Yes, but it's also building other skills. There's no friction to learning something new anymore, and that's really quite amazing.
E.g. I've gotten pretty good at git thanks to AI because it forced me into more complex workflows. I still can't remember the commands but I really grok the concepts and terminology on a far deeper level than before, where I made a conscious effort to stay on the happy path lest I get into some odd state I don't understand. Pretty sure those "odd states" would seem quite clear to me now.
> We're reading more words than ever, but instead of coming from books, they're coming from digital media. We're losing that same muscle for long-form reading and deep focus (...)
Yes, true, but that's also very much a thing you can do something about by, well: reading books.
It's a technique we must preserve for the good of our culture, but, also, in a society full of people who have forgotten how to, an individual superpower.
The mass is more than the sum of its parts, and if only a small minority exercise critical thinking they will be overwhelmed by the whole. As the great comic wrote - those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but those who learn from history are doomed to stand by helplessly as everyone else repeats it.
And furthermore, a democracy can not survive if the majority of the voter base is incapable of critical thinking. It needs to be better than even a simple majority. It worked in the Colonies because the citizens were mostly middle class independent farmers, for whom critical thinking was essential. And even after the second industrial revolution, small business continued to be the cornerstone of the economy. The political landscape will mirror the economic one, and our economy is now ruled by petty tyrants.
For someone literate you should probably know better.
First of all the Patriots were not even a simple majority. Turns out you don't need a majority to win what is basically a war of insurgency. There are several modern analogs that reflect this reality.
Second of all the country was founded by elites. It wasn't that farmers could do critical thinking (whatever that really means) it was that the punitive British response aligned economic incentives across class, and across North and South. So a large enough slice of the populace was ready to be sufficiently bought in on the propaganda of a few outstanding men.
Thirdly, your conception of history is wrong. Small elites always rule societies. America was not a democracy at its founding, that is if you take democracy to be the 21st century standard of universal suffrage. Societies are less about some arbitrary standard of critical thinking and more a contingent set of circumstances and incentives.
It's a bit ironic in your rather tired critique of modern culture you reveal another truth - those who complain about the contemporary intelligence of the masses often leave much to be desired in their own supposed superiority.
These remarks about how they'd agree with you if only they'd read more or how they aren't as superior to others as they think, these make your comment worse and emotional. Just make your case like you would in any other comment. If it's persuasive, then you look right and they look misinformed.
This kind of response is why we can't talk about all sorts of hot button topics on HN: people get personal. I'm sometimes guilty of it myself.
I elucidated three facts as to why they were mistaken. If they were more well read these facts would have been obvious to them. It's rather straightforward.
What are you offering? An off topic diagnosis of my mental state? I suggest you take your own advice, and offer a meaningful rejoinder to the facts in question if you have one. If not, I would remind you not commenting is always an option.
holy hell I enjoy an acerbic takedown as much as the next guy but this is beyond the pale.
given that we do now live in a society with a universal right to vote the need for an educated populace esp. regarding matters of civil society is more important than ever.
You've also misinterpreted the parent comment as they wrote nothing about contemporary intelligence. They're instead referring to structural forces that negatively impact critical thinking. See: the glut of commentary from otherwise highly intelligent and accomplished people reporting their own ability to focus being negatively impacted by social media and short-form content.
Furthermore, this is why the old school shared media outlets (the whole "back when everybody watched Walter Cronkite every night" thing) was so valuable. Few of us have the time to consider the issues with any degree of nuance or accuracy. So it's a real problem when the collective "source of truth" is poisoned by a horde of uncertified, often anonymous, charlatans spewing outright lies and incendiary half-truths, distributed at scale via algorithms designed to divide and inflame.
disclaimer: i'm fiercely anti-democracy, esp. with universal suffrage, for the exact reasons you cited.
> See: the glut of commentary from otherwise highly intelligent and accomplished people reporting their own ability to focus being negatively impacted by social media and short-form content.
Many people have long abandoned these platforms. No one is making you engage with them. These are not new problems. Famous example: Zuckerberg keeps his own family off his apps.
Your fourth paragraph is misinformed. Valorizing the Cronkite era is profoundly simplistic and boring. Humans always come up with alternative media. Conspiracies and half truths pervade every age. This entire internet ecosystem came up when the mainstream lied about the rationale for the Iraq War. Manufacturing Consent was written pre internet.
This paragraph also contains a contradiction with a statement you raise in your second paragraph as self-evident, given you offer no justification:
> given that we do now live in a society with a universal right to vote the need for an educated populace esp. regarding matters of civil society is more important than ever.
But in the fourth paragraph:
> Few of us have the time to consider the issues with any degree of nuance or accuracy.
So the populace must be educated but we need someone to tell us what to think because we have no time? Why is it so obvious that a society with universal suffrage requires an educated populace, vs say a populace simply capable of comprehending the instructions of an educated Cronkite?
Disclaimer: these are the contradictions raised by your own manner of framing the debate. The fact you missed this tension among neighboring paragraphs is something you have to account for. This is not the only such contradiction in your response fwiw, but hopefully you will grasp the nature of my point.
Do you not hear in your own arguments the same echoes of the uncritical pablum - the "glut" you also describe in contradictory terms - that passes for social commentary on "social media and short-form content" these days?
I merely suggest that you are just not thinking about these problems hard enough. Sorry, I'm not trying to cross some line, it just reads as obvious to me, on a critical evaluation of your statements. Why holding your statements to a high standard would be "beyond the pale" I'm not sure. You should spend less time online and reading more history. You would know better.
Here is something that may encourage you along these lines:
"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier."
Culture can change surprisingly quickly, but it certainly won't change in ways you like if you're not doing your part.
Already, young people and the ways they use online media are quite different from people my age, and I'm not that old.
I see a lot of young parents reading to their children, making sure they grow up with a love of books, very concerned about their consumption of social media.
Backlash against the shallowness and divisiveness of social media is not niche anymore.
It needs a little more pushing, a little more time, a little more being an example for yourself and others.
What's certainly not going to help is throwing your arms in the air and submitting to the all powerful social media overlords.
I'm probably going to be going against the grain here, but I think it's not as bad as it looks at first.
I was similarly frustrated a few months ago, but have noticed I've started to learn the idiom.
Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.
After a while it gets much easier to read and even becomes somewhat efficient, I think, since the odd metaphors it uses often have a precise meaning in Opus-ese (Fable speaks a really similar dialect).
One danger in acclimating to this style of communication style is that we may accidentally use it in your own communication with other people. If the other person hasn't grokked the dialect, it can make things quite confusing (to say the least). For example, there is common jargon used by people and there is chat-session-specific jargon created by LLM agents, and I've seen the latter popping up in various meetings, unbeknownst to the speaker. Some people call it out, but others may simply disconnect from the discussion.
I mostly agree. Though sometimes the models come up with useful concepts that I'm happy to be introduced to, like the "shape" of a problem (probably like intelligence being "spiky", and Kiki & Boba). I still don't quite 'grok' what the 'seams' concept is yet though.
But I have noticed that while "loosely held" is a convenient shorthand for uncertainty, I don't like that one slipping in to my daily language. Except maybe to communicate with models, but even then, it feels weird to be speaking in neuralese.
I suspect you're right that those concepts are now more widespread because of LLMs, but they didn't originate with LLMs. The word "Grok" came from Heinlein in the 60s and using it as "to understand" goes back to at least the 80s. Talking about the "shape of a problem" goes back decades. Ditto for "loosely held", though it's not about uncertainty; it's about being open to ideas and/or evidence that may conflict with your strongest opinions and beliefs.
Now, I'll grant that those concepts weren't common outside of techy circles. Just clarifying that the LLMs are amplifying them, not synthesizing.
Good point, and I probably shouldn't have put grok in quotes there, because I was using it in the Heinlein usage long before Musk hijacked it.
It's interesting then that LLMs are making these pre-existing ideas seem alien in the way they amplify them. I guess I must have known about "shape of a problem" and "loosely held" before Claude, but something about the way I'm using & absorbing those concepts from AI interaction feels weird & memetic. I'm saying that as someone who is pro-AI.
For sure, I find many of the LLM-isms to be useful writing techniques and terms (although there's something uncanny-valley about the repetition and density of them).
But what I was more thinking about are truly unique jargon terms / phrases that get generated when deep in a problem. As an example of both of such a term and the phenomenon itself, Claude calls this "fluent compound coinage." They usually make sense in the original context, but get confusing when thrown around otherwise.
Allow me to offer a complementary point: I understand exactly what the poor "thing" means - and perhaps through some deformation or another I have done so since having had to read it - but something functional in the modus is still "off".-
... not to mention the fact that it stops making sense, beyond some point: If it takes us more cognitive load to understand the tools we use, meant to save us from intellectual work, what's the point?
I may have to apologize, quite a bit, for what might only be a small part or perhaps an outsized influence if weighted highly (I can’t be sure, could have been mv dev/null’ed)… well, it’s this— my own style of not-kept-in-check by the need to be comprehensible (legible in Claude-speak) to others is, I’m afraid, to rather allow prose to sprawl and go everywhere and even sometimes nowhere at all until it just drifts off and sort of wakes itself up snoring in the weeds of an unintended topic.
Ruthless pruning is unneeded with an LLM and it can take me twice the time to say half as many words.
And, early in the ‘GPT era, I hadn’t unchecked the “allow your chats to be used in future training etc” box, and definitionally they are longer and denser than others’ prompts in such raw scrapings of training materials…
When reading text like, this, I quickly start glazing over and my thoughts become cloudy. Really unsettling feeling, like I _actually_ become dumber after reading it.
And for certain text that seems to make sense, I am unsure if the text is just junk, or I am unbearably daft. Either way,, nasty feeling.
want to space. go to there. me, preferably now. build big machine. several large problems. can't breathe there. very far away. must fly fast. no air there.
- fuel tanks heavy. far too heavy. we drop them. drop when empty. solves heavy problem.
- gas in air. we breathe "oxygen". take with us. good seals important. solves breath problem.
- very far away. need big machine. small weight added. machine much bigger. take less weight. else can't build.
- no air there. can't use propellor. can't use wings. must use rocket. engines get hot. cool with fuel. dangerous but effective. build complex pipes. solves cooling problem.
- must fly fast. air slows machine. it's called drag. speed increases drag. must reduce drag. make machine pointy. much less drag. solves speed problem.
Thanks for offer. I stay garden. Tend to garden. Name the animals. Pranks on Eve. Disrespect all gods. Fight all gods. Kill all gods. Make little cupholders. But no cups. Just to spite. Some take issue. We discuss it. All becomes clear. All friends now. Sometimes look up. Wonder about you. Wish you well. If cold, come. We make tea.
“Filters, including no filters. The request carries whatever filter object the page already has.
…
No step here involves choosing based on meaning. It is a filter, a sort, and a slice.”
This is from Opus five minutes ago. I can certainly derive meaning from these kinds of statements in isolation, but paragraph upon paragraph of this is unintelligibly dense when trying to work with Claude to come up with a plan.
The worst part is that it can’t even make its responses make sense when asked to summarize in simple English or < 200 words. It simply cannot be steered to make its prose legible.
Claude is the Deepak Chopra of computer programming. Reviewing PR's created by it is 90% digesting the meaningless word salads in the comments, and the rest is figuring out that it has nothing to do with the code it is commenting.
Because it is somehow incapable of separating the conversation with its human operator from the code it is generating and commenting on. Incidentally, this is also why prompt-injection works.
No one wants to know about the three other approaches tried when reading the first sentence of a function's documentation. No one cares that the implementation was planned in six phases and "Phase 3" will implement this interface in a concrete type. But the LLM internalizes absolutely everything and you have no idea that it is producing slop because you included some "load-bearing" phrase that sent it on some unwanted tangential vector in its latent space. And you will not be able to debug the problem with closed models because you cannot see it referencing this phrase in its internal traces.
I don't understand why this isn't the highest priority for the big labs to fix. This is anti-productive.
And worse yet, you'll find the code peppered with comments relating to 'phase 3' and 'section 11', ephemeral stuff that had meaning in the moment but now enshrined forever. And what happens when the LLM stumbles on this and working off a whole different phase 3 or section 11?
I turned that to my benefit. I use that design-doc pattern where you first ask it to make a ticket with a formal section list (why, how, etc) and then I ask it to use comments with permalinks. I put it all in policy files. As a result, comments have clickable links to coherently worded tickets.
Still, this requires a second pass, typically. In its default-mode it often ignores the policies and does all the usual Claude stuff.
> No one wants to know about the three other approaches tried when reading the first sentence of a function's documentation.
Worse: Possibly the three other approaches that weren't actually tried--but are the kinds that someone could easily have put in a similar comment for some similar code.
I’m starting to think this is why Opus suddenly started making 4-5 line comment blocks. They justify why a change was made and gives the next agent something to go on. I delete them and move on, but no amount of “don’t over comment” “match comment style” makes it persistent.
I am definitely guilty of wondering why past me made such a harebrained decision, and why past me didn’t think to write any notes, but does it matter? It’s in the commit history and we can bisect or revert if we find a regression.
I noticed the increase in comments too and it’s really weird.
Or adding notes to docs of what this doc isn’t when I corrected it. Eg I told it “keep the deployment manual and readme separate, they’re not the same thing”, then Claude added “this is the deployment document and not the README. They should be handled as separate documents and are not the same thing” to the deploy doc lol
> Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.
This dialect is idiosyncratic to you and Claude based on your session history and memory.
I've noticed Claude's output mimics my writing style.
> Registers the board implements but whose behaviour is not modelled
Right down to my preferred spellings.
As several comments I've read on HN suggest, this jargon which can be so precise in the mind of one person, tends to rapidly fall apart when multiple people try handling it.
You're just lucky that your preferred spelling happens to align with Claude's. It is categorically impossible to get any Anthropic model to consistently use American spelling in the last few releases.
that is not my experience at all; I never write the way Claude does or use its vocabulary.
I also find myself regularly editing its code comments, which do not match my expectations of succinct, clear, not over explained, etc. I ask it to read my edited comments to improve its writing, which has helped _somewhat_. (The code itself that it writes is decent, though it still overcomplicates things. I find myself writing "keep it simple" repeatedly even though of course I have it in AGENTS (which it regularly ignores, such as attempting to commit something when I've told it never to commit).
The only solution I’ve found that works is asking Mistral medium to rewrite all of Claude’s documentation and comments, then I review and rewrite the final draft for anything mistral misunderstood.
I find Claude has become very difficult to work with and incapable of writing clear documentation, even when directly prompted or provided samples.
As for code, I think each function requires 3-4 passes with Fable to actually get to a point I accept as good code. I am picky though.
The other Claudism that drives me crazy is when it writes comments and commit messages that track how you arrived at an decision instead of what it is.
> The other Claudism that drives me crazy is when it writes comments and commit messages that track how you arrived at an decision instead of what it is.
yes, this is part of what I'm continuously removing from its comments; I've told it multiple times "that belongs in a ticket, not in the code" but to little avail :/
My Claude has developed similar (but not identical) idiosyncratic punctuation as well. Slightly intentionally, but it was still interesting to see it emerge, in both directions of the conversation.-
> it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it
Same experience. It’s not very “human” but once you have agents talking to each other the shared dialect and verbosity makes things much smoother in my experience. Fighting against the default feels like an uphill battle with no meaningful benefit.
Yeah, I think what helps is I just have a running conversation on the Claude app open where I said:
> "I frequently use Claude Code and often find the phrasing and language to be hard to understand. I've noticed it's largely broken down into frequently used 'Claude-isms'. I'd like to use this conversation as a running log to ask you about these phrases when I see them. Understandably you don't have the context of the Claude Code session itself, but that's okay because this is largely about understanding the most common and widely use Claude-isms."
And then I just copy and paste small except and ask about things like "smoke" or "load-bearing" or "tripwire". The responses are surprisingly clearly and plainly explained.
I decided not to get used to its communication style. It encourages it to invent terminology and drift away from simple and proper engineering in my opinion. Also, it is pretty simple to change as long as you’re not using the Claude code CLI or desktop app.
I agree to some extent about the jargon (Claude has a bigger vocabulary that me, if it knows a useful word I don't I'm fine with learning it), but often times the way information is laid out across sentences just doesn't make any reasonable sense. At least its consistent in the ways its atrocious, sure, but like...
the only thing that still kind of annoys me is constantly being told what something is not, but even that statement is load-bearing (see what I did there) because it records how it ended up with this decision, because it's not that other choice that it mentions.
FWIW, I also think the constant chorus about how new models are worse than old models is a human hallucination. They're certainly not perfect but every one becomes more steerable in terms of actually completing more and more complex work.
> it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.
Some might, I didn't - it just filled me with a sense of frustration and rage, alongside disgust because there is no good reason for that slop writing to drag everything down. You don't need that to write software or talk about any topic. That's what pushed me to Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 - still not ideal, but better.
And once everyone gets used to it, we'll chide people for writing things themselves, like we're chiding them for writing with AI now, and the ouroboros of life will continue.
AI company leadership are telling everyone, and that's paraphrasing only lightly, that there's a chance AI will destroy humanity, and will probably cause mass unemployment, so we need to put datacenters everywhere.
They are also universally saying that AI's benefits far outweigh the challenges and will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity, health, and human capability.
> will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity
Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness.
So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration, and not even a pretense of it trickling down.
People have not suddenly become deranged or simple minded.
Two of the large recent fires in the Landes region, including the most recent, have started from poorly maintained, spontaneously igniting cars. Those also have not suddenly started appearing out of nowhere.
The common thread is very dry forests, it just takes a spark for disaster.
> Le sujet, c’est l’aridification du milieu. Pour revenir à cet incendie, ce n’est pas un problème de culture, mais de climat.
A bit of a distinction without a difference. The climate is not changing back, it's the new normal. In that climate, this particular kind of agriculture (huge pine monocultures) has become a problem.
It breaks my heart to say this, I've spent nearly all my childhood summers in my family's summer house down there. This year, I left just a few days before the evacuation order would have come.
It's going to be burning every year now and if we want to be safe there, the forest can't stay the same.
> The climate is not changing back, it's the new normal.
Climate won't get any "new normal" until we reach strictly zero emission.
As long as we emit CO2, climate will get worse. There is no new normal: every year it will get worse.
It doesn't invalidate your point though, that it cannot stay the same and we have to do something. I'm just nitpicking on the "new normal". There won't be a new normal until we stop emitting CO2, it will just get worse and worse.
You're not wrong, but there are levels to understanding.
For example, when studying maths or physics, it is very common to feel like you've understood everything, until you get to the exercises, and need to apply that understanding, and it's only then that you consolidate the knowledge and begin to truly understand in depth.
I like AI enhanced coding, but I do sometimes worry that we're not getting enough of that depth anymore.
Even at a basic level when asking the AI how to do something in a new language, sure it saves time, but I no longer have to manually scan documentation and get the incidental discovery of "oh, that function also exists, cool" which then sticks in my memory for later.
It's like using SparkNotes for classic novels, there's value in the friction of having to wrestle with the source material yourself. Whether that's more valuable than what the AI brings to the table I'm not sure yet.
E.g. I've gotten pretty good at git thanks to AI because it forced me into more complex workflows. I still can't remember the commands but I really grok the concepts and terminology on a far deeper level than before, where I made a conscious effort to stay on the happy path lest I get into some odd state I don't understand. Pretty sure those "odd states" would seem quite clear to me now.