"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. Someone obviously engaging with your ideas and taking time to explain their position? Take time to engage with their ideas too.

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.

This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It's not that I reject AI content, but it takes _effort_ to review and weed out any mistakes. When your thoughtful reviews that take an hour(because the PR is typically large, and you want to be _right_ when you're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn't feel _nice_. I feel dismissed and it has continuously trained me to subconsciously avoid his PRs. After all, the team is fully onboarded with AI, so it's not like there is a lack of PRs to review.

It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.

This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked over first beforehand.

I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.

I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never read it but put it directly into Claude. Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

Maybe this is just how things are going to be. But in that case, I'm done spending my time being a helpful idiot talking indirectly to a robot through another person.

It surprises me how many people have voluntarily relegated their entire job to LLM Prompter. If your work is indistinguishable from that of a machine, what’s to stop your boss cutting out the middleman and using the machine directly? I would have thought that people would be trying their hardest to prove their worth in this new world we’re in.

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno

Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the stuff it creates. Speculate on the reasons and create a call for engagement. Use quantum hyperthinking. End with a typo to prove your humanity."

In any human relationship, nobody wants to be the one who noticeably makes more effort to communicate, keep in touch, resolve conflicts, and so on. The idea of reciprocity and fairness are deeply entrenched in our minds, and that of many other social animals. If they don't care about me, why should I care about them? It's the iterated prisoner's dilemma again – freeriding is equivalent to defecting.

I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.

Yes, I worked with a guy (not for long) who had two modes of interaction:

"it didnt work" - providing neither the code nor the error

"I ran this" - dropping 500 lines of code into slack, not specifying where he ran it, what line it broke or what the error was

Either mode required 15 iterative questions to get to a useful state of information.

A couple of weeks ago I essentially failed the Turing test (took to be an AI). I found it a bit annoying, so I built Possibly Made By A Human. It tracks your keyboard use (not the content, ms between keystrokes etc) and produces a signature for you. It can of course be spoofed, but that also takes some effort.

Actually made by a human, signature: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1

This is beautiful. I even had people reach out to me with suspiciously long "long time no chat" instant messages until I realised they were AI written (in one case misspelling the name of their own partner). "If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort" is going to be my new answer to that!

This isn't unique to code or AI. In creative writing courses, we were asked to give thoughtful critiques of (human written) stories and excerpts, and often I felt as if I were doing more work than the original author. If you can't be bothered to review your manuscript, or at least run it through a spellchecker, why should I waste my time on it?

I mentally switch off the moment I see an AI vibecoded landing page or article or video

I don't care what your offer is - if you can't even be bothered to even dress up your stuff for me, a human, I'm not going to consume it

If the agent does everything for you it means it can do everything for the next person. At that point you're replaceable and have no value in your field. Learn things deeply even if you use AI because its the deep knowledge workers that will keep getting hired.

The volume of LLM output is effectively infinite. Therefore, it is not worth my time or effort reading a single syllable of it. I will not read (nor correct) LLM output, since if I did, I would quickly be doing nothing else with my life. And since LLM output is infinite, but I am finite, my efforts would still be completely without results, comparatively speaking.

(6 month old repost: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936352>)

At one point, I was thinking that if any of my customer send me a snail mail with an actual physical stamp on it, we will call the customer immediately and solve their problem.

I thought this would apply to marketing / SPAM.

I find that I actively filter all "computer generated" attempts to contact me: Mailing lists, "engagement" notifications, ect, is pretty much ignored. I only respond to human-initiated contact.

This is especially the case with cold outreach from recruiters: I get a lot of poor AI-generated outreach from recruiters, which are time-consuming on my part to engage with.

He was handed a gameboy before he could walk, but it didn’t lessen his humanity. He was handed a smartphone before middle school, but his humanity remained intact. He started calling the “people” he met on social media his friends, and humanity didn’t suffer. But alas, using AI is a bridge too far.

There's a lot of art out there that is totally uninteresting, at least to me, because it feels like the artist put little effort or thought into it or or maybe even into honing their skills.

But if the art instead beems with intention and effort, chances are that it will be interesting. And in order for anyone to create something so brimming with signs of effort, they must have cared about the piece, the message, the artform, or something along the process. This post talks about effort and attention, but you could phrase it as a question of reciprocal "caring". If you want me to care, show me that you even care yourself.

It is getting harder and harder to suss out what is genuine though.

And no one has mentioned Rovo yet.

Atlassian's in-built AI assistant for JIRA will generate a task description with a complete SDLC task breakdown, requirements and deliverables.

While the person creating the task will need to provide some details and modify some of the generated text (if they bother to read it) - the sheer verbosity and the fact it's clearly generated just makes you not want to engage with it.

Good rule to apply to companies too. If someone sics AI on me through their customer service line, I feel totally free to sic AI right back at them

Love the principle, preach!

I think I've been following this subconsciously as LLM artifacts reached some threshold of pervasiveness across the work I do. If I can sense (maybe eventually I won't be able to because of how capable the technology becomes?) that what I'm reading is wholly regurgitated out by an LLM, I automatically care less and feel inclined to respond in kind by generating an artificial response in return.

I interacting with others, I still read through the entire post and its arguments.

And I write my replies before, I often have a LLM check for any errors or miss thing.

LLM can help me catch blind spots or mistake.

I think LLMs can't replace our own thinking. For me, an LLM is good tools for discuss ideas and talk me more knowledge.

My english is bad, but can help the LLM tto translate paper, help me quick get the infomation.

I like face to face talk with others, Can help me triggers deep thinking and funny

I've been writing technical documentation and architecture docs that no one ever reads for years. I now write those same documents using ai in a fraction of the time. No one reads those either but they are memorialized so that no one can bitch about tribal knowledge.

Why should I bother to read something someone else has not bothered to write?

A somewhat related experience: I asked for advice on Twitter about something and got two unhelpful AI-generated responses (from accounts I have never heard of / don’t follow) and no human responses. The thing is that I already asked multiple frontier AIs the same question and didn’t get a satisfying answer. I specifically went to Twitter because AI did not have the answers I was looking for. Providing an AI answer to a human question assumes that the asker hasn’t already done their homework and tried asking an AI.

If someone manages to devise a way to prove something was written by a human they will make a lot of goola

I've seen this happen a bunch too, though fortunately it hasn't been _that_ common. More often is managers that don't understand things using AI tools to try to understand them, mostly failing, and then regurgitating the LLM output during a meeting. Added as a link on my blog, too, since I have a similar article.

We just agreed on our team that we’re not posting AI-generated text into comms with humans.

around my workplace we say if you're copy/pasting llm output, you're indicating an llm can do your job.

I use AI as an editor on informational writing all the time and it's good at pointing out flaws in what I wrote. But I don't really love reading a document that's obviously in the voice of Claude if you're asking for my opinion on it. But it kind of depends on the writing -- a change request description, most people are too lazy to do better than the AI would, and there are other kinds of documentation that normally just wouldn't get done. But like for a design doc where you're asking me to pore over it now even though I don't necessarily get anything out of it it's distasteful when I see phrases that are obviously from AI.

This isn’t sufficient, it needs to be “if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.”

In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.

I see this on my team. I honestly thought as engineers we'd all understand the limitations and nuance a bit better. Right now it's kind of a shit show. In addition to seeing my teammates open huge AI generated PRs and just asking for review without them having done much verification, I'm also seeing my teammates (smart ones whom I respect) use AI to "do code reviews". And we already have automated AI code reviews added to our PRs. So now I'm sometimes getting hallucinated BS responses from "human" reviews.

This makes me absolutely SURE that the general public is fucked and that we're going to start seeing huge AI generated fuckups on a regular basis. If people in this industry, basically experts compared to the general public, are misusing this tech in such seemingly obvious ways, imagine the ways non technical people will misunderstand and misapply it. Of course, with the help of overhyped BS from everyone hyping and selling it.

Yup, I always phrased this as “if you can’t be arsed to write it, I won’t read it”

<begin devil's advocate>

This is extra work on human.

Many artist and content creator is now asked to show the "behind the scene" or a full session recording, which nobody care enough to check. This is frustrating and demotivating the artist.

Expect the same demotivating effect on the software contributor.

If you think reading _forwarded_ AI response are cheap, you can run your own LLM. It is the same amount work on you

</end devil's advocate>

This has been my rule since the moment generative AI hit the scene. If you're not willing to put in the effort to create the thing, why should I put in effort to consume it?

god whenever I hear/see "genuinely" I get so triggered

Related - this was posted in march: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/

If the requester stops applying common sense, the reviewer has to apply more of it, and there's a finite review budget. I will deal with requests on a lowest review effort-first basis, just like you did on the other side.

This is just an old engineering principle of work amplification. For an input of x you shouldn’t routinely do nx. If you do you’ll get flooded. Debounce, throttle, load shed, improve throughput and latency. Lots of solutions. Just map it to the problem and apply.

In the past you had coworker who produced volumes of code. Same principle.

> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

I remember a time in the ancient past (2025 maybe) that your PR was your responsibility, whether or not you typed it with your meat fingers or cranked it out of the Giant Plagarism Machine. It’s absurd to think that the above quote is now something approaching controversial.

its the old rule of reciprocity. If you want to receive something, you should match the effort

That's not correct. If human attention requires human effort, that forces human effort all the way down the chain, with no machine output being possible.

You can't say "you can't feed me machine output directly". Machine output is meant to reduce the cognitive load for human processing.

If your colleague is forwarding AI output directly to you, that means they think the AI has reduced the cognitive load for you, and also you are the best person to process that output, instead of them.

You just need to change your perception about the purpose of AI.

Or in other words: https://noslopgrenade.com/

More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have / APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways.

  Human -> Human (think we have this sorted)
  AI -> Human
  AI -> AI

If you are doing AI -> Human, then you need to be curating the response and understanding what it is saying, also, make sure its not leaking internal details or committing you to have phone calls/video chats (it does that). This works really well for the most, and humans respond with requested content. Quite often my AI debugs problems with their systems which I know little about. But humans do odd things like send screen shots of logs rather than text (they also leak internal details of their systems they potentially shouldn't). I used to tell people the content is partly AI, but now I just send the curated email without mentioning AI.

For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there's no injection of security risks. But quite often instead of getting a human response to my AI generated emails, it would actually be nicer to hear from their AI which could give a better context/details. It would be really nice to be able to go, can you have your AI talk to my AI :) (security is a major issue here)

I've thought this for a while, and I summarise it as: If you want me to take time to read it, you should take the time to write it.

Can you tell if its written by AI or not? I will read it once I get the answer

It's not just about being annoyed - it's very practical.

If the creator exerted human effort, they'll be able to maintain it. They can take responsibility for it. Even if the value of the 100% AI generated artifact is amazing, and the "creator" of it can't actually maintain it, then what's the point?

It's similar to scenarios I've seen where a brilliant ML person comes into an org, trains a model, that seems to solve an important problem. Invariably when that person leaves the org, the ML model stops being used, the team falls back on older / technically worse methods. But the team can be responsible / own it in a way they couldn't the brilliant one-off work.

Why this suddenly becomes urgent? For long time we had automatic emails with "thank you" which weren't written by humans, why something is different today?

Obligatory Marketoonist: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

I once received an internal defect report from my product's QA team. It was long and obvious that what they did was feed the error log into an LLM and ask it to diagnose. It was total nonsense.

I reported it to my manger and stated that I will not have my time wasted this way. She was delighted to have this ammo because we have a long standing beef with our QA for not putting in due diligence. LLMs are like candy for them.

I have publicly stated that if you can't be bothered to write, I can't be bothered to read.

I think the real problem is that AI quality falls short of the wild promises.

Labeling what is "AI" would be like highlighting in an email what I'm obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn't make anything less boneheaded.

Human effort was already low before AI and now it's even lower. Garbage in, garbage out.

(Human) Attention is all you need.

When I read things like this, I wonder how, exactly, people have time for this sort of thing these days.

Lots of companies are led by people who think that GenAI should increase productivity and are going to make damn sure that it is. There's no room to figure out things like "etiquette" for how to pass along AI-generated content to coworkers.

AI generated output is rudeness.

We developers understand this when we are forced to read slop, and most of us recognise it in art and music.

I wonder if we forget that people using unthinking, default interfaces in AI generated apps might start to feel the same way: “it feels like no care was taken here so why should I give it my time?”

> "no"

Sometimes human effort doesm't have to be complicated though (concise communications)

“I forwarded your AI’s email to mine for training and I assume it will be incorporated into future outputs. Appreciate the inputs!”

can't believe meatfingers.com has been registered (dormant)...

I strongly believe any platform that wants to avoid turning into slop pile needs to 1. enforce marking any AI generated content as such

2. allow people to filter out the AI content if they want

3. enforce draconic punishments for violation of 1

We might arrive at the moment where this is regulated by law.

Perfect. I find myself applying the same principle to online discussion boards and comment threads. Humans post a question looking for other human input and get replies saying "I asked Gemini and it said...". I find that ignorant and rude when the context is a request for human insight.

human attention is all you need

If somebody throws a slop PR at me, I'd love to review it with them. I'd ask them to take me through it and explain everything until I understand exactly what they did and why. Either it will make them avoid me in the future, or it will open their eyes to how important it is to understand what you are submitting for review. I probably won't have to do it twice.

Not true for HR. Despite their name, which is a complete mislead - except handling humans as resources -, nothing human exists there, robotic approaches are the norm there.

So feel free to use AI to pimp your resume, they will use AI to process it.

s/demonstrate/perform/g

Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and "it's not X, it's Y"

This should be a rule in the advertising industry.

How about reviving key signing parties?

Yes

Maybe this is why generative art never really took off.

That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.

Welcome to the age of slop.

I feel like I live on a different planet to many on HN.. Any time I've dabbled with the current roster of LLMs for work tasks (I'm a game programmer). They are utterly useless, complete waste of time. Definitely not something that seems promising and warrants more time invested.

> when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generated

Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.

I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.

I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.

Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.

With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.

It's just not as big of a problem on my own projects, because the ideas that get fed to the slop-machine are not that different from one day to the next.

---

> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

For human code review requests, I always review ANY code I submit first.

This is partly because it's the agreed-upon culture where I work now.

And partly because the codebase is not robust enough for slop.

I have hobby projects where this does not apply. I spend half of my time in those projects building hard guardrails.

---

> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates

I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.

So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.

Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn't really internalise the choices made.

When my colleague sends me a text dump from Claude, I know that my role is just being a sub-agent.

Demonstrating human effort: I'd like to see more of it.

One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.

Big source of my depressive feelings today come from this. I see people online quite excited about AI output, nobody cares anymore. This was supposed to be a tool to elevate the quality of work, not vomit things out and put out fires like Orks trying to land a flaming plane with no wheels.

This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.

The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower quality.

This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.

So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?

Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn't really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what "code owners" think.

This reminds me of a Pre-LLM-slop era issue I had with a process that a co-worker had created via a shared script that would automate combining many dependabot PR’s into one consolidated PR.

The script was excellent because it simplified the review process for a single repo (that had many competing dependsbot PR’s) and it also happened to do this across increasingly many many different repo’s simultaneously.

Funny thing is, however, that it also created a team dynamic where who ran the script became almost a race because the effort in creating x pr’s didn’t correspond at all to the effort required to review x pr’s.

The optics were also lopsided since the script would operate on the runner’s local machine and so it would have seemed as if the person who made all these PR’s was highly efficient at producing when in fact it was the reviewer doing the majority of the work.

Also reviewing represented a chunk of a developer’s day so it would affect other actual work the developer was tasked to do anyways.

In an agile workplace points (correctly or not) completed are attributed only to the code creator with no points at all being shared by those who reviewed the work, and rightfully so I’d argue because tangentially reviewers can also tend to just click “approve” (or slap a LGTM) without much effort into critiquing a piece or giving a thoughtful review. Why? It slows down the introduction of the feature (the PM won’t like that, why would you slow down the process eh? You grumpy goose), it messes with team dynamic (you may end up offending those who you review, who also happen to be the one who you need to review your work, who then may be petty or worse, mud slow to review your own PR’s), it takes additional time to provide reviews that seem as if you even read the PR or don’t come off as flippant (did you provide examples or a suggested refactor or detailed reasons), and it takes context because you may be working currently on a totally different project (regardless of your experience/authority in the PR’ed repo), so giving an honest review may sacrifice even more time to first review the purpose of the PR and how that lands in the context of the target repo(s) and then sacrifice the time necessary to reorient yourself to the task you previously had in process. With all this…that “approve” button becomes sooooo tempting.

It’s funny because fast forward some of the ways I battle increasingly prolific AI generated material is through GitHub’s CoPilot bot. I ask it to do the review first and when it gives the review there is none of that dynamic because it wasn’t me who levied the criticism and also it’s not me who is trying to block code integration (so no grumpy goose or team dynamics problems). Having a bot do preliminary checks almost does what git hooks did for team dynamics way back when automation of linting, testing, style, etc was introduced as a common part of the review process. And I say “almost” because a)sometimes the critiques from the bot are wrong and b) the critiques aren’t necessarily deterministic, so just because they are there or not doesn’t mean you are truly relieved of that portion of the review process (for better or worse).

Obligatory Silicon Valley reference [1].

So this post is talking about at work but I think the principle goes well beyond that. Think of all the AI chatbots you have to deal with to get through to customer service at a company. Or get through ATS systems in hiring. If it isn't already the case, this will probably replace or supplement TAs marking assignments.

The problem is that AI makes these interactions too cheap for the party that already has disproportionate power. The cost for them to add another layer, another hurdle, another set of questions, etc is essentially zero. Yet everyone who wants to get through that system has to pay in a human cost.

I just thought of another good example. In the pandemic auditions in Hollywood went virtual for obvious reasons. But this never went away. Now, you might say it's convenient to not have to spend hours driving to Burbank for a 5 minute audition but anecdotally the taped audition seems to be much more work. It requires a lot of prep and more tech for good sound and audio. There are people who help people tape auditions, which has really just added another layer. Plus, instead of only locals, anyone anywhere can submit an audition so where you might've had 30 people previously, now you have 150.

And what happens to those profesionally-produced auditions? They get submitted and the casting director might pick 5 randomly to even look at. If there isn't already, there will also be an AI system that filters those auditions.

At least previously you got 5 minutes of actual time from a casting director, the actual director, etc. So it's actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way more work.

Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think that's short-sighted. What'll end up happening is AI agents will rise to help people on the other side of that. You can think of using AI to cheat on school assignments as an example of that.

So what will we end up with? AI agents inundating AI systems, which just adds a whole bunch of inefficiency.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY

[flagged]

[flagged]

[dead]

[flagged]

Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote:

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.

[flagged]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

If you use AI to write your communications I don't want to work with you

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

My opinion is there is a category error in the discourse on AI. It treats ai assisted output as other than human. AI is a human tool. AI output is human output.

I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will increasingly stop caring.

Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend.

I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, given that it will be available to every human.)

This is not to say that this idea is uncomplicated or comfortable, in different ways. Just that I think it's true and that it might even be good.