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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

What exactly makes it "obvious" that this is written by AI? I could totally believe that AI was used to generate parts of it, but I really don't get the sense that the whole thing was written that way. I've seen way worse examples on this site.

As software engineers we are constantly told that we need to heavily use these tools for our daily work. So is it surprising that software engineers use the same tools as writing aids? Using AI does not mean no human effort was involved.

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Subheading and dot point spam, low density writing (the opposite of standard technical english), including useless detail (like enumerating stats on Shopify's scale), using contrastive parallelism, and other llm-isms. Even if it's not AI it's bad writing done by someone who has picked up AI's worst ticks.

For example this subheading:

> "The real bottleneck: connections, not CPU"

That's two AI smells. AI likes to say vacuous punchy statements like "the final takeaway" or "here's the rub". Then contrastive parallelism "connections, not CPU". Contrastive parallelism should scarcely exist in technical writing, regardless of whether it's AI generated.

I really wish that slop writing was disincentivized in whatever RLHF they do. I don’t want to read the weird LinkedIn pop-sci tone for the rest of my life in such amounts.

I wonder if the average reader is also getting annoyed like this or whether they just don’t care - especially seeing what seems to get upvoted on your run of the mill social media sites. They probably collectively shape things more than I do.

I wish they don’t stop. Make it easier to skip past.

The LinkedIn “techbro” writings are the worst. They talk like a cryptobro “APPLE JUST PUBLISHED A CODE REPOSITORY ON THEIR HAND CRAFTED LLM ANYONE CAN USE THIS TO COMPETE WITH OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC” and its some random simple LLM on github that handles very little compared to OpenAI and Anthropic.

I don’t know how you stop the slop writing. What the LLM writes has the voice of whatever has been RLHF’d into the weights. There will be a voice. It will have ticks.

They can change it but it will be there.

I do like that I have a term for that “this, not that” phrasing that’s nails on the chalkboard for me after several years of reading slop.

The good news:

Your worst complaint has nothing to do with the overall content or accuracy of the post.

Just style bashing.

Just? With all the Claudisms it is hard to distill what really happened. My guess:

- Our oversell protection was a gross hack that broke ACID.

- MySQL has a new feature that allows us to remove parts of the gross hack.

- Question: To what extent does the hack still exist?

Instead you get garbage like "The answer is often in the plumbing, not the engine." and "Crucially, this wasn't about making reservations fast. It was about making them safe neighbors."

But this crap is what Lütke wants, so they deliver.

Did you read TFA? Because all of your questions are answered clearly there.

Maybe they should show us their prompt so we don't have to read all the bullshitting to get to those answers

The article is fine. LLMs are just turning everyone into divas.

Say the thing, not contrastive parallelism. Thanks for putting a name to that horrible LLM habit.

Clearly ai written comment

Binary opposition is another name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition

Aren't the LLMs trained on a massive corpus of human written texts? If that stands, then they are doing what they were asked, kind of? I am also not a fan of the fluff words that Claude pollutes the context with, it's a bit much, I could live 30% less but it doesn't want to read its instructions in the .md

If the author wanted, they could ask their "AI" to write the article as a caveman, no? I, simply for fun, slop coded up a skill so that I can ask Claude to reply as Samual L. Jackson, or Kramer, etc.

I also wonder if there is an "AI language barrier", likely not in this particular article, but let's say there was a published article by a researcher whose native language isn't English. What happens with the translation? I realize I am asking naive things :)

There's a post training.step where they get humans to interact with it.

As I understand it, there is (or was) a step where they ask people what's the 'better' response.

These linguistic forms sound good the first time you hear themz even if they are rare in real speech, so rapidly got trained in.

Now they distill off previous models, I imagine these weird linguistic forms are quite hard to get rid of.

If there are human knob turners, they can’t not be lurking here. If they read the room, dial down the knobs.

There are distinctive patterns of language use that can be powerful when used sparingly. LLMs trained on a massive copus of human communication, picked effective patterns, and overuses those patterns to the point that it feels both artificial and underwhelming.

I wonder if the human training process amplified this effect. I like to imagine there's an OpenAI RLHF trainer in Kenya whose name we'll never know who really likes this style of writing and is solely responsible for LLM voice. I know that's not how it works, but it would make for a fun story.

And you know what? That's not annoying--that's brave.

>Aren't the LLMs trained on a massive corpus of human written texts? If that stands, then they are doing what they were asked, kind of?

I think you might be interested in reading in training data generation, training, and post training papers/articles. I think you might be surprised at how much intervention there is on some of these levels.

>if it's not AI it's bad writing

Is this post AI generated?

I had never heard the phrase "contrastive parallelism" before and I love it. I mean, I can't stand how often LLMs do it, but having a word for my annoyance is nice.

Taken verbatim "But the hardest lesson wasn't about database design. It was discovering that the real bottleneck wasn’t what we were observing and measuring. "

Because the post is just rambling without a clear intent or direction. Why do you need "oversell protection" if you have "transactions". Isn't the whole point of a "transaction" that it handles concurrency and disk failures?

I work with Shopify often and the whole oversell protection thing is like a huge joke.

Oversell happens because Shopify doesn't decrement inventory until payment is confirmed. And they apparently would rather die than change that invariant.

It's funny the organizational rules that get written into a company's DNA.

I could see a historical moment where Shopify, sans that invariant, massively fucked up inventory counts from uncompleted transactions... then had to unwind all that when a bunch failed to clear payment.

Ergo, now there's an invariant.

Would a retail business want the inventory to decrement just because users put items into carts that get abandoned? Seems like that would really mess things up more in the long run.

An unconfirmed payment might also refer to a credit card charge that is 99% guaranteed to go through but hasn’t completed yet

Yes. You decrement for a few minutes then release if there's no purchase in time. Airlines figured out how to do this a very long time ago.

Except airlines, literally oversell flights all the time, and the context of my response was to preventing oversale.

I know this would add complexity, but I wonder if they could train a model to predict the odds of a given cart being abandoned. I'm a data scientist. I bet there are at least a few situations where you could be confident that someone was going to complete a sale.

In every AI-written post, we have the script: some top post complaining it's AI-written, someone cluelessly saying they don't see it, and another person pointing out the claudisms. Sometimes someone posts a link to pangram.

I think we need the moderation team to set up some policy. In which direction idk.

The EU helps. We can report Spotify for not labeling this content, since a substantial number here think this obviously AI assisted post is genuine:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/31/ai-labels...

Spotify's defense will then be that this post is obviously AI assisted garbage.

Shopify*

Well, one thing to remember: AI learned from us (See what I did, there?).

The training these LLMs got, was from endless human-slop, on sites like LinkedIn, and marketing copy, everywhere. In fact, don't be surprised, if we start learning from AI; reversing the process.

But I think that it's only a matter of time, before almost everything will be at least touched by AI.

I posted this, yesterday[0]. It wasn't a particularly popular comment, but I stand by it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219990

Yeah, people act like this style is new, when it absolutely is not. There's this weird romanticism of the time pre-LLMs where people imply all writing/code was perfect, and only now it's slop.

EDIT

I also read your linked comment and agree 100%.

> Yeah, people act like this style is new, when it absolutely is not.

Every time this claim is made I ask for a link to a pre-2022 blog or article that has all those AI tells.

I'm still waiting for it. I don't think I will ever receive it.

It's likely because no one could be bothered to respond. There's plenty there, but it's not their job to fetch it for you.

People on the Internet (especially here), seem to think that it's OK to make rude demands of complete strangers, and expect them to spend considerable time, meeting them.

I'd rather some rando think they "won the Internet," than spend a bunch of my time, working for free, just to satisfy them. I have better things to do with my time, and I don't really have a lot of investment in what complete strangers think of me.

Sometimes, the fox ain't worth the chase.

> There's plenty there, but it's not their job to fetch it for you.

It's been asked about 30 times now. If it existed, someone would have posted it. Maybe you.

No (see above)

One of the things that I learned, about the time I lost my baby teeth, is that making rude demands of people, instead of working with them, is likely to result in exactly the opposite.

Chances are good, that you learned this, as well, which might explain the rude demands. They are unlikely to be met, so the matter stays open.

If it can't be found, it can't be found *shrug

I mean, even the SOTA models couldn't pull up examples when asked, so it's no surprise that HN readers can't find any examples either.

They just don't exist...

I apologize for my inferior communication skills. It appears as if I am unable to make the point clear. It has nothing at all to do with the matter at hand, and everything to do with communication style.

Have a great day!

Your clearly doing it wrong, on the internet your supposed to make a positive claim such as; No blog exists from the pre-llm days that include the llm-isms. And then you wait for the internet trolls to come out of the woodwork and prove you wrong.

You dont ask people on the internet to provide you with some kinda proof because nobody can be bothered, you dont even ask them to prove you wrong because they cant be bothered. You have to confidently and boldly assert your false claim and that will enrage some poor autists somewhere into doing what you want.

AI slop: Trained on 100% natural human slop.

I read your linked comment and I'm bummed out because I agree.

The thing is that I LIKE writing code. It's fun.

I don't LIKE coding with an LLM. It isn't fun.

We can't go back to a place where the professional code is all hand written. But at the same time I'm sad and tired. The joy has been utterly sapped and I don't think I'll be able to do this as a career for much longer.

Well, I am sorry to hear that, but it hasn’t been my experience.

That may have something to do with the way that I use an LLM.

I use it as a “pair partner,” not as an agent.

Most of the code in my apps is mine, but I do ask the LLM to take care of some of the “overhead” tasks, such as minor utility functions.

In fact, I just got done, ripping out a bunch of code the LLM wrote, in my current app, and replacing it with my own work. It seems that I can’t really ask the LLM to do much beyond function level, without it going sideways.

I simply can’t understand people shipping entire, vibe-coded apps. If I let the LLM write my whole app, it would be hot garbage.

The other day, I was working with Polars and decided to go old school with everything. I asked my questions on udm14.com and wrote the code in Notepad++. It was invigorating. Reminded me why I started coding in the first place.

People see an — dash and kneejerk. Writers are deciding to stop using this valid punctuation because of this exact reaction, it's ridiculous.

A true casualty of AI. Em-dashes used to be one of my favorite punctuation devices, now I find myself consciously editing them out of my writing.

> Scale here is not abstract:

This is a really strange, clunky way of writing.

There are some claudeisms here (it's not x, it's y) but it does read like they did at least one human pass on it. Or maybe this is opus 5 writing which is a bit less distinct idk. It doesn't feel as obviously generated slop as some of the stuff posted here with every other sentence a fragment and load bearing and all that nonsense

Using AI is a pretty good indicator that the reader will need to exert more effort than the writer did. Unless the reader also decides to use AI to summarize it, but then what's the point?

The pictures.

"No waiting on the same row, less contention."

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