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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

mooreds

Comments (286)

  • gortok
    The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person.If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?
  • LPisGood
    My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading.Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name.I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed. I certainly don’t read the long-winded AI comments or the AI documentation, but perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass.
  • afr0ck
    I think the main reason many people (including me), very often, lack the motivation to read content that is likely generated by AI is the suspicion that it comes from a place of intellectual laziness. Another reason, based on personal experience, is that AI content may suffer from too much verbosity, too much jargon and over-confidence, which makes the reading experience feel fake and border-line irritating. In many cases the content may have very little to no nuance, which is ultimately a waste of time. As an anecdote, someone posted a blogpost on Linkedin on using agents to implement a driver to access PCIe devices over TCP/IP. I was intrigued because that's not an easy task for several reasons, like handling PCIe interrupts and DMA. For exmaple, how does the remote machine map the device's PCIe BARs? And when it issues I/O to the devices registers, how are these reads and writes transferred to the remote device. In the end, this is just some virtual memory. In a local machine, this is either directly mapped to the PCIe physical addresses or some IOMMU virtual address space which is then translated by the hardware upon CPU/device/VM access.After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc.Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.
  • cortesoft
    I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.
  • neilv
    > Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.).Sounds like this isn't everyone, but rather, it's people who have nothing to say, and -- even after they've "sourced ideas" -- they don't know how to reason about it, nor how to communicate it.This isn't everyone. This is people engaged in generating noise, for the sake of noise.
  • jedberg
    Every time this comes up I have to ask, how do you know it is AI? Sure, sometimes there are strong tells, like if they forget to take off the "Do you want me to change anything" at the end.But AI was trained on good writing. Good writing looks like AI. I've had to reduce my use of em dashes for example because they are an "AI tell". I used to like using the term "load bearing".And the list gets longer every day. Eventually every mark of a good writer will be an AI tell.I don't know how to resolve this. But I've been accused multiple times of copy/pasting AI when I did no such thing, and it's getting equally frustrating.
  • sega_sai
    If some text is AI written as a response to a much shorter prompt, then the prompt and/or sources used to make the text should be published instead (or at the very least together with the text).
  • CyberMacGyver
    Don’t be a meat proxy [0] is another one I like[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933
  • hatthew
    One of the ways I think about this is to treat AI as if it were another person. If I want to give information to Bob but I think Alice might do a better job of writing something, I'm not going to ask Alice and then copy-paste her response to Bob. I'd either tell Bob to ask Alice, or loop Alice into the conversation. Me being the middleman between Alice and Bob can cause several issues including delayed communication, miscommunication, and obscured provenance.Alice being AI or a real person doesn't change those factors much.
  • slybot
  • pavon
    AI—DR
  • jannyfer
  • firefoxd
    I've asked questions to people who wrote interesting articles where I didn't know it was AI generated. But then, they couldn't really answer me because most examples in the article wasn't something they experienced themselves. So basically, we were both reading the article for the first time, with made up scenarios.
  • blobbers
    (such as giant automated meeting summaries we all get after an hour long slog).
  • jumploops
    > I’m SUPER jealous that I didn’t think of this first...Not to toot my own horn, but...[0]On a more serious note, we're planning a trip with family, and my mother-in-law asked if I'd read "the planning doc" yet.It was a shared ChatGPT thread. Thankfully I read enough LLM output to skim it easily and avoid offending her (:[0]https://x.com/jumploops/status/2031936768023638069
  • ronbenton
    Anyone else have coworkers responding to your human PR review comments with AI? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, how can anyone find this socially acceptable?
  • atleastoptimal
    The problem is that in most domains we reward effort sometimes even more than results, especially in fields where results are hard to verify. A wall of text is the classic way to signal effort and delay feedback, a signal which was costly pre-AI, but now is not costly. However norms have not shifted.
  • anon
    undefined
  • wseqyrku
    If you were wondering who is responsible for this clusterfuck of a situation, it's not developers, mathematicians, or even companies. Investors with their absolute nonsense "funding rounds" are vomiting the content of their primal brains as "building the future". Turns out money can do that.
  • brunoborges
    If a coworker sends me an AI generated report to help on my task, I am more likely to ask them to just send me the prompt and model they used. Let me own the session and steer it however I want.
  • Sha1rholder
    I personally don't care whether a piece of writing was AI-generated as long as it's useful or insightful.However there's only 10% of AI-generated writing that is worth reading. If some articles convince me that there's somebody behind it contributing valuable understanding, I'm willing to overlook the telltale AI mannerisms. It's understandable that some domain experts aren't very proficient in English.That said, statistically speaking 90% AI-generated pieces are a waste of readers' time. It's a good strategy to simply skip them.I know this looks like a bot comment. It's not. It's a much older style of writing known as Chinglish. That's why as a non-native English speaker, I can totally understand why someone would want to use AI to help with their writing.
  • ramdump
    The fear I have is that I accuse of AI without being 100% certain. I've not found a good way around this except to talk to the person.
  • dkersten
    If you can’t be bothered to write it, then I can’t be bothered reading it.
  • ProCodeSoftware
    I have been feeling the same way for the past few months. I just want to say I will never read a paragraph that has signs of AI, because most of the time, the people didn't put much effort in it. I don't care if it is factually correct or not.
  • Gecko4072
    I thought this was: I summarized with AI; didn't read.
  • dbspin
    "Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.)."Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?
  • darrelld
    We have a junior research student who does this on slack.Before I think he was using AI and other tools to translate his messages since english isn't his first language. His own words, then AI translated it. Sounded kinda clunky, but I could sense the human behind the words and I gave grace since I can only imagine how hard it is to properly communicate your ideas when English isn't your first language.But now it's gotten to a point where I can tell he's not using it for just translation. I'm gonna need to chat with him.Redacted example below```Hey @PERSON_WHO_ASKED_QUESTION Both good, and the retrieval one isn't written down anywhere. In order.One corpus or four. My lean is one. Same chunks and embeddings tables, source_type column to tell them apart.Values I'd propose, flat rather than nested: paper, dataset_description, dataset_readme, dataset_contributors, dataset_records, dataset_files. Description and readme split because their units already differ, one row versus one row per paragraph. A discriminator that can't separate those isn't doing much. The existing 440 rows would need backfilling to paper.Chunk id in the same spirit: dataset doi, source type, ord. So EXAMPLE_DOI.Worth checking before any of this matters: does chunks.doi carry a foreign key to papers.doi in 0001_init.sql? If it does, a metadata chunk with a dataset doi can't go in that table at all, and separate storage stops being a choice. Ten second read, I haven't done it. Shout if you get there first.Retrieval is the one that's bigger than it looks. Search once across everything and nothing guarantees a paper chunk and a metadata chunk both land in the top k. The facts we want relate the two, and the generator can only write those if it sees both sides in the same window. So if one type systematically wins the ranking, that class of fact doesn't get worse. It becomes impossible.Which way it goes I don't know. Two mechanisms pull opposite ways. Metadata chunks are short, tens of tokens against roughly 450 for a paper chunk, so they may just lose. But we embed context header plus text, and on a short chunk the header is most of the vector. The header is the dataset name, which is also most of the query. That points the other way.Cheaper to measure than argue. Load one dataset's metadata, run a normal dataset level query, record the rank of the first chunk of each source type. Runnable as soon as any one of our four subtasks lands.After that it's one pool, per source with quotas, or one pool with a floor per source type. I'd rather not pick before there's a measurement. ```
  • montroser
    I am pro AI, and also deeply share this sentiment.I think sometimes people have a big long thread with Claude where they feel enthusiastic about the back and forth being very productive -- and then they genuinely want to share the summary of the conversation with their colleagues so that they can feel it too. It's not just typing a short prompt and copy/pasting the response.But, Claude, especially Opus is so unnecessarily flowery, and smug -- and it's so identifiably characteristic.It somehow rubs salt in the wound: "I didn't take the time to write this out in my own words, so now you get to listen to this petulant asshole mansplain it to you".If it would get to the point, and with some humility, it would be a much different proposition.
  • stevenhubertron
    Seem's reasonable and what I hold myself and my team to.
  • whstl
    There is a light at the end of the tunnel for all the minds burned out by AI slop.I already saw someone getting fired for only producing AI text as part of their entire output, after being unable to explain what they “wrote” in multiple situations.And recently my company enacted a mandate that text made for humans should not be AI generated.Sooner or later every company will start realizing that this is just people too lazy to actually work and coasting on a paycheck, at the expense of every other worker.
  • friarpuck
    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".
  • redrix
    If you didn’t take the time to write it, why should anyone take the time to read it?
  • pixelesque
    Too sloppy, didn't read.
  • uygar
    I'm not particularly interested in who wrote the first draft. What matters is whether someone took responsibility for the final version.
  • therepanic
    You don't have to preface every criticism by saying you're a huge AI proponent. EVERYONE overdoes this.
  • Alien1Being
    AI generated text should be treated as spam and automatically filtered out.
  • foobar1962
    "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
  • krona
    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)
  • techpression
    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.
  • frogperson
    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.
  • purplethreads
    Impossible to know unless you did read.TL;DR works because I can see the length at a glanceAnd 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.
  • hankbond
    Whenever I see a massive project README all I can think is if you didn't write it, ME won't READ it.
  • boogieknite
    > 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 themselvesthis 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
  • VCFundedGenYer
    The irony of making such a bold progressive statement while still being on X and not Mastodon....
  • chasing
    So what you're saying is: You no longer visit LinkedIn.
  • runjake
    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.
  • thm
    Eternal September already?
  • classictraffic
    This blog post also feels AI written (I can tell it’s human written, just sloppy)
  • quantum_state
    Very good shorthand
  • jr3592
    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..."
  • Razengan
    By the way, just want to say, AI can be good for some bedtime stories while trying to fall asleep lolAfter you've exhausted your favorite audiobooks, I meanLike, 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.
  • kmeisthax
    > 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.
  • themgt
    But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude outputClaude, post that wall of output to Slack yourself. Make no mistakes.
  • gnarlouse
    YO (AIDR)IAN!
  • river_otter
    It's now faster to write than to read. A first in human history
  • elendilm
    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.
  • layer8
    Not to be confused with Aider.
  • Terr_
    > 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.)
  • ygjb
    [dead]
  • pranav_tech26
    [dead]
  • matheusmoreira
    Yet another rant about AI, didn't read.
  • arm32
    This is HW;DR: human-written, did read
  • ademup
    I'll probably be downvoted to the bottom of the ocean, but I feel this needs to be said:- Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing? And how would you know if the /content/ is worthwhile, unless you read it...- The ability to "detect AI" is imperfect at best. 90% AI written? 5%? How would you know, unless you read it....- If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"?- If you are wrong, and you announce it to the world, how would it feel to someone who spent a lot of time and energy writing?
  • supermatt
    I submit pretty much the opposite of this, but it didn't gain any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49332291
  • a2ff6eeb0
    Eventually, AI will be a far better writer than a human is, and then nobody will want to read the human generated subpar writing.AI writing is rapidly improving. Human writing, on average not so much.
  • eddieroger
    >However, I have a new policy.>If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it...>...then I’m not going to bother reading it.Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but we've had copywriters and editors for generations now. Not reading something because AI did the post-writing work feels kinda weak. Skip stuff started from AI, fine, but this is just because it's AI, not because the author didn't do the task. And I do get the point is that if an AI did /most/ of the work, ok to that, too, but not post-write processing alone.
  • rfgplk
    It's an ego issue for most people. For one, part of it comes from genuine intimidation or fear, the notion that a machine can be smarter than you, or at least produce answers that are more knowledgeable than you could. But I think the more striking issue is what LLMs do to the perceived value of expertise. Especially in engineering there's this weird pecking order hierarchy, where someone should be listened to just "because they have the YOE/Experience/Other meaningless metrics" under their belt. Now all of a sudden, someone with relatively little (or no) background in a given subject is capable of just entering a prompt and within seconds obtaining an answer that is expert or near expert level. (You can see the results of this with engineers just hopping between different fields with ease)The implication is that expertise is being devalued in real time, and in a sense it really is, but I think that most people really do need to face the reality of their emotions and where it comes from. For myself personally, I have no qualms about reading or even engaging with AI content, as long as the content itself is of quality and truthful.