alt Hacker NewsWarranty Void If Regenerated
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 and what it would take to polish it enough to share publicly.
Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.
Comments
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 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 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.
> 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]
I liked it. It has a similar feel to an Andy Weir "The martian" type of novel.
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?
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.
So, in the past, your stories were warrant-eed? But no longer?
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!
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
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.
it's crap. you all need to go outside
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.
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
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?
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
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 enjoyed this very much. But I have to wonder, was this written by Claude?
Edit: got it right!
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.
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.
this is such a beautiful essay. thank you op for posting. made my day :)
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.
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.
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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'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.