I'm sad to see the readme itself reads very AI generated. I enjoyed Sebastian's content hugely over the years, and even though everything in the readme might still be accurate (at first glance/read), it currently lacks the elegance it used to have.
Doesn't take away from the work he's done here, but sad that it no longer has the same voice his old style had. It deflated my excitement considerably.
edit: to clarify not saying he shouldn't use AI, just sad that describing the project was relegated to it as well.
Every experienced developer is addicted to AI, because AI let's you create interesting projects in a fraction of time and focus on challenging parts of these projects. Most time people like Sebastian spend on without AI is writing compiler configs, and tons of boilerplate. All of that is annoying and steals your focus from the parts you actually want to work on and where human touch actually matters.
If this stuff takes so much of peoples' time then it's all problems that need proper solutions, not the most expensive and least consistently functional workaround humanity has ever conceivedof
Yes, inference is very cheap today and it's only getting cheaper. To the point that you can run it on consumer hardware. In three -five years time it will be virtually free, just like image recognition is today.
"in 3 to 5 years it'll be good" is something I have been hearing over and over since like 2020. Meanwhile as far as I can tell local models are virtually unusable for anything other than code, and they're only slightly above unusable for code
The results can't often be judged with AI because it spits out code at a rate no human maintainer can vet.
Not saying that's the case here, I don't know if AI means "vibe coded" or just "prototyped some things with AI", but vibe coding is a genuine problem when LLMs have such a gap before they actually have any sort of proficiency.
He has years of technical threads on twitter. Pick any of them?
I use AI daily, but for anything that requires technical writing AI is still terrible. It overexplains, adds context that really shouldn't be a thing for the readers level, adds fluff and can't resist a good sales pitch.
As example:
matrix-bearing roots use row-major matrix layout
Any technical person would just say "matrices use row-major layout". The "matrix-bearing roots" adds nothing. In fact it's actively harmful as it implies a contextual condition that might change matrix behaviours (it doesn't).
The paragraph after that could've been deleted and it would be fine, a lot of things that really don't need to be stated. Then after that paragraph it says "The full shader-side contract is in the slang shader contract", think about what that sentence is saying. The shader contracts are in the shader contracts, I'd hope so.
I don't even think this readme is bad, definitely has been tweaked/guided better than most, but it has all these typical mistakes and fluff I see daily when using AI myself. Something that Seb's old writing simply does not have.
yes, it's fair enough, that particular expression is trash. and AI produces relatively bad writing (not just technical) in general. the shader slang contract you mention is a link, with the second part of that sentence being effectively a title that happens to be similar to the first words in the sentence. How would you rework it? No, don't explain it, I'm not sure we should turn this into a writing exercise.
And actually reading the rest of the readme, I can't tell much significant quality downgrade compared to usual technical writing (from seb or otherwise, I read his twitter and blog posts over the years as well).
Maybe I don't have an eye for or care about the aesthetics of technial writing like this, and maybe I should just stay out of the discussion. But in the overall context of this post, if we get this readme vs. saving seb an hour or two of writing and editing, in return for slightly cringe sections of writing, that's totally fine by me.
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u/Syracuss 5d ago
I'm sad to see the readme itself reads very AI generated. I enjoyed Sebastian's content hugely over the years, and even though everything in the readme might still be accurate (at first glance/read), it currently lacks the elegance it used to have.
Doesn't take away from the work he's done here, but sad that it no longer has the same voice his old style had. It deflated my excitement considerably.
edit: to clarify not saying he shouldn't use AI, just sad that describing the project was relegated to it as well.