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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Meh, I don't know. I think you can use AI to lorem ipsum a lot of things where it doesn't really matter:

- Making a brochure. You need a photo of a happy family. It doesn't matter if the kids have 7 fingers on each hand.

- You have some dashboard for a service, you don't quite know what the panels need to look like. You ask AI, now you have some inspiration.

- You're building a game, you need a bunch of character names. Boom. 300 names.

- Various utility scripts around whatever code you're writing, like the dashboard, might find use, might not.

None of those things is pretending you're an expert when you're not.

Give AI to a coding novice, it's no different from giving autopilot to a flying novice. Most people know they can't fly a plane, yet most people know that if they did, autopilot would be useful somehow.

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> You're building a game, you need a bunch of character names. Boom. 300 names.

This is actually one of the things AI is notoriously bad at. If asking for a plain list, it very quickly falls into blatant patterns (one name per letter of the alphabet, all names starting with A, all names with exactly 2 syllables, etc.). And, whether part of a list or not, one of the most obvious signs of AI writing is that it always resorts to the same handful of names for a given archetype.

Traditional random name generators are much better.

But if it matters to you, use the specialized tool.

If it's not important, lorem ipsum, cheaply.

If it doesn't matter to you, then whatever you are creating has no value to society, and is in fact likely net-negative.

We're seeing it all over: curation has become much harder since the slopfest began.

I rather spend one hour to write a script than writing one with AI. If I’m spending that much time, that is a clear signal that it’s important to get right or I’m enjoying the learning process.

As for when there’s a rush, I just avoid putting myself in those situations. If there’s not enough time, I advocate for a simpler solution, even hackish.

You could just ask it for one name, 300 times? (And clear context in between, I suppose.)

> Making a brochure. You need a photo of a happy family.

do you really?

> you don't quite know what the panels need to look like.

look at your competition, ask your users, think?

> Most people know they can't fly a plane

this isn't how llm products are marketed, and what the tfa is complaining about.

> do you really?

That's supporting my view. You might want it, you might not. It's marginal, and now it's cheap.

> look at your competition

LLM does this for you

> this isn't how llm products are marketed

It certainly is. Something like ChatGPT is marketed as a low-risk chat partner, most certainly not pretending to give you medical or legal advice. Talk to it like your buddy, you get buddy responses. Your buddy who has read a few law books but doesn't pretend to be a lawyer.

> do you really?

This is what's known as an "example".

> Various utility scripts around whatever code you're writing, like the dashboard, might find use, might not.

Let's hope you protect that dashboard well with infra around it, because it will be the front door for people to invade your site.

The same apply in slightly different ways to your deployment script, packaged software (or immutable infra) configuration, and whatever tools you keep around.

> Let's hope you protect that dashboard well with infra around it, because it will be the front door for people to invade your site.

I was thinking of internal dashboards, but like I said above, if it doesn't really matter, use LLM. If you are building a cockpit for an airplane, yeah, don't just use a fill tool. If you need security, yeah, don't leave the door open.

> It doesn't matter if the kids have 7 fingers on each hand.

Only if you don't care that your customers surmise you don't care.

Careful not to overestimate the customer

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