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Comment by sarreph | Hacker News Reader

I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years.

However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms, my eyes glaze over, and I stop being able to follow what the article is trying to communicate to me. I would love for the OP to call me out and correct me (that they haven't used LLMs to write this).

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As soon as I read this: "Everyone Bought the Motor. Ford Rebuilt the Floor." my brain recoiled and I did not want to continue reading it.

Interestingly I did not directly recognise the text as AI, but this is precisely the moment that I stopped reading.

This is rapidly becoming the damning accusation of quasi-journalism: this sounds like AI.

There should be journalism classes on how to not sound like a bot.

impossible, because bots will adjust to new way of writing very quickly. at the end of the day, they will be trained with the new style

Yep that was the exact moment for me too. The premise was interesting, but I hit that spot and just registered it as not worth proceeding.

I was bothered by the writing and fought through it, and carefully went through everything in the article... and you didn't miss anything. It's a tweet expanded to article length.

Wait. It's going to happen and it's SOTA, but you can't read the article because genAI produces such garbage?

Seems like a disconnect there.

LLMs being used as a tool in general (and in the future) to automate creation and maintenance of software is not mutually exclusive to one person using LLMs to create an article.

writing prose and writing code are two different things

I can get good code out of LLMs. I can rarely get good writing out of them.

Maybe it's a skill issue, but it's not inherently a contradiction that they're better at some things than others. It's much easier to RL coding than writing.

Being dull and predictable and repeating existing patterns are characteristics of good code, and simultaneously characteristics of bad writing.

I like to delete all AI comments, and write my own. If I can't write a comment, I don't understand the code well enough to have my name on the commit. I often delete the resulting comment, because AI likes to add many more than are necessary.

Ugh, this one was so sloppy. "No engineer can hold that in their head, and that’s the point: the machine holds it." Shudder.

A machine supremacist wrote this. Beware the machine uprising!

The factory analogy is tenuous, because real software is always bespoke, it’s not about producing gazillion copies of the same thing. Factories are about reliability and tolerances, aspects which are inherently intractable with LLMs.

One tragedy of this is that I stop reading when things don't make sense. There are a few connections in the article that seem tenuous. In the past I might have thought through it, considered the situation, and realized that the author had a different perspective and, if I shifted my mindset, there was a real insight there.

Now I just assume that it's AI-slop and there's no other "way of thinking" that I can adopt to make it sensible. I'm surely missing out on learning through some human-written articles, but the volume of slop means that I can't spend all my time digging through nonsense in the hope that there's a gem of insight.

In your second paragraph, that was true before AI-slop, at least for me. There was enough human slop that I couldn't bother to spend my time digging through it in the hope of finding a gem.

AI makes it worse, of course, because the ratio of slop to non-slop is worse.

True. I quit reading most of my subscriptions way before AI. Ironicall, now when we have AI, I can filter out the slop using my criteria for "gems". Recently vibe-coded some simple UI for this, would appreciate if you can try this: knoless.app

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