alt Hacker NewsAI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
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I'm not particularly interested in who wrote the first draft. What matters is whether someone took responsibility for the final version.
Engagement Bait; Didnt Read.
I dunno, not a huge fan of TL;DR (even though it definitely has its place for long-winded walls of text) -- I feel like TL;DR is a cause or a symptom or both of our dwindling attention spans. I think this inability to read anything longer than a tweet, and the resulting loss of nuance, has been pretty bad for discourse, online or off.
AI-writing is definitely very annoying to read, but I don't know if it's ideal to start dismissing interesting content before we even get to its substance just because we don't like its form.
You don't have to preface every criticism by saying you're a huge AI proponent. EVERYONE overdoes this.
The problem is merely determining to "AI; DR" itself is not free. Reading an article takes effort, effort that one hopes will result in something intellectually stimulating. By the time you sample enough of the content to make the determination that the article is AI, you've already invested effort, and now found out the rug has been pulled.
Sure, before, there was always the possibility that the article wouldn't deliver. Sturgeon's Law. But now it's like 10× more, and the amount of slop out there means its even harder to find that (human-written) gem amongst all the chaff. This last month especially, I've started to wonder "what even is the point of HN?" as more and more of the frontpage ends up dominated by slop. The thing that made HN worth it in the beginning is that it had a high gem:chaff ratio — at least compared to other corners of the Internet at the time I joined.
What I dislike is people who say they don’t know something when it’s easy to just Google it, with Gemini looking up fairly trivial factoids and comparisons is especially easy now. I know this was a stronger meme a few years ago, “just Google it dammit!” But now it’s even more so. People who don’t know these things at this point just don’t want to know, and they still get offended when someone throws an AI answer at them, not understanding that they already offended other people first by being willfully ignorant.
A similar metaphor (I think I came up with but can't remember) is the slop sandwich. You can deliver slop to me but only when wrapped in a thick layer of human intervention (which usually also means removing 50% of the slop)
(such as giant automated meeting summaries we all get after an hour long slog).
If you can’t be bothered to write it, then I can’t be bothered reading it.
If you didn’t take the time to write it, why should anyone take the time to read it?
Fight fire w fire. Have AI read it and decide what to do w it.
that's fine. doesn't absolve you from responsibilities of recipientship - as you'll inevitably find out (if you haven't already).
AI generated text should be treated as spam and automatically filtered out.
Seem's reasonable and what I hold myself and my team to.
Overall, I agree. My only problem with the idea is that I'm seeing more and more people just use "AI;DR" to deride an opinion that they don't agree with. It's becoming the new "paid shill".
This hurts particularly much when it comes to software changelogs/release notes, most recently for me was the solidjs 2 beta, reading the announcement post was painful, even the headers are LLM:isms.
I suspect the free market of information content will ultimately sort this all out. I feel similarly about AI art, but to get to that point I had to go to my city's art museum and experience artwork in person. There's just no comparison between being in the same room with a Michelangelo sculpture and peering at a Stable Diffusion/Midjourney/Whatever image on one's screen, there just isn't. What AI can do though is create endless content and too many are content with that, see linkedin.
TLDR: Content != Art
NP;DR
(Newsletter popup,. Didn't read)
I guess I'm in the minority. I don't mind an AI response if it's informative, concise and well-crafted.
The problem is that those kinds of responses are rare in the tech world. But when you have someone competent at the helm, it's much better than reading human slop.
> But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output, then I’m afraid I received a different message than you intended.
i have what ill call a "condition" where i fear assuming someone did something stupid is insulting. i try not to patronize people because i also assume that would be insulting. this leads to issues where sometimes people really want to be lead to water rather than make an implied connection themselves
this is a roundabout way of saying, is there a genuinely polite way to tell colleagues posting ai copypasta makes them seem ignorant? i dont think ai:dr is workplace appropriate. id like to tell people gently and avoid patronizing if possible
Impossible to know unless you did read.
TL;DR works because I can see the length at a glance
And you cannot tell all AI. Only mainstream crap like ChatGPT and Gemini which is full of cached tropes and boilerplate formats so it all sounds the same.
My custom invoicing software automates notes based on years of my previous notes and tasks I did - looks nothing like AI.
Use a real library and local model, mess with settings, there is a lot more to this than the mainstream consumer apps.
So what you're saying is: You no longer visit LinkedIn.
The irony of making such a bold progressive statement while still being on X and not Mastodon....
But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output
Claude, post that wall of output to Slack yourself. Make no mistakes.
This blog post also feels AI written (I can tell it’s human written, just sloppy)
I love the notion, but I'm too conflict-averse to assert it.
Really hate it when I send a tricky spec out for review and people respond a couple minutes later with a Claude summary. Way to add value bro.
Very good shorthand
I don't think AI is ever fully going away, but I can't wait for the bubble to pop and customers are forced to pay the actual cost of tokens. i think that's the only way we see a meaningful reduction in slop.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
The irony here is that his very own post reads (to me) as AI slop. Take this line:
> I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Why? Because there is growing grumbling among everyone about AI writing. And it’s not just others; it’s me!
Classic AI "its not just, its..."
By the way, just want to say, AI can be good for some bedtime stories while trying to fall asleep lol
After you've exhausted your favorite audiobooks, I mean
Like, I love The Wind in the Willows, but I wish the part where Toad and the gang go on the road in the cart lasted for longer. I asked ChatGPT to invent some fill-in chapters matching the same style and speak it out loud, and it kinda did OK actually.
> Yes, there are certain situations in which we should expect 100% AI-generated copy. Customer support would be a perfect example. We’re not looking for artisanal “did you make sure to reset your phone” style dialogue.
No, no, no, no - the whole point of customer support is that I am having a problem that requires attention from a representative of the business I am dealing with. Businesses really don't like doing this; they call it a cost center to have to talk to their own customers, so they staff their call centers with increasingly useless script-readers designed specifically to shield the people with knowledge of the matter you're facing against customers like you. This is a great solution for dealing with technically illiterate people who don't do basic troubleshooting and terrible for literally anyone else who actually tries to be a good customer.
The new modern workflow is to take a succinct idea and expand it into pages and pages of slop using AI. Nobody reads this slop, they ask another AI to summarize it back down to the original succinct core.
Whenever I see a massive project README all I can think is if you didn't write it, ME won't READ it.
It's now faster to write than to read. A first in human history
YO (AIDR)IAN!
> TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) was the solution for social media.
> AI;DR (AI; didn’t read) is the solution for AI slop.
Maybe I'm the odd one out here and didn't plumb the worse-depths of social media, but I feel I need to defend good old TLDR as a slightly different, and less-hostile animal.
It can be a moral condemnation of the poster, where they're disrespecting everyone else's time by posting something big and vague... But it usually isn't. At least half the time TLDR is someone providing a summary because they think it'd be useful (even of it's sometimes a hostile interpretation.)
Not to be confused with Aider.
Another use of this might be labeling yourself of the stuff you just pasted from your AI without reading so that the readers are aware where did the text come from.
Not the first time this has been used, despite what author wants to claim, not the first time any of this has been said or commented about on HN
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ai%3Bdr
This piece is still slop, human or ai created
fwiw, I'm partial to ns;nt (https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/), but it is different in nuance
Its a bit lame in 2026, to attack the messenger instead of the content of the message.
Its awfully similiar to bitching about reading mails on a computer and attacking the sender.
The virtue signaling is beyond me. I dont care about AI;DR or TL;DR.
Give me good content. And I will read it.
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Too sloppy, didn't read.