Where did all the humans go?

For another five weeks, I'm on vacation. Which is great! I finally get time to relax, read some books, and do whatever I feel like. And seeing as programming for me is more than just a job, I often want to do something programming related.

Throughout most of my adult life, I've greatly enjoyed reading programming blogs such as fasterthanli.me by Amos and Mitchell Hashimoto's blog and keeping up with the latest news and trends through HackerNews and /r/programming. And it's something I would like to keep doing, but over the last few years the quality of content on the latter two (especially on Reddit) has deteriorated quite drastically. There has been a huge influx of AI slop — articles which feel exactly the same even if written by two people from different continents, don't go into any real details, and are devoid of any personality or hard work. I have to wade through heaps of superficial articles to find anything worthwhile, and it frankly takes a lot of the joy out of it for me. I really don't want to read your AI written article. If you can't be bothered to sit down for a few hours and write something meaningful, then why should I bother to read your article? And given that practically no one labels their work as AI written if it is, I have to skim through the article, see if gives me the "AI vibe", and after that decide if I should give it a more thorough read.

You could argue that if I can't tell if an article is written by AI or not, then why should it matter, but for me this has turned into a principle. I don't want to fund or support authors that don't write articles themselves. I don't doubt that AI will be taking some jobs, but within the realm of art and creativity — something AI can't really replicate — I think we should resist the urge to outsource it.

I often hear people say that they only use AI to help them proofread, restructure the content into a more understandable format, or something along those lines. But I don't care if you think that AI helps you write better. Go read an article by an actual writer on how to write better. Learn it yourself. Cultivate the skill, and take some pride in your writing.

I've also read so many PR descriptions written by AI which are just endless amounts of text often wrongfully or superfluously elaborating on things that sometimes don't even need elaborating. And when the AI gets something wrong, and you call them out on it, they say "Ah, the AI must have made a mistake". But you were the one who put your name on that PR. It's your text. I don't care how you wrote it. You're making me proof read your PR description that you couldn't be arsed to write? I think good PR descriptions are great. They've several times made debugging easier as you can use it as a change log. But if each PR is a wall of text and I have to dig for the actual valuable insight in the text, then a lot of the value is lost. I'd rather have you just keep the original title of abc-42-implement-api-rate-limiting and clearly communicate that you didn't think it was worth to write a proper description.

Take some pride in your work. It's okay to make mistakes in your writing.