657 karma · joined January 10, 2013
I get the anxiety about authenticity, but sometimes the witch-hunt feels more automaton-like than the tools themselves. For what it's worth, I've written publicly about my process ––how I use AI as scaffolding, not ghostwriting–– in my standing note on AI use.
The discomfort around augmented intelligence is fascinating + telling. I sometimes wonder if the same people browse HN on typewriters or pray for the next X-class solar flare so we can all return to rock carving.
"My high school teacher in 2004 accused me of plagiarizing from Wikipedia because my research paper looked "too polished" for something typed on a keyboard instead of handwritten. Twenty years later, HN commenters see clean prose and assume LLM slop. Same discomfort, different decade, identical pattern: people resist leverage they haven't internalized yet.
I use AI tools the way I used spell-check, grammar tools, and search engines before them—as cognitive leverage, not cognitive replacement. The ideas are mine. The arguments are mine. The cultural references, personal stories, and synthesis across domains—all mine. If the output reads coherently, maybe that says more about expectations than about authenticity.
You can call it slop. Or you can engage with the ideas. One takes effort. The other takes a glance at a header image and a decision that polish equals automation. Your choice reveals more about your relationship to technology than mine."
I use AI tools the way I used spell-check, grammar tools, and search engines before them; as cognitive leverage, not cognitive replacement. The ideas are mine. The arguments are mine. The cultural references, personal stories, and synthesis across domains—all mine. If the output reads coherently, maybe that says more about expectations than about authenticity.
You can call it slop. Or you can engage with the ideas. One takes effort. The other takes a glance at a header image and a decision that polish equals automation. Your choice reveals more about your relationship to technology than mine :)
Re: Figma vs Illustrator –– totally agree Figma doesn't cover Illustrator's full surface area. But in a lot of product/UI/marketing work, "good enough + collaborative + extensible" beats "feature-complete." The fact students default to Figma signals where the center of gravity is drifting, even if print/illustration shops still anchor on Illustrator.
Re: Omarchy + Framework –– not claiming market dominance — it's tiny and new. My point is more about signal: indie dev culture experimenting with modular laptops + DHH's OS is the kind of early-edge activity that tends to foreshadow bigger cultural/tooling shifts.
I write from a Silicon Valley x indie dev POV: watching sparks at the periphery because that's often where the next fire comes from.
That’s the core of what I was trying to name with the 12-month bug: our tendency to loop in abstraction long after execution could’ve started. Doesn’t matter if the code’s rough; the point is you crossed the boundary. From there, the real operating system is iteration.
If it’s useful, I wrote a companion post called Stuck Theory: Resistance as Fitness Function. Similar~ish meta-conclusion. For me the blog as a whole is a running attempt to debug how we keep pushing dense, sometimes unwieldy information down our own neural pathways while AI is gradually offloading the lighter parts of cognition. Thanks for reading!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fliptheweb/jfdmnek...
(inspired by com.google)
I had the same remark; "why on earth another Chat Widget company?". I guess you could communicate better on the service by adding some sort of graphic (user comes to your site, we do this, we do that, ...).
Best of luck!
Two startup founders who developed voice recognition software were negatively affected by tweaked search engine page ranking of ChumHum after refused being acquired.
Coincidence?