meaningful difference between "But no _individual_ speaks like this." and "But the ratio was never the danger.", aside from them being about different topics. They are syntactically very similar.
It's a foundational model (fresh from autoregressive pretraining) that approximates the probability distribution of human texts. And, no, it's not the statistical average of how people speak. It approximates how a person who could have written a text in its context would have written the next words.
Fine-tuning, RLHF, reinforcement learning change this probability distribution. I guess, it's mostly RLHF that shapes the way LLMs write. The similarity of style is due to common providers of RLHF data.
Do you mean starting sentences with "But"? I do, but then again I'm not a native speaker and my writing may be nonstandard. Or do you mean short and direct sentences? In which case, Hemingway.
I'm not saying the article isn't AI slop, but I think it's not obvious from the specific sample you chose, since plenty of people online write like that, before AI.
It's a blog post. It was written. The written word is different from the spoken.
People don't speak like: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
People don't speak like: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
In fact, I can throw this question at you:
"TFA's title is"
Who the FUCK speaks like that? Who the FUCK uses TFA's IRL OMG WTF?
Silly, isn't it?
The person you're replying to is saying that it wasn't written. If you are the author, I will believe you that it was. If you are not the author, I have no idea why you think you know more than anyone else does.
“For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea..."
I think taste is developed from a combination of sensual attunement (clarity of perception and focus) and experience (exposure to relevant, high quality 'stuff'), but the catalyst is joy, or at least some kind of pleasure.
One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things.
i see parallels to zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance as well, who's whole thesis if i can recall is something like, "quality cannot be put into words." Its a pre-rational thing that, try as you might, can't be pinned down.