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Comment by barishnamazov | Hacker News Reader

This write-up has good ideas but gives me the "AI-generated reading fatigue." Things that can cleanly be expressed in 1-2 sentences are whole paragraphs, often with examples that seem unnecessary or unrealistic. There are also some wrong claims like below:

> The Hacker News front page alone is enough to give you whiplash. One day it's "Show HN: Autonomous Research Swarm" and the next it's "Ask HN: How will AI swarms coordinate?" Nobody knows. Everyone's building anyway.

These posts got less than 5 upvotes, they didn't make it to home page. And while overall quality of Show HN might have dropped, HN homepage is still quite sane.

The topic is also not something "nobody talks about," it's being discussed even before agentic tools became available: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=AI+fatigue

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> HN homepage is still quite sane.

Those Show HN posts aren't the insane part. Insane part is like:

> Thank you, OpenClaw. Thank you, AGI—for me, it’s already here.

> If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement

> Code must not be reviewed by humans

> Following this hypothesis, what C did to assembler, what Java did to C, what Javascript/Python/Perl did to Java, now LLM agents are doing to all programming languages.

(All quoted from actual homepage posts today. Fun game: guess which quote is from which article)

This is so disheartening. Time to short more tech stocks

I personally believe what we’re seeing are newcomers who aren’t even programmers who fall for all this crap and then come here to post about it

> Things that can cleanly be expressed in 1-2 sentences are whole paragraphs

Perhaps the author just likes to write? I've only just recently started blogging more, but I unexpectedly started to really enjoy writing and am hoping to have my posts be more of a "story". Different people have different writing styles. It's not a problem, it's just that you prefer reading posts that are straight to the point.

https://xkcd.com/3126/

"You're not imagining it." I hit back immediately.

Sigh.. same.

The real AI fatigue is the constant background irritation I have when interacting with LLMs.

"You're not imagining it" "You're not crazy" "You're absolutely right!" "Your right to push back on this" "Here's the no fluff, correct, non-reddit answer"

“You’re not [X]—you’re [Y]” is the one that drives me nuts. [X] is typically some negative characterization that, without RLHF, the model would likely just state directly. I get enough politics/subtext from humans. I’d rather the LLM just call it straight.

The boring and likely answer is that is was just clauded out,”I’m tired chat, look through my last ten days of sessions and write and publish a blog post about why,” but it would be fascinating to discover that the author has actually looked at so much ai output that they just write like this now

> Things that can cleanly be expressed in 1-2 sentences are whole paragraphs

Funny, I don't associate that with AI. I associate it with having to write papers of a specific length in high school. (Though at least those were usually numbers of pages, so you could get a little juice from tweaking margins, line spacing and font size.)

I had word/page quotas, but I also don't write my blog in a way that resembles the papers I wrote for school 10 years ago.

I think those kind of texts (school papers, marketing fluff, linkedin influencers trying to look smart) just influenced the dataset a lot.

Too bad we didn't have more laconic, interesting books to feed in?

> but gives me the "AI-generated reading fatigue."

Agree. The article could have been summarized into a few paragraphs. Instead, we get unnecessary verbiage that goes on and on in an AI generated frenzy. Like the "organic" label on food items, I can foresee labels on content denoting the kind of human generating the content: "suburbs-raised" "free-lancer" etc.

Can't upvote this comment enough.

"You're not imagining it."

"But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder."

"Now?" as the paragraph opener

"Why? No reason." as the paragraph opener

Nice try OP, submitting your own post to HN.

The headline is clickbait-y but I think the article is well articulated. I found the "What actually helped" helpful too.

I'd personally rethink about applying some advice in that section. Here's my take.

> Time-boxing AI sessions.

Unless you are a full-time vibe coder, you already wouldn't be using AI all the time. But time boxing it feels artificial, if it's able to make good and real progress (not unmaintainable slop).

> Separating AI time from thinking time.

My usage of AI involves doing a lot of thinking, either collaboratively within a chat, or by myself while it's doing some agentic loop.

> Accepting 70% from AI.

This is a confusing statement. 70% what? What does 70% usable even mean? If it means around 70% of features work and other 30% is broken, perhaps AI shouldn't be used for those 30% in the first place.

> Being strategic about the hype cycle.

Hype cycles have always been a thing. It's good for mind in general to avoid them.

> Logging where AI helps and where it doesn't.

I do most of this logging in my agent md files instead of a separate log. Also after a bit my memory picks it up really quickly what AI can do and what it can't. I assume this is a natural process for many fellow engineers.

> Not reviewing everything AI produces.

If you are shipping in an insane speed, this is just an expected outcome, not an advice you can follow.

Article is mostly GPT vomit after a couple bullet pints. If it’s not as easy for others to tell I’ll stay my blade runner style shop that tells who NOT to hire

>These posts got less than 5 upvotes, they didn't make it to home page. And while overall quality of Show HN might have dropped, HN homepage is still quite sane.

top 24 hours is a better way to get sentiment. Here's the top 5 for today (not including this post at #2)

> DoNotNotify is now Open Source

> I am happier writing code by hand

> Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

> Slop Terrifies Me

> Vouch

real shame, we just missed the politics post at #7.

I'm also getting really annoyed by AI-generated images like this article has that don't really help comprehension, but make the author feel like they're "pro blogging" because god forbid you have two paragraphs in a row without a subhead or an image.

Programmers complaining about AI but then ripping off umpteen illustrators' labor through AI is infuriating.

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