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lqettoday at 11:04 AM2 repliesview on HN

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in.

There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste. I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems strangely out of character. A needlessly verbose text written by someone who was previously allergic to verbosity. An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. The work itself is always completely immune to any rational criticism, as it checks all the boxes: extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style, and for texts perfect grammar, non-offensive, seemingly objective. But, for lack of a better word, it simply lacks taste.


Replies

Octoth0rpetoday at 11:29 AM

> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago.

Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. I'm not sure how we can create incentives that optimize for finding the 'right' solution, which may be the cheapest (the bash one-liner). Perhaps a widely recognized but not overly optimized for benchmark for this class of problems?

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stavrostoday at 11:35 AM

Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.

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