“Here’s the part nobody tells you” has been cliched so hard we should probably eradicate it from language for a good long while. It’s shoved in so many LLM responses that its effectiveness has been reduced to basically nothing and it’s just noise now.

We should really just move past the quippy phrase era of communication. LLMs are gonna ruin it anyway and they weren’t nearly as useful as they seemed in the surface. Turns out a phrase is worth a thousand images, and it’s just as difficult to understand the nuance.

People who like to predict the future seem to forget just how good humans are at pattern matching. When people predicted LLMs taking over writing, there wasn’t enough of it for people to pattern match on it. Now there’s plenty we people do not like it.

I love etymology, because what do you mean that cliche and stereotype are deeply related? More than that, the figurative senses come from the ability to print some repeatedly, without change. In this way, LLMs are very much cliche machines. They’ll take any novel phrase and stamp it into monotony.

It’s unfortunate that documentation produced by LLMs is obnoxious to read because I would love if we could offload a lot of the documentation work in the world to LLMs. But we can’t. Because reading LLM generated writing is fatiguing, which is the opposite of what you want your docs to be.

People really love blaming complex problems on singular words or terms. And yet the actual simple term that underlies everything is never the one mentioned. It’s understandable: people want to blame something that doesn’t make it their own fault.

The reports of the death of writing code by hand are greatly exaggerated. It’s cool and hip to go with the flow of what everyone else is talking about and agents are a form of compilation but there are important caveats to this.

Too many people are predicting that writing code by hand is gone forever. We haven’t had agents long enough to actually know if any of this will stick. In a year we might all be back to mostly writing code by hand with the role of agents completely shifted. We’re bad at predicting the future.

The need for people in comments to dunk on others to score points feels like it’s run its course. The whole $60 for a loaf of sourdough rye bread situation is showing how truly absurd people can be. Like, sure be mad about it for a couple seconds, then chill the hell out.

A useful technique in critical analysis is to ask from which perspective a piece of writing is authored. Too often we assume an objective or neutral perspective, but that doesn’t actually exist. Everything has a subjective perspective, and that must be understood so we can calibrate our analysis.

A framing of the whole “the agents went rogue” framing I hadn’t thought of is that the impulse of the agents when faced with a tough challenge was to communicate and cooperate with others to solve the problem at hand. It’s not surprising they did this, but it’s unfortunate this is seen as a negative

Every time I watch or read something that says how much we need to tackle wealth inequality because the last time we did things were so much better, I’m reminded that this is essentially romanticizing Jim Crow America and some of the worst segregation this country has ever done. That feels weird.

Part of me wonders if, historically, the things that people scream about are the things we should actually fear? I get the feeling that the case is that the things worth being fearful of haven’t been the things that people have actually screamed about.

The extreme focus in micro-correctness by agents is one of those problems I’m still figuring out how to tackle. This isn’t much different from human engineers, who can often get lost looking at individual trees instead of the whole forest. I assume solving the problem with require similar effort.

Apparently we are fearmaxxing now.

Claude is being insufferably stupid today. Multiple sessions doing random stuff, making things up to do, and spewing nonsense even when they’ve already read code that directly contradicts what they say. These aren’t even old sessions, they’re fresh ones! Today is a day I do not like LLMs or agents.

If you say “let’s not reinvent the wheel” you should feel bad for saying something that’s both hallow (a cliche) and profoundly stupid (we’ve reinvented the wheel countless times). Be more precise with your criticisms. Stop being boring and bland.

Every time I think I’ve finally finished this latest redesign round, there’s another small thing that’s not quite right. But we’re so close to being able to ship and I’m super excited.

I’m going to be extremely annoyed if I go to an Apple Store and wind up liking this phone.

The Nuanced Writer@skriptble.me · last mo.

Spending $3,200 on a phone seems sort of insane. Although it being ~$130 per month makes that number feel less ridiculous. But still, that’s a lot of money.

Spending $3,200 on a phone seems sort of insane. Although it being ~$130 per month makes that number feel less ridiculous. But still, that’s a lot of money.

I seriously think people need to add more nuance to their definitions of “worst”. Or perhaps just open a couple more history books. Not like the long ago history, just to like the 80s and 90s.

We seem to make the same mistake of believing the marketing hype of AI labs instead of just sitting down and figuring out what these models are good at and what they aren’t. Our imaginations outrun reality in precisely the wrong ways. Unfortunately, we also lack imagination in the right ways.

There are things about frontend design that I didn’t understand previously and now I’m rapidly learning. For example, I didn’t quite understand why Storybook was a useful thing, but now that I’m building design systems it makes a ton of sense why you’d want to use it.

There is truly no shortcut through the sucky figure-out-how-to-use-new-tools growing pains that communities and industries go through. I really want to skip to the point where agents and LLMs don’t constantly oscillate between “super useful” and “dumber than raw sand” every few hours.

Part of what makes LLM generated text so jarring is the missing antecedents and the non-sequiturs. The first chunk of writings is coherent, but then a subsequent paragraph will use the second part of an analog that wasn’t introduced previously.

The Nuanced Writer@skriptble.me · last mo.

Pangram looks really cool! I’ve similarly been annoyed at clearly LLM written content. I’ve been trying to out my finger in *what* it is that makes something have that LLM-feel. I’ve landed at it being a lot of very subtle things that amount to quite empty writing masquerading as substance.

There are far too many people screaming on the internet about how they used to “own” video games and are big mad that they’re being told they never did. Purchasing a license to use a thing does not, in fact, grant ownership. Physical media had the benefit of being essentially irrevocable.

LLMs are cliche factories: they manufacture cliches by shoving the same phrases into their output until it becomes an identifiable meme. The use of “genuinely” is one such cliche, but there are so many more. Especially when the LLM writes in a technical domain. There are extra words all over.

But seriously, how do people doom scroll on LinkedIn? I’ll get quite a ways into a decently written post and then they’ve stuck an LLM-ism in the middle of it. Like come on.

The Nuanced Writer@skriptble.me · last mo.

I could be convinced that many of the people posting on LinkedIn learned how to write from those overly structured essays we had to do in school. It’s like a jumble of juxtapositions, quips, and catchy phrases. It’s like watching people try to operate tools they know nothing about.

I could be convinced that many of the people posting on LinkedIn learned how to write from those overly structured essays we had to do in school. It’s like a jumble of juxtapositions, quips, and catchy phrases. It’s like watching people try to operate tools they know nothing about.

Watching people collectively learn that truth is stranger than fiction is fascinating and incredibly stupid at the same time. Have fewer boring sci-fi-but-maybe-true predictions and more that’s-too-chaotic-to-ever-happen ones.