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I'm trying to sort out my own emotions on this.

I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling.

It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable.

I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.

It's a major bummer. When I first read the story (a few days ago, maybe?) I thought it was an interesting metaphor that didn't quite line up with the observed details of software development with AI. I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.

Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.

Surely you see it's somewhat unreasonable? As if it was written by the author you disliked, and until you knew of the fact, you quite enjoyed it.

Quite honestly, I do that sometimes too -- but I _know_ that it's unreasonable.

hard to form an emotional connection with the emotionless

What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you? It's the same story, down to the same delicate details. When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now?

I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel like the current attitude towards AI generated art will suffer the same fate—but I'm really not quite sure.

What is your understanding of the luddite movement? I ask because I don't believe many are aware that luddites were not anti-technology. It was a labor movement which was targeted at exploitation by factory owners. Their issue was with factories forcing the use of machines to produce inferior products so owners could use cheaper, low skill labor.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-la...

Right, wrong, whatever. The one thing every sane person can agree on is that it's a good thing the Luddites didn't prevail.

How much did you pay for the shirt you're wearing now?

I'd have been ok if things fell more in their direction... I'm not saying "clear win", but a middle ground that had the machines do the things they're best at while letting humans do the quality work.

Once again showing how little you actual understand about the movement you decry.

You can get some good guesses from the comment itself.

> I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.

If you assume you're reading something from a person with intention and a perspective, who you could connect with or influence in some way, then that affects the experience of reading. It's not just the words on the page.

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Stories are particularly troubling because we have the concept of "suspending disbelief" and readers tend to take a leap of faith with longwinded narratives because we assume the author is going somewhere with the story and has written purposefully.

When AI can write convincingly enough, it is basically a honeypot for human readers. It looks well-written enough. The concept is interesting and we think it is going somewhere. The point is that AI cannot write anything good by itself, because writing is a form of communication. AI can't communicate, only generate output based on a prompt. At best, it produces an exploded version of a prompt, which is the only seed of interest that carries the whole thing.

Somebody had that nugget of an idea which is relevant for today's readers. They told the AI to write it up, with some tone or setting details, then probably edited it a bunch. If we enjoy any part of it, we are enjoying the bits of humanity peeking through the process, not the default text the AI wrote.

i don't find the luddite comparison accurate. they were against looms and anti-ai people or ai skeptical people are against the wholesale strip mining of intellectual property as it exists... both public domain and non-public domain. it's used to enrich the capital class at the expense of the workers. sure it's similar but it certainly didn't have the copyright and wholesale theft of all of the human ideas behind it. it just feels quite different.

c'mon, were they really just against the looms...?

the story is bad in itself and doesn't add anything to the reader

but if you knew it came from a human it would be interesting as a window to learning what the writer was thinking

since there is no writer such window doesn't exist either

Yes, this is a thing. Bad writing with an interesting idea underneath it all is still interesting if it comes from a human because we have the expectation that the human will improve in how they share their ideas in the future. In other words, we see potential.

But LLMs don't have potential. You can make an LLM write a thousand articles in the next hour and it will not get one iota better at writing because of it. A person would massively improve merely from the act of writing a dozen, but 100x that effort and the LLM is no better off than when it started.

Despite every model release every 6 months being hailed as a "game changer", we can see from the fact that LLMs are just as empty and dumb as they were when GPT-2 was new half a decade ago that there really is no long term potential here. Despite more and more power, larger and hotter and more expensive data centers, it's an asymptotic return where we've already broken over the diminishing returns point.

And you know, I wouldn't care all that much--hell, might even be enthusiastically involved--if folks could just be honest with themselves that this turd sandwich of a product is not going to bring about AGI.

Very well said.

You cannot even get angry or upset if you disagree with anything in the story, maybe the author’s despicable worldview permeating through the characters... because there's no author’s worldview, because there's no author. It's a window into nothing, except perhaps the myriad of stories in the model's training set.

I want to at least have to option of getting upset at the author.

As a couple sibling comments said, I took it for an insight into the way an optimistic writer might see AI software development becoming a new form of "end-user programming" or "citizen developer" tooling. I'm personally too deep in the weeds to ever see it becoming empowering in that way (if nothing else, this will be an incredibly centralizing technology and whoever wins the "arms race" [assuming we we're not in a bubble destined to pop soon] will absolutely have the possible Toms and Megans of such a future by the short hairs). But I love end-user programming, or whatever we're calling it now! (I was partial to "shadow IT" - made it sound really cool.) So I enjoyed the idea that somebody saw AI as a "bicycle for the mind" in that sense, even if I feared they'd end up disappointed.

But there was nobody there, and I'm only disappointed in myself for not noticing.

People had a revulsion to eating refrigerated foods. The developed world got over it. We're comfortably on the path to becoming Eloi who will trust everything the magic box does for us.

> We're comfortably on the path to becoming Eloi who will trust everything the magic box does for us.

And if you've read literally any science fiction you will know the myriad ways that could be absolutely terrible for us

>What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you?

Read my comment below for a perspective.

> When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now?

For me, the answer to this riddle is very easy: I want to engage with other human minds. A robot (or AI) doesn't have a human mind, so I'm not interested in its "artistic" output.

It was never about how good it was. Of course AI slop adds insult to injury by being also bad. Currently. But it'll get better. My position was never that AI art (shorts, pictures, music, text) is to be frowned up because it's bad. I don't like it because it's not the expression of a human mind.

It's a bit like how an AI boy/girlfriend is not the real deal, no matter how realistic -- and I'm sure they'll get uncannily realistic in the future. They aren't the real deal because there's no real human behind the facade of companionship.

Humans build friendships and relationships on shared experiences. There is an element of relationship-through-experiencing-a-thing. Whether it's going for a walk together or the classic first date template of dinner and a movie. The shared experience is the thing.

With stories that shared experience is between author and reader. Book clubs etc will try to extend that "shared experience" but primarily it is author <-> reader relationship.

Remove that "shared feeling with the author" and what meaning does it have?

You can look at a tree and feels things by yourself. Also there's the shared readership.

...and what meaning does it have?

It means, "Wow. Cool. I'm a member of a species that taught rocks to think. Holy fuck. That's pretty insanely fucking awesome. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Fuck."

That's about all it means. Nothing was removed from your life, but something optional was added.

snark filter off, "wow wow wow this sex doll feels so real why would i ever bother with an actual girl"

Agreed, that will indeed be a problem. We may be building the proverbial Fermi filter.

birth rates have already tanked everywhere that isnt religious. youd think people would move back to religion and save their culture, but the sex doll argument has already pervaded. we werent designed to have our senses constantly hyperstimulated; resultantly, people increasingly dont care about reality. only sociopaths and the well disciplined thrive in this environment, everyone else becomes lost in hyperreality. id love to send it and join the masses ... after contemplating eternal damnation, a few years of sensory pleasure just arent worth it.

I think "I'm a member of a species chasing our own extinction by worshipping an idiot machine god for the purposes of profit. That's so insanely depressing. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck"

It has absolutely made my life worse not better

There is an interesting dichotomy where we express an uncanny-valley revulsion to AI-generated text, art, video and music; yet we seemingly go with the AI-generated code.

Personally I have an uneasiness with it and are correspondingly cautious. Often after a review and edits it loses that "smell". I kind-of felt the same about NPM and package managers for a long time before using it became obligatory (for lack of a better word).

Are we conditioned to use other people's code unthinkingly, or is it something else?

It's because code isn't a way to communicate ideas, it's a way to specify behavior. Text, drawings, video, and music are means for brains to connect with each other. When you read or view or listen to something generated you're not connecting with any other brain. No idea has been transmitted to you. The feeling is analogous to speaking on the phone and only realizing several minutes later that the call was dropped. It's a feeling that combines betrayal, being made to waste time, and alienation.

Whether people know it or not, when they engage with art they are assuming a person not just made it but experienced it. I'm going to blow past the discussion of "what is art" here, but where something came from and how it was made has always mattered to me (you could draw parallels to food here if you wanted). One thing that has been on my mind a lot is a particular photograph I saw in the past few years (and I'm sure it's easy to find online): it's a POV shot taken by a person sitting atop a skyscraper with their feet dangling over the edge. There is just no way that anyone could in good faith claim that the same photo produced by "AI" could possibly have the same emotional impact as knowing someone actually went and did that. I think that for a lot of people they may not even realize that when hey see a painting or even a photo as innocuous as a tree, their mind goes to that the person who produced this went to this that place the tree was in an had an experience and chose to document that particular perspective. If they were to see a painting or drawing of something that is clearly "fantasy," they know that a person made this up in their crazy mind and experience their feelings on it (good or bad). "AI" (heavy quotes) is trying to trick us and rob of us this basic knowledge. Some see this as progress. I personally think it's fucking disgusting, but I've been wrong before.

Of course this has always been a bit of a problem with digital art trying to mascarade as the real thing... I always think of programmed drums using real drum samples. In my adult life I found out that an album I loved as a teenager that listed a real drummer as the performer was actually 100% programmed (this was an otherwise very "organic" sounding heavy guitar album). I always had my suspicions since it was so perfect but I experienced exactly what you are describing. I also never got over it.

I had a similar experience a few days ago with some music on Spotify. It was an Irish Pub song, rendering some political satire that seemed pretty consistent with what I figure is a predominant Irish viewpoint. Since I holidayed in Ireland a while ago and adored the public there, I really liked it. I reveled in the fact that somewhere in Ireland, there was a band singing messages in pubs that resonated strongly with me. And then it was pointed out that it was AI. I was crushed. I went from feeling connected to some people across the pond, to feeling lonely.

And yet, in ironic counterpoint, there is a different artist I follow on Spotify that does EDM-fusion-various-world-genres. And it’s very clearly prompt generated. And that doesn’t bother me.

My hypothesis is that it has to do with how we connect/resonate with the creations. If they are merely for entertainment, then we care less. But if the creation inspired an emotion/reasoning that connects us to other humans, we feel betrayed, nay, abandoned, when it comes up being synthetic.

It's full of AI generated imagery. Why would it not be AI generated?

Good rule of thumb is if it was posted on HN, it's almost certainly AI slop.

The duality of generated content.

It feels great to use.

It feels terrible to have it used on you.

I think its a valid emotion to feel. I genuinely resonated with the story, but when I learned it was written by Claude it kind of left me feeling ... betrayed?

One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.

So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.

But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.

If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.

In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.

You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.

This is what the deconstructionists were preparing us for, I guess. The author is dead, and if not dead, then fake. It was never a good idea to tie our sense of meaning to external validation.

The humanity immanent in the text came from you, the reader, not the author, and it has always been that way. Language never gave us access to the author's mind -- and to the extent that statement is wrong, it doesn't matter. AI is just another layer of text, coming between the reader and the same collective consciousness that a human author would presumably have drawn on. The artistic appreciation of that text is the sole privilege of the reader.

I suspect (but don't know) that this had to be edited somewhat heavily or generated in isolated chunks: I've generated a lot of fiction with Claude and it has a chronic issue of overusing any literary device one might associate with good writing once it appears in the context window

I think if you left it to its own devices, some of the narrative exposition stuff that humanized it would go off the rails

Yeah, there's a lot more work and personal touch that went into this (and the previous piece) than just "write prompt -> copy/paste into substack".

It's really interesting to hear about others that have been exploring generating fiction with Claude. I clearly need some more work based on some of the comments, but it has been really interesting discovering and coming up with different techniques both LLM-assisted and manual to end up with something I felt confident enough about to put out.

I'd be curious to hear more about your experience!

I also did not gin to the fact that it was AI, but I did have the distinct feeling that I was reading something not that great. It bothered me because the message was something I could appreciate but the delivery felt anathema to the message.

It felt like it was written by someone trying to quit an addiction to Corporate Memphis content spam. Like it came from some weird timeline where qntm was a LinkedIn influencer. It straddles an uncanny valley of being a criticism of the domination of The Corporation over human culture while at the same time wallowing in The Corporate Eunuch Voice, not because it's a subversion of form, but because it knows no other way.

I then came to the comments section and found the piece that brought the picture into focus.

It's just... hard to explain the specific kind of disappointment. Perhaps there is a German phrase-with-all-the-spaces-removed kind of word that describes it succinctly. I feel like I exist in this Truman Show kind of world where everyone is trying to gaslight me into thinking LLMs are important, but they aren't very good at it and whenever I try to find out how or why, it all evaporates away. I was very reluctant to say that because I'm sure it's going to come with a heaping side of Extremely Earnest Walruses ready to Have A Debate about it and I just don't have the energy for it anymore. That's the baseline existence right now. It's like a really boring version of Gamergate.

And then this thing comes along. And yeah, it's a thing. You got me. Ha. Ha. Joke's on me. I lost the shitty, fake version of the Turing Test that I didn't even ask to be a part of. And it reminds me of the Microsoft Hololens: a massively impressive technological achievement that was ultimately a terrible consumer experience. Like if you figured out Fusion Power but it could only power Guy Fieri restaurants.

Ever since the pandemic I've been keenly aware of the complete destruction of every enjoyable social structure around me. The meetups that evaporated. The offices we essentially squatted in that suddenly turned Extremely Concerned about what people were doing. The complete lack of any social interaction at work because we're all so busy because we're running at half-workforce and pretty sure the executive suite is salivating at the bit to lay the rest of us off. The lack of care about how this is impacting open source software. The lack of concern for people.

I feel like my entire adult life was this slow, agonizing, but at least constant push forward into recognizing the humanity in others and creating a kind and diverse world and then over night it's all been destroyed and half the people I see online are cheering it on like it's Technojesus coming to absolve them of their sins of never learning to invert a binary tree. Where the blogs and books and startups of the early 2000s were about finding the hidden potential in people--the college dropout working as a barista who just needs someone to give them a chance to be a programmer or a graphic designer or an artist or whatever--the modern era seems to all be about the useless middle management guy who never had any creative bone in his body no longer having to write status reports to his equally mendacious boss on his own anymore.

We might be restarting old coal plants, but at least Kevin in middle management gets to enjoy "programming" again.

you're saying qntm is NOT an influencer? what a miscalculation i have made

Thanks for sharing. This was an amazing read. I’d love to see novels with similar style stories about speculative near future tech and world.

I guess I'm an expert on LLM-isms somehow, I thought they were still plentiful. They're plentiful at the start but get significantly worse near the end, so I'm guessing you spent more time polishing up the first 2/3rds or so.

But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste.

The story is good.

Thanks! Yeah there were a couple I decided to leave in rather than try to rework as I wasn't trying to hide that it was written with AI, more trying to add more variety to the storytelling. I'm sure as I do more of these I'll be able to recognize them a lot easier. I have been toying with the idea of working them more into character's dialogue in the future, as I've already noticed some people I know speaking in LLMisms.

I'm particularly allergic to LLM-isms, if you look at my comment history I'm constantly complaining about LLM-written text. I am genuinely quite surprised to have read that much LLM-generated text and been happy to do so.

I am also extremely interested in thinking about where software development is going, so I really appreciated the ideas that went into this.

Since you seem open to feedback, I want to add that I felt the generated images were a negative addition. Maybe they wouldn't be if they also got a little polish - the labels in them were particularly bad.

Ahh cool, I'll dig through your comment history tonight :) I will say, I suspect we're only in the early stages of the LLM's writing equivalent of "autotune" while we all collectively figure out what's tasteful use, what isn't, what it might be like to use autotune as an instrument itself, and then what gets overused. So it'll probably get a lot worse before it gets better.

And thanks for the note about the images, I'll take that into account! I only really just started this project and am going to keep iterating as I learn to use the tools better and I find the right visual language for it.

Since you seem in the mood to give feedback ;) If you take a quick glance at the previous story, do you feel the same way about the images in that one or was it just this one's that you found particularly unpolished?

that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of

some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:

- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.

- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)

- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there

- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least

fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.

All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!

I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.

Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.

Kubler-Ross process -> "A model outlining emotional responses to terminal diagnosis or loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance"

Exactly. The stages don't always occur in order, or at all, but you can see the general progression play out any day, all day on here.

I'm happily surprised (frankly amazed TBH) that the submitter didn't get bawled out by people flagging the post and accusing him of posting slop.

> As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about.

Can you elaborate on this?

Automation and technology in general have made it possible to do more farming with fewer people: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso... . In the US job market, agriculture accounted for 51% of workers in 1880 and less than 3% in 1980. It now appears to be closer to 1% depending on which source you reference.

Hard to imagine many occupations that have undergone more radical change in the recent past than farming. The profession is now utterly technology-dependent, and a few companies like John Deere have hastened to take unfair advantage of that. Hence the growing advocacy of right-to-repair laws.

> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop. “You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.

“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”

“Everything.”

He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.

Ethan looked ill.

--

I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?

[Edited for clarity]

The entire story is AI slop. Tasty and enjoyable slop, but slop nonetheless.

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I will say this is one of the few pieces of prose I've read that was AI generated that didn't immediately jump out as it (a couple of inconsistencies eventually grabbed me enough to come to the comments and see your post details which mention it - I'd clicked through from the HN homepage), so your polishing definitely worked! Quite a neat little story

I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set. Not that the writing is bad but it's just derivative. I listen to stuff like "Lost Scifi" podcast almost daily for example, but there are many similar ones which are focused on reading classic stuff from the golden-age zines because it's all public domain.

The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.

It is a pitch perfect interpretation and I assumed that's what OP was going for. Manna (2010) read very similarly.

Can't speak for them but FWIW it does not sound like OP is necessarily aware of the genre at all. They asked Claude to explain something via fiction, and then perhaps Claude made the "creative decision" based simply on the availability of the material.

> I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set

Which is totally fair, I'm honestly not! I haven't read much of that myself

The only thing I noticed is that the melody of the words was not equal to the quality of the writing and story arc.

It was the text equivalent of hearing a singer whom you know has perfect pitch sing atonal playground songs.

Take this sentence:

Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible.

Perfectly fine, a nice set up for a next sentence, but then you get hit with this:

He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years.

Bad. The rhythm is all off. Minor improvement:

For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield.

Minor change, really, but the fluidity of the language matters a lot and just that one sentence written that one way breaks the flow.

It's almost as if a second person interjected and wrote that sentence like a friends annoying girlfriend who won't let him finish a story without adding in her parts.

But two notes does not a music make, so let's compare that 1 minor change with a before and after of all three opening sentences:

Original:

Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.

Modified:

Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.

It was pretty obvious to me, but the train of thought was something like this:

* this is a good attempt at a work of art, but written in a generic style that detracts from it * nobody making genuinely good attempts at art like this would also write so generically * and if they were making it generic on purpose, they wouldn't be able to do it so flawlessly * oh, it must be AI

I guess I can discern the presence of a human artist, but only in the idea, which just means it was a good prompt.

Nanoclaw is the first hint I've seen of new type of software, user-customizeable code. It's not spec-to-software like in the story, but it is rather interesting. You fork it and then when you add features it self-modifies. I haven't looked deeply, but I'm not sure how you get updates after that, I guess you can probably have it pull and merge itself for a while but if you ever get to where you can't merge anymore, I'm not sure what you do.

As for spec-to-software - I am still pretty unsure about this. Right now of course we are not really that close, it takes too much iteration from a prompt to a usable piece of software, and even then you need to have a good prompt. I'm also not sure about re-generating due to variations on what the result might be. The space of acceptable solutions isn't just one program, it's lots, and if you get a random acceptable solution that might be fine for original generation, but it may be extremely annoying to randomly get a different acceptable solution when regenerating, as you need to re-learn how to use it (thinking about UI specifically here.) Maybe these are the same problem, once you can one-shot the software from a spec maybe you will not have much variation on the solution since you aren't doing a somewhat random walk there iterating on the result.

I also don't know if many users really want to generate their own solutions. That's putting a lot of work on the user to even know what a good idea is. Figuring out what the good ideas are is already a huge part of making software, probably harder than implementing it. Maybe small-(ish) businesses will, like the farmers in the story, but end-users, maybe not, at least not in general.

I do think there is SOMETHING to all this, but it's really hard to predict what it's gonna look like, which is why I appreciate this piece so much.

A fun read!

I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.

Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?

I also got a slight feeling of ai assistance as well (especially on the drawings), but the story was well written and really sucked me in all in all.

Thanks! Yeah this was AI assisted. As an experiment I started asking Claude to explain things to me with a fiction story and it ended up being really good, so I started seeing how far I could take it.

I’m pleasantly surprised this was AI assisted so deeply that inconsistencies like that slipped by you. The writing is really extraordinary. It made me want to read for fun again for the first time in decades. Thank you!

Funny, I was talking to a friend the other day about some thoughts on branding and he commented "as someone with a background in marketing & advertising communications, it's wild to watch a software engineer learn the value of branding and marketing from first principles".

I guess I'm also learning the value of working with an editor from first principles... over the last couple weeks before publishing I read through and made edits to this piece at least twice a day and still didn't catch this.

> from first principles

I don't think that phrase means what you are trying to say here.

What it doesn't mean: - learning by doing

I believe it generally means: a formalization that comes after a subject is understood so well that you can reduce it to "first principles" that imply the rest. Or, the production of a hypothesis by deduction from widely-accepted principles.

When I saw this the other day -- and it just went on and on, like a good human author who was going to write this kind of story probably wouldn't -- I looked for a note that it was AI-generated, and I didn't find it.

All I found was a human name given as the author.

We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.

I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.

I continue to resonate with the Oxide take when I hear this kind of sentiment expressed about AI prose

"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers

I sadly agree with this sentiment. But to add my own thoughts, I wonder if our “human generation” (all consciously existing today) are just plainly dinosaurs. Like in three decades we’ll have a society that knew LLMs from birth.

As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine.

Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?

> Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets?

Yes, science fiction writers and readers have, since before any of us were born.

"This was the mechanic’s paradox: the cheaper you were relative to the cost of failure, the more your clients needed you; and the more they needed you, the more they resisted the implication that they’d need you again."

This is my common issue from building websites for SMEs. It's not until Google updates their algorithm - killing their ranking and their sales leads slow that you hear from them.

There is wisdom in constantly up-selling to your customers (we offer management services, SEO and are cautiously moving in AIO), they may say no, but you have a fall back that you offered things that would have mitigated their current crisis.

That it was largely/mostly generated by Claude adds a certain poignancy to it.

As an allegory it reminds a lot of one I read as a teen: Joshua by Joseph Girzone. Not a literary masterpiece but a cleaver thought-raising story.

I really enjoyed fantasy part of many small farmers. It felt rustic. However based on my understanding the modern world is moving towards megacorps and economies of scale.

I liked it. It has a similar feel to an Andy Weir "The martian" type of novel.

I do enjoy this sort of speculative fiction that imagines though future consequences of something in its early stages, like AI is right now. There are some interesting ideas in here about where the work will shift.

However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier.

The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better.

We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.

Yeah, in the real world, Tom is already an OpenClaw instance...

Funny I actually saw this tweet this morning about an Openclaw instance getting too advanced for the users to know how to control and fix: https://x.com/jspeiser/status/2033880731202547784?s=46&t=sAq...

> Funny I actually saw this tweet this morning about an Openclaw instance getting too advanced for the users to know how to control and fix: https://x.com/jspeiser/status/2033880731202547784?s=46&t=sAq...

I feel like this ultimately boils down to something similar to nocode vs code debates that you mention. (Is openclaw having these flowcharts similar to nocode territory?)

at some point, code is more efficient in doing so, maybe even people will then have this code itself be generated by AI but then once again, you are one hallucination away from a security nightmare or doesn't it become openclaw type thing once again

But even after that, at some point, the question ultimately boils down to responsibility. AI can't bear responsibility and there are projects which need responsibility because that way things can be secure.

I think that the conclusion from this is that, we need developers in the loop for the responsibility and checks even if AI generated code stays prevalent and we are seeing some developers already go ahead and call them slop janitors in the sense that they will remove the slop from codebase.

I do believe that the end reason behind it is responsibility. We need someone to be accountable for code and we need someone to take a look and one who understands the things to prevent things from going south in case your project requires security which for almost all production related things/not just basic tinkering is almost necessary.

Yeah responsibility and accountability are also some areas I'd like to explore. I'm mostly digging through this artifact I created with Claude to look at first order and second order effects and then "traffic jams" in the "good science fiction doesn't predict the car, it predicts the traffic jam" and what kind of roles might pop up to solve those issues: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/39e718fa-bc4b-4f45-a3d5-5...

I've mostly been digging through my own version of that and trying to find things I find interesting and seeing what kinds of stories we can build about what a day in that job might look like.

>>There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing.

For the exact same reason why there is absolutely no technical reason why two departments in a company can't talk to each other and exchange data, but because of <whatever> reason they haven't done that in 20 years.

The idea that farmers will just buy "AI" as a blob that is meant to do a thing and these blobs will never interact with each other because they weren't designed to(as in - John Deere really doesn't want their AI blob to talk to the AI blob made by someone else, even if there is literally no technical reason why it shouldn't be possible), seems like the most likely way things will go - it's how we've been operating for a long time and AI won't change it.

> The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems.

Or you can ask the agent to do this after each round. Or before a deploy. They are great at performing analysis.

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Your polishing work made a difference! The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.

It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!

The story didn't mention what had happened to inflation in the meantime. A dozen eggs costs $32.

> The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.

Well, then, you gotta move on to reading better science fiction. Because this is pretty damn bland. I gave up after 2 minutes because of it. Kinda feel vindicated after coming to the comments.

I can see it working for casual readers, which is why it's already an editorial problem. Imagine having to sift through a growing number of faux writers sending publishers AI generated prose.

Huh, I got cottage core, not dystopia!

There's a bit of a tradition of introducing engineering ideas through stories. I remember a novella which was used to introduce something like MRP II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning) in the 80's. One of the reasons I think it works is that it keeps a focus on the human elements - like why Tom fitted the switch in your story. I remember automating a lab system back in 1985, which would bring in £1000 per day. Two weeks later I found out that the reason it wasn't in use was that the user wanted an amber monitor rather than a green one. I fitted the switch.

I don't know if this is what the future will look like, but this looks realistic. And if my non-existent grandson starts re-coding my business without asking, he's going to spend the next six months using K&R C.

I started reading this and it gave a strong whiff of Richard Stallman’s “the right to read” - once dystopian and now a commonplace.

Then I started scrolling and thought the author was just verbose like RMS.

When it just kept going I was just mad to have fallen into the AI tarpit.

Fun idea. 5x too long. I need to calibrate my ai spidey sense better.

I enjoyed this very much. But I have to wonder, was this written by Claude?

Edit: got it right!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47419681

Haha well it was me and Claude ;)

I wonder if it was de-indexed from HN for this reason.

30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.

Yeah I was wondering the same thing. I didn’t realize there was any kind of rule against this kind of stuff

There was another rule you did not know seemingly. Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And now it’s #1 on the front page.

A fun read. I was hoping for the title to have some more relevance to the story, like someone who had handcrafted a piece of software and didn’t want others messing with it! Was that ever part of a draft?

Ugh yeah, I had an aside about the right-to-repair fights still going on indefinitely into the future that I ended up cutting. I kept the title because it seemed like a warning the characters would see on everything they bought, even if they ignored it. I'm sure I'll explore the idea more in the future though, I plan to explore insurance and liability and law at some point too.

So, in the past, your stories were warrant-eed? But no longer?

My favorite part was the illustration from inside the car. The rear-view mirror clearly shows un-mirrored store signs.

Prompts in, garbage out.

Often suggested by optimistic podcast guests these days: the as-yet-unknown new careers that will replace the familiar old ones and thus give employment in the AI era. I think your story is more a commentary on the current AI goldrush than an insight into future careers.

This is such a good written fiction story. Well done. And the best part: I can see myself as Tom.

I can see this future happening!

This sort of article really needs at least a vague clue as to what it is about.

It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about

It's speculative fiction.

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It's worth reading. It's about AI.

Having read most of it, I don't agree that it's worth reading. A bunch of made-up technical jargon and situations that never happened to frame specific problems that are part of the made-up situations using more jargon, in a farmer-centric area. It was a waste of time and a waste of concentration to try to make sense of it. There was no learning, nor was it worth quoting, nor comparing to anything else.

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this was a ridiculously pointless story, I stopped after the second paragraph and came here to ask politely what was the point of it

what was my surprise when I read it was AI-generated

with the speed of llm/ai improvement, this too maybe steamrolled

I don't oppose reading AI generated content in principle, but because it's free to generate, I always am less likely to read super long prose that is AI generated. So the question is whether someone has taken the time to keep it as long as necessary but not longer. Or if there are ways to make it easier for me to commit to the experience, with a sort of TLDR

counterpoint: this assumes everyone has the same constraints. not always true

A few months ago, I asked Grok for a piece of fiction set in the cyberpunk 2077 universe. A cremated incredible story about a braindance that was actually stealthily programming the watcher through a back door in the watchers own implants to transmit a AI from beyond the black wall, allowing the AI to escape into the physical universe through the braindance’s audience. Excellent.

I used to live in Marshfield WI. It's kind of jarring to see it mentioned "in the real world", the the extent that HN resembles that.

excellent story, it was both interesting and mildly terrifying. to think that one day software could be malleable seems so wrong to me - you would think having deterministic results is important for programming - and yet with "vibe coding" that really seems to be where it's going.

The whole reason it is called software is because of its malleability :)

There are always bugs in software. The question is do you have enough eyes on the data to spot them or do they linger for years.

this is such a beautiful essay. thank you op for posting. made my day :)

it's crap. you all need to go outside

ai photos and em dashes/directional inverted commas (so probably AI writing), sorry to be rude but i dont see the point of reading this when i could prompt an AI to generate the story myself if you shared the prompts? im not trying to be crass here, if someone could share why they think this is worth reading id be all ears. after being warned across the net to not be snarky about AI i really must iterate that snarkiness is not my intention here, im genuinely curious.

edit: since im being downvoted, i clarify my interest to be in the human artistic input behind this mathematical model output

I appreciate the question and I think the answer is much longer and more nuanced than can really effectively fit into this form factor. I think this question is getting asked right now about all art forms because of AI and from a lot of different people.

My short answer to “why should I care about the mathematical model output from the human artistic input” is “I think we’re all figuring that out right now!” And I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t “you shouldn’t care at all”. Especially if the mathematical model output from the human artistic input expresses what the human wants to express at a quality level that passes that human’s “Taste Gap” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI)

I’m sure we could go back and forth about this a lot (and happy to keep this conversation going, I truly do feel like exploring and discussing, this is very interesting to me!) so happy to dig into any aspect with you :)

I will say that I think what’s happening is that we’re seeing more people explore art forms that couldn’t before because of mechanical skill gaps, and that’s interesting in the same way that synthesizers and sampling and software instruments did to music or I imagine digital art tools did to physical art, and I imagine digital photography did to photography which did the same to painting. It’s an interesting time to be alive!

but ai doesn't bridge a mechanical skill gap in this instance. there was nothing stopping you writing this story or drawing those pictures. juxtaposing language models against synthesizers chopping up discrete samples is just not a fair comparison. by prompting ai, one does not even remotely serve to fully engage their imagination in producing creative output (the dictionary definition of art). yes you could be seen to be using a tool to make art. in this instance, using that tool is an act of outsourcing your imagination to the distilled creativity of humanity. at this point the definition of tool must be reduced to I/O alone.

regarding your personal input, this is an order of magnitude less imaginative compared to tapping some keyboard keys. it's not your imagination that produced the majority of this story; it's unfair to claim any aspect of this process except your prompts. which is why i asked for the prompts. im not here to hate on your artistic expression, just as im not here to listen to the sum total of humanity's creativity that has been poked and prodded into maximising shareholder value. some people might be interested in that - frankly i doubt they would be, if they empathized with a painter or writer or producer (or had any clue how easy it is to manipulate humans). me myself, im here for your creativity and yours alone. not that of anthropic (who, like other AI companies, stole it).

by pushing out this work, theres nothing stopping you from having inadvertently acted as a conduit for a corporation to deliver its message. how do you know that you havent accidentally pushed out a work with hidden messages embedded within? do you know how good llms are at encoding and decoding hidden meaning?

FWIW, I read it before I learned that it was AI-generated, and I enjoyed it and thought it's possibly insightful.

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Who can know what the world will look like as we "transition"? I sure don't, but I'm thankful the author here has taken a stab at it. I feel like this is one of the first stories I've seen to try to imagine this post-transition world in a way that isn't so gonzo as to be unrelatable. It was so relatable (the human-ness shining all the brighter in a machine-driven world) that I cried as I finished reading. I've felt very anxious about my own future, and to see one possible future painted so vividly, with such human and emotionally focused themes, triggered quite an emotional reaction. I think the feeling was:

> If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.

Thank you for this comment, I'm so glad it made you feel a little bit better about the future, if even for a little while!

This is really the whole idea behind this project with Near Zero. I think there's a lot of anxiety out there around AI and the future, I was there for a while too. Ultimately I've ended up pretty optimistic about it all, and inspired by what the group at Protocolized is doing, found science fiction a great way to help express that.

I'm disappointed, as the Google result showed "warranty void if regenerated" in the description and I thought HN had started serving witicisms for the desciption

It’s a neat piece of writing, but not nearly dystopic enough for my taste. There will only be one farm and whoever is fixing it will be on the other side of the world.

Yawn. I'm tired of dystopian fiction. We're likely to get something that is neither dystopia nor utopia, but somewhere in between.

I think that's the point, and it's refreshing to see. My takeaway is that even if everything goes as good as it possibly could go, there will still be a need for that human touch.

Just saying that everything is going to go to shit and one or two corporations will take over everything... Maybe, but I've heard that story already.

Dystopians are too easy. The real challenge and reward are interesting utopian novels.

Did this story disappear then re-appear?

Yes, which is why some of the comments are from a day ago but the post is only a couple of hours old. We originally downranked it due to being AI-generated.

But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.

We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.

"it's boring to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this."

FTFY

Please don’t post snarky, shallow dismissals or use internet tropes on HN. I explained thought process we went through. Nothing on HN is to everyone’s taste. Plenty of people are finding this post interesting and having a good discussion about it.

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counterpoint: this assumes everyone has the same constraints. not always true