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Comment by gigatree | Hacker News Reader

Looking forward to most posts having “No AI” tagged on. Definitely a huge plus.

This makes me wonder if there will be a time when "No AI" will be considered up-scale (of sorts) like hand-sewn clothes or artisan bread

Yeah, I imagine “hand-coded” will be a common phrase on a lot of repos soon

All of the code will be handcrafted, bespoke and artisanal. Written in heirloom editors. The comments could be described as ambrosial, whilst the code reads in a piquant and succulent manner.

Maybe one day but, right now, I think the onus is on the minority of AI repos to declare it rather than the other way round.

Agree, but they have no incentive to. I always tell Claude to remove its attribution from commits because it’s not a great signal.

Of course you are free to do that, but doesn't that make the situation worse for everyone?

"brain-coded" is where it's at.

And, of course, it will be inferior to what the machines make.

Just like machine created cutlery is essentially perfect, but human smithed cutlery will have lots of small imperfections.

It won’t always be inferior. Some items are just not profitable or too bespoke for mass production.

In what way do those imperfections make something like cutlery inferior?

I think there are many more examples of his point. Food, for example. McDonalds famously adds non-uniformity, scorch marks, etc to their bread and meat to make it appear as if it wasn't manufactured within small dimensional tolerances.

Cutlery is, of course, a very different thing from artistic works. Has a machine ever created cutlery as beautiful as a human being can?

Well, conventionally a human being designs the cutlery, and a machine produces to that design.

And yes, they can be quite pretty.

What you see as the absolutely most beautify fork is in the eye of the beholder, of course.

Handmade cutlery is an artistic work. Machine made cutlery is an artistic work.

Remember, the benchmark for art is a banana taped to a wall.

the benchmark for art is the first banana taped to a wall.

I don't think there's any evidence that the famous banana was the first one to be taped to a wall.

And yet many people pay small fortunes to get those small imperfections instead of the machine ones, nowadays considered collection items.

Yes, humans pay for all kinds of interesting quirks.

Yes, like proper cooking became slow food, we will get slow programming.

You might like Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".

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