In the early aughts, I was so adept at navigating my town because I delivered pizza. I could draw a map from memory. My directional skills were A+.

Once GPS became ubiquitous, I started relying on it, and over about a decade, my navigational skills degraded to the point of embarrassment. I've lived in the same major city now for 5 years and I still need a GPS to go everywhere.

This is happening to many people now, where LLMs are replacing our thinking. My dad thinks he is writing his own memoirs. Yeah pop, weird how you and everyone else just started using the "X isn't Y, it's Z" trope liberally in your writing out of nowhere.

It's definitely scary. And it's definitely sinister. I maintain that this is intentional, and the system is working the way they want it to.

Who is "the nephew"?

More precisely, each ‘AI’ is just a statistical grouping of a large subset of other (generally randomly) selected humans.

You don’t even get the same ‘human’ with the same AI, as you can see with various prompting.

It’s like doing a lossy compression of an image, and then wondering why the color of a specific pixel isn’t quite right!

Understand the first 70%.

With the 70% you then pitch "I have this" and some Corp/VC will buyout the remaining 30%.

They then in return hire engineers who are willing to lap the 70% slop, and fix the rest with more AI slop.

Your brother dies happily achieving their dream of being a bazillionaire doing nothing more than typing a few sentences in a search bar.

I think you might’ve missed this part from the post:

> AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating

It’s his boss. The type of boss who happily generates AI slop is likely to be the type of person who wants things done their way. The employee doesn’t have the power to block the merge if the boss wants it, thus the conversation on why it shouldn’t be merged needs to be considerably longer (or they need to quit).

"You're absolutely right— This code works by [...]"

Sadly, I've seen multiple well-known developers here on HN argue that reading code in fact isn't hard and that it's easy to review AI-generated code. I think fundamentally what AI-generated code is doing is exposing the cracks in many, many engineers across the board that either don't care about code quality or are completely unable to step back and evaluate their own process to see if what they're doing is good or not. If it works it works and there's no need to understand why or how.

The best way I’ve found to use LLM’s for writing anything that matters is, after feeding it the right context, take its output and then retype it in your own words. Then the LLM has helped capture your brain dump and organize it but by forcing yourself to write it rather than copy and paste… you get to make it your own. This technique has worked quite well with domains I’m not the best at yet like marketing copy. I want my shit to have my own voice but I’m not sure what to cover… so let the LLM help me with what to cover and then I can rewrite its work.