> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share.

This isn't always a great indicator.

I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

I'm sometimes asked to produce meaningless 30-page documents that nobody ever reads. I mean literally nobody, since I can see the history of who has accessed it. Me and a proof-reader, and occasionally someone will open it up to check that it exists. But nobody reads them, let alone reads them closely. Not the distant funder who added it as a line-item requirement to their grant (their job is adding line items to grants, not reading documents), nor the actual people involved in the project, who don't have time to read a meaningless document, and don't need to. It's of use to no one, it's just something that must be done because we live in a stupid world.

I've started having AI write those documents. Each one used to take me a full week to produce, now it's maybe one day, including editing. I don't feel bad about it. I'm ecstatic about it, actually; this shouldn't be part of my job, so reducing its footprint in my life is a blessing. Someday, someone will realize that such documents do not need to exist in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now, and I can't change it. I'm just glad AI exists for this kind of pointless yeoman's work.

Once, I had a very frustrating slack chat with a fellow developer. We were discussing edge cases for a new feature and the experience from my perspective was that for each of my messages, I’d get a “in case of … how about …” style reply. The topic was focused around iOS vs. Android app lifecycle. Every now and then my colleague would suggest APIs or events that simply don’t exist.

This was before vibe coding, around the days of GPT 3.5. At the time I just thought it was a challenging topic and my colleague was probably preoccupied with other things so we parked the talk.

A few weeks later, while exploring ways to use GPT for technical tasks I suddenly remembered that slack chat and realised the person had been copy pasting my messages to gpt and back. I really felt bad at that moment, like… how can you do this to someone…? It’s not bad that you try tools to find information or whatever, but not disclosing that you’re effectively replacing your agency with that of a bot is just very suboptimal and probably disrespectful.

“Any time saved by (their) AI prompting gets consumed by verification overhead, …”

This

When I receive a PR, of course it’s natural an AI is involved.

The mortal sin is the rubber stamp.

If they haven’t read their own PR, I only have so many warnings in me. And yes, it is highly visible.

I know I'm an outlier on HN, but I really don't care if AI was used to write something I'm reading. I just care whether or not the ideas are good and clear. And if we're talking about work output 99% of what people were putting out before AI wasn't particularly good. And in my genuine experience AI's output is better than things people I worked with would spend hours and days on.

I feel like more time is wasted trying to catch your coworkers using AI vs just engaging with the plan. If it's a bad plan say that and make sure your coworker is held accountable for presenting a bad plan. But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan.

Why can't the plan be judged on its merits? Rigorous verification of the idea is a good thing that should happen anyways. The main potential problem I see is transmission of privileged information to a third party.

I assume they are working at a business to make money, not a school or a writing competition.

Nowhere in the article does he explain why the use of AI is inherently problematic or why it necessitates rewriting the project plan. Work product is either good or bad, and responsibility for its quality rests with the person delivering it. The tools used to produce the work are irrelevant. In fact, for those who prioritize execution speed, the use of labor-saving tools should be encouraged wherever feasible.

This comment was generated by chatgpt (inspired by me).

If I discover you fed me AI output, directly from AI, it really makes me wonder what you are doing here. What did you add to this equation when I could have done it myself?

At least a "Generated by AI, reviewed and edited by xyz" tag would be some indicator of effort and accountability.

It may not be wrong to use AI to generate things whole cloth, but it definitely sidesteps something important and calls into question the "prompter's" contributions to the whole thing.

> If you know in your heart of hearts that you didn’t put the work in, you’re undermining the social contract between you and your reader.

There's been a lot of social contract undermining lately. Does anyone please know about something that can be done to try and revert back? Social contract of "F you. I got mine" isn't very appealing to me, but that seems to be the current approach.

Before AI, if someone submitted a well-formatted, well-structured document, we could assume they spent a lot of time on it and probably got the substance right. It's like the document is a proof-of-work that means I can probably trust the results.

Maybe we need a different document structure--something that has verification/justification built in.

I'd like to see a conclusion up front ("We should invest $x billion on a new factory in Malaysia") followed by an interrogation dialogue with all the obvious questions answered: "Why Malaysia and not Indonesia?", "Why $x and not $y billion?", etc.

At that point, maybe I don't care if the whole thing was produced by AI. As long as I have the justification in front of me, I'm happy. And this format makes it easy to see what's missing. If there's a question I would have asked that's not in the document, then it's not ready.

When it comes to LLMs, the only thing I hate more than the "I don't know, the AI wrote it" people is the "I wrote this" crowd. No you didn't, you asked someone else to write it. If you couldn't claim copyright for it in an IP court, you did not write it. Period.

>Regardless of their intent I realised something subtle had happened. Any time saved by (their) AI prompting gets consumed by verification overhead, the work just gets passed along to someone else – in this case me.

This is _exactly_ how I feel. Any time saved by precooking a "plan" (typically halfbaked ideas) with AI isn't really time saved, it is a transfer of work from the planner to whoever is going to implement the plan.

Lets steel man this:

1. If the output is solid, does it matter?

2. The author could simply have done the research, created the plan, and then gave an LLM the bullet list points of research and told it to "make this into a presentable plan". The author does the heavy work and actually does the creative work, and outsources the manual formatting to the LLM. My Wife speaks English as a second language, she much prefers telling an LLM what she is trying to say and to generate a business friendly email from this than writing it herself and letting in grammatical mistakes.

3. If I were to write a paper in my favorite text editor and then put it through pandoc to generate a word doc it would do the same thing.

"Chat, expand these 3 points into 10 pages."

Later, at someone else's desk:

"Chat, summarize these 10 pages into 3 points."

I don’t really find it better when someone ads a disclaimer. What am I supposed to do then? There’s still an expected default behavior of reading it, and if I don’t I need to confront them and say “I don’t care what you got an LLM to say, why not give me your view”. It’s inappropriate under any circumstances imo

Nowhere in here does it indicate that the generated plan was wrong or broken. I dont care if you use ai to write. I care if you write well. If the author trusted the other person, then it shouldn't matter. If the author didn't trust the other person, then they'd have to validate their output anyway. Granted the tech allows people I dont trust to generate a lot more bs, a lot faster. But i just reject and move on with my life in that case. I am no ai booster but a lot people are expressing distaste for tools when they should be expressing distaste for fools.

Plans usually start a short lists of ideas without a lot of detail. When people discuss and agree on things, then choices are decided upon. The branches of the "search tree" which are not being taken are pruned away and detail is added to the path taken.

If someone just generates an incredibly detailed plan in one go, that destroys the process. Others now are wasting time looking at details in something that may not even be a good idea if you step back.

The successive refinement flow doesn't preclude consideration of input from AI.

I recently joined a project where the manager greeted me cheerfully that my new task is fully described and specified in a technical architecture doc. The manager left shortly after and considered my onboarding complete. It took the next couple of weeks to realize that the docs were AI generated, surprisingly detailed and accurate. However they were largely irrelevant to the actual problem the client has.

I was later asked why is it taking so long to complete the task when the document had a step by step recipe. I had to explain why the AI was solving the wrong problem in the wrong place. The PMs did not understand and scheduled more meetings to solve the problem. All they knew is that tickets were not moving on the board.

I suddenly realized that nobody had any idea of what’s going on at all on a technical level. Their contribution was to fret about target dates and executive reports. It’s like a pyramid scheme of technical ignorance. The consequence is some ICs forced to do uncompensated overtime to actually make working software.

These are the unintended consequences of the AI hype that CEOs are evangelizing.

> But if you ship it and people use it, you’ve created an implicit promise: that you can maintain, debug, and extend what you’ve built. If AI assembled it and you can’t answer basic questions about how it works, you’ve misled users about what they can depend on.

Agree with the premise but this part is off. When I find a project online, I assume it will be abandoned within a year unless I see evidence of a substantive team and/or prior long-term time investments.

Similar article = https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-...

> My own take on AI etiquette is that AI output can only be relayed if it's either adopted as your own or there is explicit consent from the receiving party.

The content of the document matters too. I don't really care if someone was AI-assisted writing a project plan. As long as it's sane and clear I'm not gonna lose sleep over that. However for my performance review I definitely want my manager to put in the effort and actually tell me nuanced thoughts on my performance. I don't want AI output for that part.

Google docs Document history can also be turned off https://support.google.com/docs/answer/7378739?hl=en&co=GENI...

This will all devolve to people submitting LLM work to people who can't tell (or don't care) that it's LLM work.

I think it quickly needs to become good manners to indicate when text was written by AI rather than a person. I read that text differently and I shouldn't have to spend my time guessing.

There is knowing, and then there is knowing.

For example suppose that someone likes to work in Markdown using VSCode. To get the kind of Word document that everyone else expects, you just copy and paste into Word. AI isn't involved, but it will look exactly like AI to you.

And there are more complicated hybrids. For example my wife has a workflow where everything that she does, communications, and so on, wind up in Markdown in Obsidian. She adds information about who was at the meeting that includes basuc research into them done by an agent (company directory, title, LinkedIn, and so on - all good to know for someone working in sales). Her AI assistant then extracts out bullet points, cross references, and so on. She uses that to create summaries that she references whenever she goes back to that project. And if someone wants to know what has happened or is currently planned for that project, AI extracts that from the same repository.

There's lots of AI in this workflow. But the content and thought is mostly from her. (With facts from searches that an agent did.) The fact that she's automated a lot of her organizational scutwork to an AI doesn't make the output "AI slop".

I'm amazed by how few people appreciate the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, "If I had more time I'd write a shorter letter."

Why aren't people using LLM to shorten rather than lengthen their plans? You know what you meant so can validate whether the shorter version still hits the points you care about. Whereas if I use an LLM to shorten your email there is always a risk I've now missed your main point.

Cleaning up grammar, punctuation spelling etc is a good thing worth doing but adding padding is exclusively irritating.

I will admit to being an LLM workslopper. I don't ever send anything written by an LLM (because anyone who's seen enough LLM writing will recognize it's an LLM) without rewriting it by hand first - with exceptions for parts of READMEs - but for any other task it's pretty much 100% LLM.

I look at the output and ask it to re-re-verify its results, but at the end of the day the LLM is doing the work and I am handing that off to others.

I would likely feel betrayed in a situation like this, but _sometimes_ there may be a sentence or two, capable of being more succinctly expressed via ai. This has happened to me personally. I have written something, came to a 'tip of the tongue' moment, then had ai help me to express it.

When used right, ideas could be distilled not extrapolated into slop. -- So maybe its not ALL BAD?

I propose a new quotation system, the 3 quote marker to disclose text written or assisted by ai:

'''You are absolutely right'''

Many responses (correctly) identifying that edit history is not a reliable "tell" but this misses the broader point of the original article

I think that we should have revision control for intermediate stages - for code, documents, even paintings. So we can at least have some idea of provenance, how it's made.

Until AI is used to fake that, too.

It will probably be unpopular here, where people appear to have drawn the lines and formed unyielding positions, but...

The whole llm paranoia is devolving into hysteria. Lots of finger pointing without proof, lots of shoddy evidence put forward and nuance missing points.

My stance is this: I don't really care whether someone used an llm or wrote it themselves. My observation is that in both cases people were mostly wrong and required strict reviews and verification, with the exception of those who did Great Work.

There are still people who do Great Work, and even when they use llms the output is exceptional.

So my job hasn't changed much, I'm just reading more emojis.

If you find yourself becoming irrationally upset by something that you're encountering that's largely outside of your control, consider going to therapy and not forming a borderline obsession with purity on something that has always been a bit slippery (creative originality ).

> So it’s definitely AI. I felt betrayed and a little foolish. But why?

Because the prompter is basically gaslighting reviewers into doing work for them. They put their marks of authorship on the AI slop when they've barely looked at it at all which convinces the reviewer to look. When the comments come back, they pump the feedback into the LLM, more slop falls out and around we go again. The prompter isn't really doing work at all—the reviewers are.

There is nothing worse than this feeling, like fantastic, now i have to go read through this slop with incredible care and minutia. I may as well not read the slop and go redo all the work/thought myself, it will be easier that way.

Just a hot take, but if you ask someone to complete a rote task that AI can do, you should not be surprised when they use AI to do it.

The author does not mention whether the generated project plan actually looked good or plausible. If it is, where is the harm? Just that the manager had their feelings hurt?

Is writing with LLM assistance that different than writing with a typewriter 100+ years ago? Than using a computer and printer 30 years ago?

Each can be seen as using a tool to add false legitimacy. But ultimately they are just tools.