The advantage of the writing vs images, is that it takes longer to absorb the whole with text, so its less apparent that the whole thing doesn't quite come together.
My problems was with Claude's prose and ideas is that it kept recycling the tropes and phrases after a while - something that has been observed that these models have very strong statistical biases - when asking for a random number for example, LLMs are far more predictable than even humans, this shows up in unguided writing exercises.
But as for actually crafting text that is both terse and to the point - such as oneliner explanations, or writing summaries - these models are quite bad. The best I have seen is they could turn a given length of prose into an even longer version - with generally some loss in the tonal accuracy or the points made in there.
As such they are a terrible tool for professional communication, but unfortunately, lots of people have started using them for exactly that.
I get that it sounds clever but that's the damn problem!
This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbreviations and emojis exclusively. LLM prose is significantly better than what the average person can produce.
Way back in the past (around 30 years ago) I remember reading an article on "how to read a book" or a similar subject. They argued that, you should not skip the acknowledgments, preface and other "personal" related sections of a book, because it was there where you got a glimpse of the person that was writing the book. The idea being that, you should had in mind that the person writing was explaining something through you.
Carl Sagan even has a video where he argues Books/Writing is some sort of communication through time.
Now, this has been the case historically: A person writes some text (even in botched language like my writing, as English is not my first language) with thinking that someone else in the future will read the ideas and reason about them.
But what about text written by an LLM? Does it have inherent intention? When reading LLM text, it feels like looking at those "this is not a person" photos. Yeah, they are words, yeah they form sentences and paragraphs but... they lack "soul".
Maybe? That is one reason to read, but there are a lot of other reasons, too. It doesn't mean you are doing it wrong if you want to read something and don't care at all about the person who wrote it.
If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion.
For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds.
I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title.
—-
Okay, I got through the first paragraph of Walter’s writings. While I nod to the bitterness (I assent to the existence of it), I do not bow.
What I find to be the normal pattern (by intuition) is that the condensed leading text belies the expansive following text. This is likely lazy (a shortcut) and I am open to correction at your effort. If a call to your effort (I apologize) is unpalatable then I concede.
At least in the USA: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [1].
1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level is simply not a some kind of catastrophe and it does not mean those people cant read. There is this idea that 6th-grade level is almost like not knowing how to read, but that is simply not the case at all.
At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.
But that's the real problem with LLMs. Culture is aspirational. It has a consistent goal - find the best, highlight it and distribute it so others can build on it.
LLMs are the opposite - produce as much of everything as possible at the lowest possible barely-acceptable-if-you're-lucky quality.
This was already a problem before LLMs. Mass market content farms - Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad, Spotify, social media in general - give everyone an equal voice, with mass popularity and "likes" as the only metric.
Now LLMs are automating the creation process, so everyone gets more of everything.
Except inspiration. Not so much of the "That's astounding, I wonder if I can learn from that and reach for something in that league."
I think this is open to debate. To me, the code has always been the goal, and the fact that writing it sometimes serves to produce a product is important to others (and what brings the paychecks in), but ultimately not something I've ever been excited about or interested in throughout my career. So I judge a developer based on the beauty and quality of the code he produces, just as I judge an LLM by the same sorts of things.
The fact that AI can one-shot a working CRUD app is not really that interesting to me. If it could make the code beautiful, concise, maintainable, extensible, minimal, performant, readable, and bug-free: a work of art and love that a craftsman would be proud of... that would impress me.
I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it, and both can be impressive technical feats. But most people judge carpenters and artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on. On the other hand, as a trained logician, I definitely see proofs (which, by the Curry–Howard isomorphism, are computer programs) have some degree of beauty-within-themselves, but that's quite hard to achieve. Not everyone is a Gödel, after all.
I also think programming languages, despite being Turing complete (which is frankly not saying much), are far too limiting to truly construct magnificent things with.
> artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on
The main output of programmer's work is their understanding of the system they work with, the rest comes from that. Behind the code there's its author's intention, vision, their tastes, philosophy and experience that makes them tackle problems in specific ways. Code review is, aside of quality assurance, mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.
You don't need to see magnificence in code to realize that there's more to it than just the syntax tree to compile.
I feel like I need to push back here, because some of the best programmers around: Carmack, Torvalds, Johnathan Blow, even folks that make programming languages like K&R, Rob Pike, etc. are judged on their respective end products, not on minutia found in code reviews. For example, if I asked you "why do you think Stroustrup is a good programmer?"—you wouldn't cite some obscure optimization he came up with, but would rather talk about his overall vision for C++, his ideas of evolving C, his staunch anti-GC takes over the years (and their justification), etc.
Frankly, I have no real idea of how good Carmack, Torvalds or Blow are as programmers, I have never worked with them so I don't really have a way to tell (even though I do contribute to Linux and I've seen some of their code). They're likely past a certain above-average threshold, but they haven't got famous for their programming skills.
That said, if you think Torvalds isn't being judged on "minutia found in code reviews", I'm not sure your take is very serious in the first place - that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now :)
How?
> you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products
Thoughts and visions are much more closely intertwined with end products (in fact, likely supercede them) than some random code review is, so I'm not seeing where the contradiction lies.
> that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now
Linus hasn't written any code[1] in at least half a decade+. To argue that he's being judged on his code misunderstands why Linux became so popular to begin with.
[1] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/2133201/linus-torv...
> Code review is (...) mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.
The way he does that is exactly what most news stories about Torvalds have been focusing on for many years now. In practice, unless you run a project alone, code review is where thoughts and visions surface up the most. Or, well, should be - not everyone is good at it.
(that said, even though my point is that's he's obviously not being judged on his code, you can easily find code that he wrote as late as this month, so your statement is clearly wrong even if that doesn't really influence the discussion here - code review is still the vast majority of his job, just like he stated there under your link)
Could be both :)
The way I look at it is like this, and you could call this my thesis: I do not categorically think that code in itself is primarily relevant to us looking at a "software engineer" and saying "wow, she's good." The product (the Linux kernel, in Torvalds' case) is, on the other hand, what actually matters. I think we're getting caught up on the idea of a code review; a code review can serve many purposes, as a code review is basically just people talking about the code, the product, their feelings, and so on. Sure, sometimes it's like "this `i` should be a `j`", but other times it's "this should serve feature X, not feature Y."
Overall, I don't think Torvalds is judged by his code quality. And the snippet I cited is the man himself saying "I don't write code anymore" so I took that at face value, even though my conviction stands wether or not he actually does still write code. I don't think anyone actually cared that much about his code quality (maybe with the caveat that the kernel didn't crash).
PS: I could be totally wrong, and this is an interesting & stimulating conversation, regardless.
I write code for a living mostly by hand. In the odd case where I need help I still use google like I always have. I spend more of my time in meetings or staring at the ceiling than writing code. This was also true a decade ago before LLMs. It was also true several decades ago when someone else's ass was in my seat.
FWIW, I'm with GP. It's quite easy to get just mind-numbingly tired reading beyond the first two sentences of a typical LLM output, let alone on something I'm familiar with.
Same to you though, have a nice day
How do you think the author of the page would read this? That sounded pretty asshole-like for me. If it's not for you I'm really sorry for you, you must have to endure really screwed up people.
And sorry about your blog :/ didn't know it was hacked. Looking at the comment section of the hello world though it gets pretty obvious LOL. You should consider removing it from your HN about though.
However, in fiction I’ve found it a useful collaborator. There have been more than a few occasions when, given some notes of how I want a character’s arc to develop in a particular scene, that the LLM gives some excellent pointers and ‘new’ ideas I hadn’t considered.
As far as editing my prose, I use it as a ‘thesaurus of phrases.’ When lazy, I can give it a rough sketch of the paragraph, giving it the gist of what I want, and have it generate a dozen or so versions. I usually can find nuggets of good phrases therein that are useable… much as I would refer to Roget’s to find a more precise word.
That said, one has to resist tbe temptation of using a chunk of generated text verbatim; no matter how good it sounds in isolation, the repetitive grammatical structure and other LLM-smells add up quick and become nauseatingly obvious if used frequently.
In any case, I think LLM’s get a bad wrap for writing… when used correctly, it is incredibly useful. And, it’s tiresome to hear pretentious snobs assume that an author who uses LLM simply lacks the taste to appreciate how bad the prose sounds. Not true in all cases.