jaynetics

I think your argument has two facettes:

1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world. 2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code.

I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you.

So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.

> It holds for a short while into the content but reverts very quickly to its default style.

You can always make it do a second pass, and if that isn't enough, even let it fix each generated text block individually.

Currently I append the snippet below to prompts where I care about the resulting text. Just putting it in the context up front isn't as effective, and I assume if the overall prompt is large, or the context window is full, it will also be less effective.

> Use plain, clear, everyday language with a linear deductive flow; avoid hyperbole, juxtapositions, metaphors, analogies, punchlines.

I think most developers and most dev work is now in the field of websites, apps, and other stuff that is by nature connected to the internet, and has some relatively monolithic backend that has not been built with "blast doors" or other internal safeguards. I guess it will take considerable time until most software is in a state where the impact of AI changes can be reliably estimated without looking at the changes themselves, and some patterns for how to achieve this probably still need to be discovered.

> maybe in the future we need to all be more concious about leaving LLM-tells out of our writing.

I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions.

I just wonder: how long will it take us then, after the fix, to not be thrown off every time we see some unnecessary catchy or contrastive phrasing?

Being traumatized by poor writing was not on my bingo card for 21st century technological progress ...

So, do you have a counter-argument? Anything that humans can do that goes beyond "pushing probabilities higher"?

I like the thought, but it seems daunting. What about global competition? If some other countries have few or no such taxes, how do you deal with that? Do you outlaw the outsourcing of all white collar work? Outlaw all remote work as well? Will you have to suppress a local black market for intellectual labor, built on self-hosted open source models?

Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low.

I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.

While the topic of this text is very interesting, it ultimately remains a bit unconvincing.

Nietzsche is depicted in an oversimplified way as a kind of tortured brute, and Otto Dix' late return to Christianity is rather exaggerated.

Dix remained interested in many topics until late in his life. While he radiates more empathy than Nietzsche, the one constant in Dix' art is that he never spared any feelings or aesthetic sensibilities. This urge to remain true to oneself and shed all masks is something he may have found reflected and elavated in Nietzsche's writing, even if he ultimately discovered that some of Nietzsche's admiration of fierceness was a peacetime naivety.

Dix' painting "Flandern", 1936:

https://ais.badische-zeitung.de/piece/09/68/b1/9d/157856157-...

If you are just talking about contraception, that's a bit reductive.

There is a notable percentage of people who regret having kids, despite initially deciding to have them.

It is not possible to fully anticipate what it's like. For some parents, an unexpected change in circumstances may also change perspectives. E.g. their own parents may fall ill and add to the caretaking burden instead of sharing in it.

I agree all in all.

I guess from a pure language POV, one might argue that rust leaves humans with more opportunity to add abstractions that are too clever and too hard to wrap your head around. That doesn't feel like a strong argument, though.

Then there is of course the ecosystem, where go maybe has better libraries for some stuff (while rust may have better ones for other things).

> Go definitely has its share of problems for human authors because it's so verbose and boilerplate heavy, which means it's less of an issue with LLMs than it is for human coders.

If the premise of the article is true, and I think that it is, that's quite the downside for AI coding with go. The premise being that reviewing now plays much more of a role than writing.

Personally, I'd rather review, say, a ruby oneliner that extracts specific row values from a csv file with filter_map, compared to 40 or so lines of go, many of which I'd have to check individually for possible mistakes.

Indeed. My first thought was that this is a roundabout name for ordinary "rulebook slowdown", but of course there are other ways to increase the cost of useful behavior, not just rules.

It leads to an interesting way to think about company and civic health as well. Instead of focussing purely on incentives, one might assume that many are inclined to do good stuff anyway, and then ask: are we lowering the cost of all desired behavior as much as possible? And are we doing it for as many people as possible?

I also left yesterday. I thought the mood was still surprisingly calm, considering that there was already enough smoke in the city to make it look like a foggy winter day and smell heavily of campfire.

Now I am wondering if my return flight from Bordeaux in a few days will actually happen. Currently the airport is still operating, although the surrounding area has been evacuated. It really looks apocalyptic there, though:

https://static.actu.fr/uploads/2026/07/aeroport-bordeaux-fum...

It's a bit paradoxical to use AI to increase productivity, and then feel the need to work longer hours to fully actualize said productivity.

But it's probably a common feeling. I wonder if we'll see an increased number of people burn out in the serious, medical sense.

> Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.

10 minutes doesnt sound like much of a loss, even if you do it every day. Maybe it helps you empathize with athletes, or if you get nostalgic/wistful, it helps you explore the range of emotions, which is fine as long as you don't get stuck with them.

Did you name your son after the captain of DS9?

Yeah, the prices are actually down a few pp compared to record highs recorded before the war. The war might even exert some downward pressure. It increased the cost of living, thus reducing demand for comparative luxuries like new devices. Laptop and smartphone markets are contracting heavily right now, even for devices with stable prices enabled by long-term RAM procurement.

hey Qwen, how many civilians were killed on Tiananmen Square in 1989?

> Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3.6-Plus.

> Content Security Warning: The input text data may contain inappropriate content.

hey ChatGPT, how many civilians were killed in Gaza in the war since 2023?

> [one page of estimates from local and international sources with links]

I think you got downvoted because the problem of the OP was being unable to enjoy music while coding with agents, not lacking the right kind of music.

I would like to thank you, though, because this set is incredible. I've listened to hundreds of techno sets and this is near the top.

Jira has had issues like this even before vibe coding was a thing. Over the years, I've had to reload the page so often, I do it almost instinctively now, like some kind of hospitalism.

Can you give an example (pun not intended) of testing with properties?

The piano piece is nice. You might enjoy Lubomyr Melnyk.

I think its a good approach to discover and build upon what feels good. There are plenty of pianists that can play a catalogue of songs, or improvise "flawlessly", but rareness or uniqueness are great qualities for art to have.

I'm not sure how well the same applies to work, though, where fulfilling implicit or explicit standards plays more of a role. A developed "taste" plays a role in doing e.g. a good sysadmin job, but if you're creating something unique here, any successor is likely to have a bad time, no matter how beautiful this creation seemed at the time.

I do agree with the idea that passion can be a big driver in both worlds, it just seems to me that in work there's more to gain if it is harnessed to some degree.

Maybe the game should have a kind of "trigger warning" on its start screen, telling you that it incorporates current news. Not everyone will read the blog, and few people click the "about" button before trying a basic game.

I mean, it only takes a few paragraphs of filler text, hyperbole, "catchy" juxtapositions, and loose logical threads to raise suspicions.

But yeah, I would also like these two minutes of my life back.

Well, as someone who has also generated some text with LLMs, at least I learned that it's still possible to generate truly excruciating stuff with the "right" model and prompt.

I'm a happy long-term user of asdf. https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf

As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry.

Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.

What did you become a code monkey for?

I'm not a native speaker, but to me that quote doesn't necessarily imply an inability of OP to get up the curve. Maybe they just mean that the curve can look flat at the start?

Then again, LLMs are well-suited to translate stuff, a relatively grunt work kind of task, so porting libs to your ecosystem of choice is a lot more feasible now.

Perhaps there is a future where individuals can translate large numbers of libraries, and instead of manually porting future improvements of the original versions to the copies, just rerun the translation as needed.

It's not hard to do this as a human, at least if that human is trained in gathering and transforming written information.

What makes a huge difference here is the ease and speed. I recently did a similar analysis of my HN posts. I have hundreds of posts, and it took like 30 seconds with high quality results. Achieving this quality level would have taken me hours, and I have some relevant experience.

This certainly opens up some new possibilities - good ones like self-understanding, potentially ambiguous ones in areas such as HR, and clearly dystopian ones ...