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Comment by ryanbrunner | Hacker News Reader

Our workplace are heavy users of AI for nearly everything, but we still hold to the rule that if the audience of text is a human, it should be written by a human.

AI generated text is still exhausting to read.

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I know of one CEO who said "If you copy/paste an AI response and send it to someone else, they didn't need you in the loop and you don't need to work here anymore".

I find it shocking and disappointing how rare plainly logical and intelligent reactions like this are.

Not that I would ascribe actual intelligence to "AI", but those fans who claim it's better than your average human almost seem to be proven right by the sheer amount of incredibly stupid behavior around "AI".

I had a situation recently where I had to onboard to a new process, I spent the day analysing the onboarding docs raising PRs working through all the issues we hit using Claude. At the end of the day my Claude was primed with all the knowledge from the days efforts. When a colleague asked me why his onboarding was having a specific error my session was able to quickly debug it and give him an accurate answer. His agent could have absolutely done it but it would have taken (slightly) more effort to get it primed rather than proxying through me to my agent

Does your workplace generate a lot of text for non-human audiences? Other than code, I'm not sure what this might be.

Maybe better phrased as "another human". If you're prompting AI for your own purposes that's totally fine, just absorb the information and summarize it for people instead of just dumping AI output directly on them.

Any time you want to glue two systems together, an LLM will default to some kind of markdown or script to facilitate the work

presumably if you are generating text for yourself to read prior to you writing something for a human.

documentation?

Is it a gentlemens agreement, or do you actually enforce this somehow? What stops anyone from prompting "copy my writing style, use less words, make some small typos and gramma inefficiences

That’s what I am doing. My writing is horrible and i produce much better results when i take AI output as starting point. But I do much more than adding typos (never) and grammar inefficiencies.

Try flipping it, that's what I do. I usually prompt AI for research, absorb thta, write my own thing, and then ask AI to proofread it and I'll let it fix small grammatical errors and typos, while larger structural suggestions I'll still implement myself. It doesn't take much more time in my experience and I'm infinitely more satisfied with my output.

Doesn’t work for me. I am reasonably ok editing an existing document but I have total writer’s block when I have to write from scratch.

It's expected to call out people (usually in DMs) when they post AI generated stuff. Occasionally people will link to a claude doc as like an "additional details here" type note, but that's the extent of it.

It's entirely possible that people have just finely tuned AI to perfectly mimic them, but if it passes the Turing test, I guess I have nothing to complain about. Our rules are less about some fundamental opposition to AI and more that it's just annoying to read unedited AI slop.

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