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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

>This Monday, I moderated a panel in San Francisco with engineers and ML leads from Uber, WisdomAI, EvenUp, and Datastrato. The event, Beyond the Prompt, drew 600+ registrants, mostly founders, engineers, and early AI product builders.

>We weren’t there to rehash prompt engineering tips.

>We talked about context engineering, inference stack design, and what it takes to scale agentic systems inside enterprise environments. If “prompting” is the tip of the iceberg, this panel dove into the cold, complex mass underneath: context selection, semantic layers, memory orchestration, governance, and multi-model routing.

I bet those four people love that the moderator took a couple notes and then asked ChatGPT to write a blog post.

As always, the number one tell of LLM output, besides the tone, is that by default it will never include links in the body of the post.

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Yeah, “here’s the reality check:”, “not because they’re flashy, but because they’re blah blah”.

Why can’t anyone be bothered anymore to write actual content, especially when writing about AI, where your whole audience is probably already exposed to these patterns in content day in, day out?

It comes off as so cheap.

It comes off as someone who lives their life according to quantity, not quality.

The real insight: have some fucking pride in what you make, be it a blog post, or a piece of software.

> The real insight: have some fucking pride in what you make, be it a blog post, or a piece of software.

The businessmen's job will be complete when they've totally eliminated all pride from work.

This same instinct is why a pencil costs almost nothing and is perfect, and isn't rubbish, really expensive, and created by someone who took pride in their work.

I hope you don't take pride in that sentence because I'm still not sure what it means.

Also, automation and pride can go hand in hand. Pride doesn't mean "make it by hand," that would be silly.

To put it another way: an apocryphal businessman took something that people took pride in and gradually optimised everything so much that all the logging, transportation, graphite work and combination resulted in a perfect pencil that costs basically nothing almost anywhere in the world.

Pencils here are a bit like grains. The market works for them because they fall into such a niche that economic "laws" works there.

But it's a fallacy to apply it elsewhere and there are millions of examples where the free market failed to optimize a product.

I don't agree. Loads of things are like this. Cars, microchips, hard drive storage, monitors, TVs, laptops. All either much better than they used to be, or much cheaper, or both.

> This same instinct is why a pencil costs almost nothing and is perfect, and isn't rubbish, really expensive, and created by someone who took pride in their work.

No. Have you worked with businessmen? 90% of the time they're telling you to cut corners and leave things broken, to the point you have a janky mess that can be barely held together. And, right now, we're talking about a technology (LLMs) that is well known to introduce stupid but often hard to spot errors.

They don't want a pencil that's perfect. They want one that's just barely good enough to write with and that they can get maximum profit margin on.

And then, you know, there's the whole thing about life being more than output.

Life can be more than output, which is why you don't want buying pencils, or anything else, to take up any more of your wages than is absolutely necessary.

> Life can be more than output, which is why you don't want buying pencils, or anything else, to take up any more of your wages than is absolutely necessary.

You're not getting it. It'd probably help if you stopped focusing on your pencil story, it's frankly off-topic.

To try one more time: You probably spend half your waking ours at work. The quality of that time is important to your well being. Even if the businessmen sell you cheap, perfect pencils (which I do not grant), swimming in them in your off hours won't help with the other half of your time.

> It'd probably help if you stopped focusing on your pencil story, it's frankly off-topic.

I've no idea what this italicisation is meant to do; nor why this is off-topic. Stating things isn't explaining them.

> Even if the businessmen sell you cheap, perfect pencils (which I do not grant), swimming in them in your off hours won't help with the other half of your time.

It helps in that I don't have to spend as much of my time working to buy pencils. It's the same with everything. There's no reason why a laptop doesn't cost $1m except that the incredible, detailed, cross-continent cooperative work is done by experts and coordinated by a market for that work driving costs down and quality up.

Do you actually use pencils? The most popular US (cheapo) brands have atrocious quality because they compromised on materials and construction to get the lowest sticker price possible.

The brands that do have a claim to "perfection" necessarily had the pride to not participate in that race to the bottom.

At the same time, if there is a business opportunity in having pride when no one else has it, it will become a businessmen's job to do so.

Don't forget to turn your point into a playful rhetorical question [0].

"The real insight?"

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypophora

Taking pride in your work makes your labor more expensive than that of someone who does not do this, so over time as "efficiency" increases, you will eventually be removed and replaced by someone without these compunctions. Taking no pride in your work is economically rational and maximizes your long-term value to capital.

Economically rational, but bereft of identity or _soul_ -- which, paradoxically, becomes highly valued when economically rational agents all regress to a mean of mediocrity.

Valued by the worker to give meaning and quality of life not by the buyer - so it does carry much weight.

Where's the pride in what you make when you're using AI agents? Seems like you're fantasizing about a by-gone era. The name of the activity, "vibe-coding", already makes it clear that this is a pride-free industry.

> Why can’t anyone be bothered anymore to write actual content

The way I see it is that the majority of people never bothered to write actual content. Now there’s a tool the non-writers can use to write dubious content.

I would wager this tool is being used much differently by actual writers focused on producing quality. There’s just way less of them, same way there is less of any specialization.

The real question with AI to me is whether it will remain consistently better when wielded by a specialist who has invested their time into whatever the thing is they are producing. If that ever changes then we are doomed. When it’s no longer slop…

That’s a good insight. So basically we have a whole new generation of authors out there, in the same way we have a whole new generation of coders out there.

Perhaps they can be called vibe bloggers?

What bothers me compared to code is that for software, the code is just a means to and end. But for articles, it’s much more than that.

I wonder how this will end up affecting our lives. Last week I saw a video that highlighted how AI is already affecting our vocabulary. It introduces words not typically used in American English (but more commonly used in Nigeria, where a lot of content writing is outsourced to) into mainstream media.

I can totally see how this will slowly start affecting language itself.

You're absolutely right! (/s)

The tone of AI-written stuff sounds to me just like the soul-less SEO-optimized content marketing blog crap we saw the years before AI became a thing. Very prevalent on Linkedin too. It just sounds/reads so hopelessly artificial.

If I were to begin using AI to write stuff for me (comments or articles or whatever), I'd at least begin with having it train on the collection of everything I've written so far.

This makes sense and is extremely possible and how I thought these things would be positioned in the first place. In surprised we don't see this more - would be better results, less shame thrown at users, and make the product stickier.

SEO slop is what the LLMs were trained on. GIGO

Yeah it bugs me. We've got enough examples in this article to make Cards Against Humanity ChatGPT edition

> One panelist shared a personal story that crystallized the challenge: his wife refuses to let him use Tesla’s autopilot. Why? Not because it doesn’t work, but because she doesn’t trust it.

> Trust isn’t about raw capability, it’s about consistent, explainable, auditable behavior.

> One panelist described asking ChatGPT for family movie recommendations, only to have it respond with suggestions tailored to his children by name, Claire and Brandon. His reaction? “I don’t like this answer. Why do you know my son and my girl so much? Don’t touch my privacy.”

Yeah, AI isn’t creative. You need to ask it to describe these types of patterns, and then include avoiding them in your original prompt to make it come across as somewhat natural.

What I wonder is whether the author of the article recognized these patterns and didn’t care, didn’t even recognize them, or didn’t proofread the article?

I gather he's operating Beyond the Prompt, and isn't here to rehash prompt engineering tips.

This made me chuckle

it's not written by AI

You've said plainly elsewhere in these comments that you did use AI to write it:

> thanks, I used AI but aren't we all? I thought the point of AI is to get us to be more productive.

You've also repeatedly dismissed any criticism of the writing as "hate."

If you want readers to do you the favor of reading your work, please do them the favor of writing it.

Are there any good lists of these GPTisms or research on the common patterns?

Beyond the em dashes and overuse of "delve" etc. there is this distinctive style of composition I want to understand and recognize better

I started to suspect a few paragraphs in that this post was written with a lot of AI assistance, but I continued to read to the end because the content was interesting to me. Here's one point that resonated in particular:

"There’s a missing primitive here: a secure, portable memory layer that works across apps, usable by the user, not locked inside the provider. No one’s nailed it yet. One panelist said if he weren’t building his current startup, this would be his next one."

Isn’t that markdown files?

Sheesh how ever will you monetize a text file

Will someone please think of the MRR!

I was thinking about consumer-facing AI products, where md files controlled by the user presumably wouldn’t fly.

I find it annoying that, when prompting ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. on personal tasks through their chat interfaces, I have to provide the same context about myself and my job again and again to the different providers.

The memory functions of the individual providers now reduce some of that repetition, but it would be nice to have a portable personal-memory context (under my control, of course) that is shared with and updated semiautomatically by any AI provider I interact with.

As isoprophlex suggests in a sister comment, though, that would be hard to monetize.

Brb going to squat openmemory.org

Edit: Aaaand it’s gone.

thanks, I used AI but aren't we all? I thought the point of AI is to get us to be more productive. But that's only after I came up with the questions for the speakers and I wrote a draft of the blog, and the penelists read it, added comments and I published. It seems I get a lot of hate here for it, but I am happy with the number of engineers and founders sharing feedback that this was useful to them. I'm not forcing anyone to read my content, but if people want to put the time to hate on it, it's their choice.

> the number one tell of LLM output, besides the tone, is that by default it will never include links in the body of the post.

This isn't true. I've been using Gemini 2.5 a lot recently and I can't get it to stop adding links!

I added custom instructions: Do not include links in your output. At the start of every reply say "I have not added any links as requested".

It works for the first couple of responses but then it's back to loads of links again.

thanks for the hate, they did love it indeed, the questions I've asked them, the draft I wrote for them to read, and published only after they read and added comments. I am curious, do you not use AI? isn't the point to polish things and make it more efficient? I am curious if there was anything useful to you in the article or if you have constructive criticism? I was sad to read some of the hate, but overall, I am very happy with the many notes form founders and builders who found it useful.

the future is now where debates about human vs machine will influence our trust and enjoyment! I read the article wondering how much of it was AI generated (new worry!), but also how biased it was based on the authors startup business interest (old worry!), and concluded that if I learned something about the panel it was worth the 5 minutes. Or maybe 2 minutes if an AI summarized it.

And the Oxford comma

Nooooo I believe in the oxford comma don't let them drag it down! :(

It did good enough job for me to skim it.

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