Books or blogs on the other hand are different. Every person writes differently, and the writing style is part of the experience. The same scene or concept can be described in an infinite number of ways. But LLM prose ends up very samey. You get the same sentence structure, the same key words, the same metaphors, the same similes, the same rough distribution of word usage. It's very average, and it's boring. And it frequently reads like a corporate blog.
I like LLM generated code that works in a technical way. Just like I like LLM prose that tells me the facts I want to know. But no fluff.
This is completely irrelevant. An LLM's voice is not influenced by its at-scale training data. LLM-prose is the result of human feedback training rewarding it for making every single sentence sound like a YouTube or BuzzFeed headline, which is effective against a large portion of the population who get dopamine hits from such clickbait style of writing, and completely infuriating to the portion who recognize it for what it is.
LLM code is also infuriating, but for a different reason, because it is not reinforced in exactly the same way. However, people are fine with it because they don't read it. If they actually read the dogshit code an LLM produces, and were capable of understanding it, they would be infuriated by it too.
All the rest of the generated code is usually slop. It only gets worse the further away you get from the most popular idioms that have already been written.
I don't think we're ever getting beyond that point with statistical "AI".
It's actually a pretty significant defeat for any open source tools that wanted to maintain control over what is considered canonically good. Maintainers are now forced to be a lot more defensive about what is possible with their tools. This limits their scope and kills curiosity and creativity.
We're lucky that all this happened after we found enough stability that people aren't too interested in creating new languages and frameworks from scratch like it was a decade ago.
People don't like abstracting, or just don't understand abstractions, often just mistaking it for indirections. The few that understand it just take the message, apply it and go away to live their lives with improved coding.
sure, man, whatever.
Yet another HN item linking to a blog post by someone extolling the brave new world we are in due to LLM-generated code. Reminds me of this:
The best thing I can compare it to is Adderall (without a prescribed reason for taking it). Have you ever been reading a dense text and realized halfway through the page that you didn't comprehend anything? I get this kinda sick feeling in my stomach and then I back up to the last point I was really paying attention. Adderall gets rid of that feeling, and I can just read through. But am I actually comprehending the text or is the drug just raising the ambient dopamine levels enough that I'm not feeling the missed comprehension? Using coding agents makes me feel the same way. I'm not feeling the struggle of learning something new, but I worry I'm writing code no one will be able to fix, even the AI.
Anyways, I've defaulted to using a free chatbot "ChatGPT style". It makes a lot of mistakes and forces me to go through everything over and over.