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Theme Radar

nemomarx 2026-02-19 18:17 UTC link

I've seen a few people use ai to rewrite things, and the change from their writing style to a more "polished" generic LLM style feels very strange. A great averaging and evening out of future writing seems like a bad outcome to me.

tptacek 2026-02-19 18:18 UTC link

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work.

AI for actual prose writing, no question. Don't let a single word an LLM generates land in your document; even if you like it, kill it.

lasgawe 2026-02-19 18:21 UTC link

The more interesting question is whether AI use causes the shallowness, or whether shallow people simply reach for AI more readily because deep engagement was never their thing to begin with.

mym1990 2026-02-19 18:22 UTC link

Most ideas people have are not original, I have epiphanies multiple times a day, the chance that they are something no one has come up with before are basically 0. They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it. There is a huge case for having good taste to drive the LLMs toward a good result, and original voice is quite valuable, but I would say most people don't hit those 2 things in a meaningful way(with or without LLMs).

taude 2026-02-19 18:22 UTC link

AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. It'll also make people who write better than average, worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use wisely.

EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. Don't be lazy, just because you're leaning on LLMs.

aeturnum 2026-02-19 18:24 UTC link

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak) but it's inelegant and boring. I do think AI is great at allowing you not to write the dumb boiler plate we all could crank out if we needed to but don't want to. It just won't help you do the innovative thing because it is not innovative itself.

JohnMakin 2026-02-19 18:25 UTC link

> The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had

Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it.

glitchc 2026-02-19 18:25 UTC link

It used to be that all bad writing was uniquely bad, in that a clear line could be drawn from the work to the author. Similarly, good writing has a unique style that typically identifies the author within a few lines of prose.

Now all bad writing will look like something generated by an LLM, grammatically correct (hopefully!) but very generic, lacking all punch and personality.

The silver lining is that good authors could also use LLMs to hide their identity while making controversial opinions. In an internet that's increasingly deanonymized, a potentially new privacy enhancing technique for public discourse is a welcome addition.

TheDong 2026-02-19 18:26 UTC link

We don't know if the causality flows that way. It could be that AI makes you boring, but it could also be that boring people were too lazy to make blogs and Show HNs and such before, and AI simply lets a new cohort of people produce boring content more lazily.

daxfohl 2026-02-19 18:28 UTC link

And the irony is it tries to make you feel like a genius while you're using it. No matter how dull your idea is, it's "absolutely the right next thing to be doing!"

iambateman 2026-02-19 18:28 UTC link

We are going to have to find new ways to correct for low-effort work.

I have a report that I made with AI on how customers leave our firm…The first pass looked great but was basically nonsense. After eight hours of iteration, the resulting report is better than I could’ve made on my own, by a lot. But it got there because I brought a lot of emotional energy to the AI party.

As workers, we need to develop instincts for “plausible but incomplete” and as managers we need to find filters that get rid of the low-effort crap.

jcalvinowens 2026-02-19 18:29 UTC link

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time.

The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

josefresco 2026-02-19 18:32 UTC link

While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.

discreteevent 2026-02-19 18:36 UTC link

> Original ideas are the result of the very work you’re offloading on LLMs. Having humans in the loop doesn’t make the AI think more like people, it makes the human thought more like AI output.

There was also a comment [1] here recently that "I think people get the sense that 'getting better at prompting' is purely a one-way issue of training the robot to give better outputs. But you are also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!"

Both of them reminded me of Picasso saying in 1968 that " Computers are useless. They can only give you answers,"

Of course computers are useful. But he meant that they have are useless for a creative. That's still true.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059206

fredliu 2026-02-19 18:47 UTC link

We are in this transition period where we'll see a lot of these, because of the effort of creating "something impressive" is dramatically reduced. But once it stabilizes (which I think is already starting to happen, and this post is an example), and people are "trained" to recognize the real effort, even with AI help, behind creating something, the value of that final work will shine through. In the end, anything that is valuable is measured by the human effort needed to create it.

BiraIgnacio 2026-02-19 18:53 UTC link

One of the down sides of Vibe-Coded-Everything, that I am seeing, is reinforcing the "just make it look good" culture. Just create the feature that the user wants and move on. It doesn't matter if next time you need to fix a typo on that feature it will cost 10x as much as it should.

That has always been a problem in software shops. Now it might be even more frequent because of LLMs' ubiquity.

Maybe that's how it should be, maybe not. I don't really know. I was once told by people in the video game industry that games were usually buggy because they were short lived. Not sure if I truly buy that but if anything vibe coded becomes throw away, I wouldn't be surprised.

serf 2026-02-19 19:02 UTC link

AI doesn't make people boring, boring people use AI to make projects they otherwise never would have.

Non-boring people are using AI to make things that are ... not boring.

It's a tool.

Other things we wouldn't say because they're ridiculous at face value:

"Cars make you run over people." "Buzzsaws make you cut your fingers off." "Propane torches make you explode."

An exercise left to the reader : is a non-participant in Show HN less boring than a participant with a vibe coded project?

overgard 2026-02-19 19:05 UTC link

Totally agree with this. Smart creators know that inspiration comes from doing the work, not the other way around. IE, you don't wait for inspiration and then go do the work, you start doing the work and eventually you become inspired. You rarely just "have a great idea", it comes from immersing yourself in a problem, being surrounded with constraints, and finding a way to solve it. AI completely short circuits that process. Constraints are a huge part of creativity, and removing them doesn't mean you become some unstoppable creative force, it probably just means you run out of ideas or your ideas kind of suck.

kouru225 2026-02-19 19:23 UTC link

This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level.

Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme example, but the more you learn about art the more you notice just how much art works via unintentional processes like this. This is why the Trickster Gods, Hermes for example, are both the Gods of art (lyre, communication, storytelling) and the Gods of randomness/fortune.

We used to assume that we could trust the creative to make their own decisions about how much randomness/automation was needed. The quality of the result was proof of the value of a process: when Max Ernst used frottage (rubbing paper over textured surfaces) to create interesting surrealist art, we retroactively re-evaluated frottage as a tool with artistic value, despite its randomness/unintentionality.

But now we’re in a time where people are doing the exact opposite: they find a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devalue it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic. Coincidentally, these same people think the most “artistic” process is the most intentional one. They’re rejecting any element of creativity that’s systemic, and therefore rejecting any element of creativity that has a complexity that rivals nature (nature being the most systemic and unintentional art.)

The end result is that the creative has to hide their process. They lie about how they make their art, and gatekeep the most valuable secrets. Their audiences become prey for creative predators. They idolize the art because they see it as something they can’t make, but the truth is there’s always a method by which the creative is cheating. It’s accessible to everyone.

zinodaur 2026-02-19 19:28 UTC link

Using AI to write your code doesn't mean you have to let your code suck, or not think about the problem domain.

I review all the code Claude writes and I don't accept it unless I'm happy with it. My coworkers review it too, so there is real social pressure to make sure it doesn't suck. I still make all the important decisions (IO, consistency, style) - the difference is I can try it out 5 different ways and pick whichever one I like best, rather than spending hours on my first thought, realizing I should have done it differently once I can see the finished product, but shipping it anyways because the tickets must flow.

The vibe coding stuff still seems pretty niche to me though - AI is still too dumb to vibe code anything that has consequences, unless you can cheat with a massive externally defined test suite, or an oracle you know is correct