@baldur
Yes, in which case, for them, we could just cut out the middle man…

@baldur the grasshoppers are slowly turning into locusts and are wondering why we’re not joining in on the feeding frenzy

@baldur Libreoffice has been publishing slop blogposts for weeks weeks, now running on a "No AI is a feature" campaign.

@baldur if they're up to their eyeballs in generated text they'll start talking like that even when not using LLMs, which makes it hard to tell the difference

@baldur

Truth to be told, most of developers I know are terrible writers. Not that LLM generated prose is exactly Nobel prize material, but at least is usually readable, even if verbose. I think nearly all the articles on the web about AI are LLM redacted; in fact most of them have clear marks of it. The more obscure the writer, or the worse the article, the more likely it is to be LLM.

@baldur My own experience with the perceived importance of written communication skills among developers would suggest that’s correct.

I once suggested to my (former) team that our hiring process should include a writing assignment. That suggestion was strongly shut down by the whole team, but I maintain that an assessment of writing skills is more useful than any “whiteboarding” exercise.

Dev types drastically undervalue writing as a skill and it’s depressing.

@baldur Probably.

As far as I know, the ratio is 0% for all the devs I currently read prose from off work.

(At work, it's getting more and more weird communicating with Claude through a large and growing number of different human names. It sometimes feels like I have like 5 coworkers in total, but one of them - Claude - signs its communication with 20+ different names.)

@baldur Yeah, I find devs have long preferred to automate writing their documentation. In the process making said documentation harder to use!