Has AI become inefficient? And how can we use it better and effectively (for both parties)?
I’m increasingly noticing a trend: people use AI for (almost everything), especially for writing texts. – it is nothing new, but it started to be annoying (?)
The problem is that AI often:
– fully or largely replicates existing text without adding anything new
– adds completely pointless things, like a two-line comment followed by “✨✨✨✨🚀”
– writes extremely long comments that no one will actually read
The last point might be the most problematic, because:
it either wastes the reader’s time
or the reader simply ignores it, since they won’t search through 30 lines to find a point that could’ve been said in 2 sentences
How do you use AI in a way that the other side still perceives the output as efficient?
[My advice: keep it to a maximum of 4 sentences. Anything more just increases the chance that the other person will start to hate you.] 😃
Replies
I think it’s great as a collaboration tool, but I often see people blindly copy exactly the output it produces. That’s the point where I get turned off. I even once had a job candidate paste in their comments to a coding challenge and at the bottom was the famous appendage “If you’d like I can give you a few more options to choose from…”.
If you are going to use the tools, do it in a way that boosts your productivity, not replaces it. That’s my feeling on the matter. I like your 4 sentence max rule of thumb. And for goodness sake, at least read the output yourself to screen it!
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@bradh11 🤣 This made me audibly wheeze. I remember that I polished grammar in one email and almost sent it with that appendage too. But only almost :D
vibecoder.date
At this point I use AI as little as possible for any writing.
My creative writing and personal non fiction writing is fully air-gapped from AI.
For vibecoder blog articles I have the AI place my words verbatim, send them "like this in between quotes."
I then use the chat interface to edit, and give explicit instructions to only fix typos and to check in with me about grammar. Sometimes I bend the rules a lil. For effect.
After that, because of the meme nature of the site, I have the AI add headers, em dashes, and let it pick what to make bold to give that text an LLM sheen. Why? Because it's hilarious to me.
For emails, tweets, texts, etc. I'd rather write by hand. I don't even have predictive text on my phone.
The only reason I use Opencode when writing the blog articles instead of a document interface is because of the illusion of talking to someone. It makes things faster. Writing feels like a lonely endeavor.
@build_with_aj lol - hello person in the mirror. This is how I feel about a lot of my interactions. I'll frequently write in .md files so I can interact with them in Codex or Gemini CLI. Though the primary reason I like Codex is because chat-gpt feels more like terse-gpt in codex, just the perfect amount of autistic for my liking. Makes a surprisingly good writing critic too.
vibecoder.date
@nikhilshahane
I get that. I use the term HMIX (Human - Model Interaction experience) as a logical evolution of UX and I think it's important to filter models for compatibility as much as we do for capability.
Models feeling 'autistic' is hella comfy. I also ahve a strategy of invitations over directives. It helps relieve the baked in people pleasing behavior some models have. Cough Anthropic Cough.
I will give 5.2 codex a shot in opencode
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@build_with_aj Have you heard about Ellipsus? They are crafting tool for writing: https://ellipsus.com/ and are agains using AI in creative writing :)
vibecoder.date
@busmark_w_nika Oh I know them! Great product ngl, My brain is just not wired for that level of features.
I write either in neovim or in proton docs with a dark mode extension lol
I might give it a proper shot but idk if it is for me.
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@build_with_aj I didn't know about neovim, so gonna google it, tank you! :D
Since ChatGPT became a trend, I've been trying to find the best way to take advantage of AI, and I've concluded that I prefer writing texts myself lol
I tried to give it as many different prompts and inputs as I could, from the most generic to the most detailed ones, and still, didn't get the results I wanted.
That's exactly how you say @busmark_w_nika: AI just largely replicates existing text.
So, personally, I craft the text myself first and then use AI to check for typos, consistency, grammar, and similar stuff.
At this point, I manage to understand pretty well when a text is AI-generated and honestly, I can't stand it anymore, especially on LinkedIn, when 80% of posts are written with AI, so when you scroll, you just see a list of incredibly similar posts. That's becoming really annoying!
minimalist phone: creating folders
@pamela_arienti True true, and it also uses the same words like "intriguing" and similar :D Every post looks the same. I am fed up with those generic phrases. And it is disrespectful when users make up text (esp. comments) with AI and do not bother with reading the convo.
@busmark_w_nika the most annoying phrase structure of all: It's not [whatever you want to say]; it's [whatever you want to say]. I just see it everywhere now ahah
I no longer use AI to write for me. Summaries for research with citations that I can go after and code - where deterministic tests work well.
I find most writing output is very predictable and without soul. It's great for stuff I don't care about, but anything that I'd want to put out (like this reply here) has no input from AI at all.
To be fair, I've also been writing much less than I did earlier. I guess I'll probably use it to help me with bits and bobs as I get into writing wordier stuff in the future.
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@nikhilshahane I think that you made a good decision to rely on your own writings :) Not many people do that. :)
Termsy
I was super impressed when AI first launched, I was amazed that it could write so well.
But over time, either my standards went up or the models became worse at writing.
Most times I genuinely feel it doesn't "get" what I am trying to say.
But, this is how I write now:
Write the first incomplete draft myself
Prompt AI to draft another version. Check if there's anything usable and copy those lines into my draft.
Copy my draft and ask AI to improve the writing. Most times only 10% of what AI has done would be better than what I've written. Incoroporate that 10% into my draft.
Post that it's usually taking indiviudal sentences that I find clunky and asking AI to improve it.
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@arungopidas I use it similarly – I write on my own and ask to improve it + polish the grammar. Then, I use only parts I like :)