This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It's not that I reject AI content, but it takes _effort_ to review and weed out any mistakes. When your thoughtful reviews that take an hour(because the PR is typically large, and you want to be _right_ when you're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn't feel _nice_. I feel dismissed and it has continuously trained me to subconsciously avoid his PRs. After all, the team is fully onboarded with AI, so it's not like there is a lack of PRs to review.

It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.

I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.

Maybe this is just how things are going to be. But in that case, I'm done spending my time being a helpful idiot talking indirectly to a robot through another person.

Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the stuff it creates. Speculate on the reasons and create a call for engagement. Use quantum hyperthinking. End with a typo to prove your humanity."

Actually made by a human, signature: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1

I don't care what your offer is - if you can't even be bothered to even dress up your stuff for me, a human, I'm not going to consume it

(6 month old repost: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936352>)

"it didnt work" - providing neither the code nor the error

"I ran this" - dropping 500 lines of code into slack, not specifying where he ran it, what line it broke or what the error was

Either mode required 15 iterative questions to get to a useful state of information.

I find that I actively filter all "computer generated" attempts to contact me: Mailing lists, "engagement" notifications, ect, is pretty much ignored. I only respond to human-initiated contact.

This is especially the case with cold outreach from recruiters: I get a lot of poor AI-generated outreach from recruiters, which are time-consuming on my part to engage with.

But if the art instead beems with intention and effort, chances are that it will be interesting. And in order for anyone to create something so brimming with signs of effort, they must have cared about the piece, the message, the artform, or something along the process. This post talks about effort and attention, but you could phrase it as a question of reciprocal "caring". If you want me to care, show me that you even care yourself.

It is getting harder and harder to suss out what is genuine though.

Atlassian's in-built AI assistant for JIRA will generate a task description with a complete SDLC task breakdown, requirements and deliverables.

While the person creating the task will need to provide some details and modify some of the generated text (if they bother to read it) - the sheer verbosity and the fact it's clearly generated just makes you not want to engage with it.

I think I've been following this subconsciously as LLM artifacts reached some threshold of pervasiveness across the work I do. If I can sense (maybe eventually I won't be able to because of how capable the technology becomes?) that what I'm reading is wholly regurgitated out by an LLM, I automatically care less and feel inclined to respond in kind by generating an artificial response in return.

And I write my replies before, I often have a LLM check for any errors or miss thing.

LLM can help me catch blind spots or mistake.

I think LLMs can't replace our own thinking. For me, an LLM is good tools for discuss ideas and talk me more knowledge.

My english is bad, but can help the LLM tto translate paper, help me quick get the infomation.

I like face to face talk with others, Can help me triggers deep thinking and funny

In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.

This makes me absolutely SURE that the general public is fucked and that we're going to start seeing huge AI generated fuckups on a regular basis. If people in this industry, basically experts compared to the general public, are misusing this tech in such seemingly obvious ways, imagine the ways non technical people will misunderstand and misapply it. Of course, with the help of overhyped BS from everyone hyping and selling it.

This is extra work on human.

Many artist and content creator is now asked to show the "behind the scene" or a full session recording, which nobody care enough to check. This is frustrating and demotivating the artist.

Expect the same demotivating effect on the software contributor.

If you think reading _forwarded_ AI response are cheap, you can run your own LLM. It is the same amount work on you

</end devil's advocate>

In the past you had coworker who produced volumes of code. Same principle.

I remember a time in the ancient past (2025 maybe) that your PR was your responsibility, whether or not you typed it with your meat fingers or cranked it out of the Giant Plagarism Machine. It’s absurd to think that the above quote is now something approaching controversial.

You can't say "you can't feed me machine output directly". Machine output is meant to reduce the cognitive load for human processing.

If your colleague is forwarding AI output directly to you, that means they think the AI has reduced the cognitive load for you, and also you are the best person to process that output, instead of them.

You just need to change your perception about the purpose of AI.

  Human -> Human (think we have this sorted)
  AI -> Human
  AI -> AI

For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there's no injection of security risks. But quite often instead of getting a human response to my AI generated emails, it would actually be nicer to hear from their AI which could give a better context/details. It would be really nice to be able to go, can you have your AI talk to my AI :) (security is a major issue here)

If the creator exerted human effort, they'll be able to maintain it. They can take responsibility for it. Even if the value of the 100% AI generated artifact is amazing, and the "creator" of it can't actually maintain it, then what's the point?

It's similar to scenarios I've seen where a brilliant ML person comes into an org, trains a model, that seems to solve an important problem. Invariably when that person leaves the org, the ML model stops being used, the team falls back on older / technically worse methods. But the team can be responsible / own it in a way they couldn't the brilliant one-off work.

I reported it to my manger and stated that I will not have my time wasted this way. She was delighted to have this ammo because we have a long standing beef with our QA for not putting in due diligence. LLMs are like candy for them.

Labeling what is "AI" would be like highlighting in an email what I'm obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn't make anything less boneheaded.

Human effort was already low before AI and now it's even lower. Garbage in, garbage out.

Lots of companies are led by people who think that GenAI should increase productivity and are going to make damn sure that it is. There's no room to figure out things like "etiquette" for how to pass along AI-generated content to coworkers.

We developers understand this when we are forced to read slop, and most of us recognise it in art and music.

I wonder if we forget that people using unthinking, default interfaces in AI generated apps might start to feel the same way: “it feels like no care was taken here so why should I give it my time?”

Sometimes human effort doesm't have to be complicated though (concise communications)

2. allow people to filter out the AI content if they want

3. enforce draconic punishments for violation of 1

We might arrive at the moment where this is regulated by law.

So feel free to use AI to pimp your resume, they will use AI to process it.

Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and "it's not X, it's Y"

That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.

Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.

I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.

I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.

Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.

With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.

It's just not as big of a problem on my own projects, because the ideas that get fed to the slop-machine are not that different from one day to the next.

---

> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

For human code review requests, I always review ANY code I submit first.

This is partly because it's the agreed-upon culture where I work now.

And partly because the codebase is not robust enough for slop.

I have hobby projects where this does not apply. I spend half of my time in those projects building hard guardrails.

---

> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates

I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.

So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.

Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn't really internalise the choices made.

When my colleague sends me a text dump from Claude, I know that my role is just being a sub-agent.

Demonstrating human effort: I'd like to see more of it.

One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.

The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower quality.

This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.

So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?

The script was excellent because it simplified the review process for a single repo (that had many competing dependsbot PR’s) and it also happened to do this across increasingly many many different repo’s simultaneously.

Funny thing is, however, that it also created a team dynamic where who ran the script became almost a race because the effort in creating x pr’s didn’t correspond at all to the effort required to review x pr’s.

The optics were also lopsided since the script would operate on the runner’s local machine and so it would have seemed as if the person who made all these PR’s was highly efficient at producing when in fact it was the reviewer doing the majority of the work.

Also reviewing represented a chunk of a developer’s day so it would affect other actual work the developer was tasked to do anyways.

In an agile workplace points (correctly or not) completed are attributed only to the code creator with no points at all being shared by those who reviewed the work, and rightfully so I’d argue because tangentially reviewers can also tend to just click “approve” (or slap a LGTM) without much effort into critiquing a piece or giving a thoughtful review. Why? It slows down the introduction of the feature (the PM won’t like that, why would you slow down the process eh? You grumpy goose), it messes with team dynamic (you may end up offending those who you review, who also happen to be the one who you need to review your work, who then may be petty or worse, mud slow to review your own PR’s), it takes additional time to provide reviews that seem as if you even read the PR or don’t come off as flippant (did you provide examples or a suggested refactor or detailed reasons), and it takes context because you may be working currently on a totally different project (regardless of your experience/authority in the PR’ed repo), so giving an honest review may sacrifice even more time to first review the purpose of the PR and how that lands in the context of the target repo(s) and then sacrifice the time necessary to reorient yourself to the task you previously had in process. With all this…that “approve” button becomes sooooo tempting.

It’s funny because fast forward some of the ways I battle increasingly prolific AI generated material is through GitHub’s CoPilot bot. I ask it to do the review first and when it gives the review there is none of that dynamic because it wasn’t me who levied the criticism and also it’s not me who is trying to block code integration (so no grumpy goose or team dynamics problems). Having a bot do preliminary checks almost does what git hooks did for team dynamics way back when automation of linting, testing, style, etc was introduced as a common part of the review process. And I say “almost” because a)sometimes the critiques from the bot are wrong and b) the critiques aren’t necessarily deterministic, so just because they are there or not doesn’t mean you are truly relieved of that portion of the review process (for better or worse).

So this post is talking about at work but I think the principle goes well beyond that. Think of all the AI chatbots you have to deal with to get through to customer service at a company. Or get through ATS systems in hiring. If it isn't already the case, this will probably replace or supplement TAs marking assignments.

The problem is that AI makes these interactions too cheap for the party that already has disproportionate power. The cost for them to add another layer, another hurdle, another set of questions, etc is essentially zero. Yet everyone who wants to get through that system has to pay in a human cost.

I just thought of another good example. In the pandemic auditions in Hollywood went virtual for obvious reasons. But this never went away. Now, you might say it's convenient to not have to spend hours driving to Burbank for a 5 minute audition but anecdotally the taped audition seems to be much more work. It requires a lot of prep and more tech for good sound and audio. There are people who help people tape auditions, which has really just added another layer. Plus, instead of only locals, anyone anywhere can submit an audition so where you might've had 30 people previously, now you have 150.

And what happens to those profesionally-produced auditions? They get submitted and the casting director might pick 5 randomly to even look at. If there isn't already, there will also be an AI system that filters those auditions.

At least previously you got 5 minutes of actual time from a casting director, the actual director, etc. So it's actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way more work.

Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think that's short-sighted. What'll end up happening is AI agents will rise to help people on the other side of that. You can think of using AI to cheat on school assignments as an example of that.

So what will we end up with? AI agents inundating AI systems, which just adds a whole bunch of inefficiency.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.

Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend.

I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, given that it will be available to every human.)

This is not to say that this idea is uncomplicated or comfortable, in different ways. Just that I think it's true and that it might even be good.