I'm trying to sort out my own emotions on this.

I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling.

It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable.

I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.

I guess I'm an expert on LLM-isms somehow, I thought they were still plentiful. They're plentiful at the start but get significantly worse near the end, so I'm guessing you spent more time polishing up the first 2/3rds or so.

But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste.

The story is good.

that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of

some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:

- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.

- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)

- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there

- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least

fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.

All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!

> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop. “You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.

“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”

“Everything.”

He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.

Ethan looked ill.

--

I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?

[Edited for clarity]

I will say this is one of the few pieces of prose I've read that was AI generated that didn't immediately jump out as it (a couple of inconsistencies eventually grabbed me enough to come to the comments and see your post details which mention it - I'd clicked through from the HN homepage), so your polishing definitely worked! Quite a neat little story

> Tom pulled up the tool’s specification on his diagnostic display. This was always the first step: read the spec, not the code. Clearly this writer has never felt the frustration of CC telling them a feature was never a part of the plan, because it overwrote the plan and then compacted.

When I noticed the article header image was generated with AI my interest in reading the article itself dropped to zero.

Around the part where Margaret explains the problem to Tom , and started to feel annoyed. I could tell it was a LLM trying to fit a sci fi novella style of writing. And it was doing a good job , it was certainly better than 90% of posts ive read in the last 6 months.

Dont know why that makes me annoyed, maybe cause its the depressing seriousness of being a 'prompter' and the americana framing of it.

LLM's also do well with writing parables, so try something like: "write a parable about a software engineer battle against the compiler and discovering that letting go of control and letting the compiler help him build better applications. The style can be where the developer is a toad, but also a monk, and the compiler is a snake.". You can do it with any profession ("doctor vs management", "nurse working overtime") and it can write very insightful parables.

A fun read!

I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.

Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?

Reading this was a roller coaster for me.

Because of a bad habit reading comments before the link I knew it was AI. I read it regardless, and... I still enjoyed it!

I'm very much not a writer or a critic, so my definition of good writing is likely very low. Yet I can't shake off this weird feeling that I truly enjoyed the writing and felt the emotions, _while_ knowing it's LLM.

I'm guessing that human after touch is what made it pleasant to read. I'd love to see the commit history of the process. Fun times we live in!

Nanoclaw is the first hint I've seen of new type of software, user-customizeable code. It's not spec-to-software like in the story, but it is rather interesting. You fork it and then when you add features it self-modifies. I haven't looked deeply, but I'm not sure how you get updates after that, I guess you can probably have it pull and merge itself for a while but if you ever get to where you can't merge anymore, I'm not sure what you do.

As for spec-to-software - I am still pretty unsure about this. Right now of course we are not really that close, it takes too much iteration from a prompt to a usable piece of software, and even then you need to have a good prompt. I'm also not sure about re-generating due to variations on what the result might be. The space of acceptable solutions isn't just one program, it's lots, and if you get a random acceptable solution that might be fine for original generation, but it may be extremely annoying to randomly get a different acceptable solution when regenerating, as you need to re-learn how to use it (thinking about UI specifically here.) Maybe these are the same problem, once you can one-shot the software from a spec maybe you will not have much variation on the solution since you aren't doing a somewhat random walk there iterating on the result.

I also don't know if many users really want to generate their own solutions. That's putting a lot of work on the user to even know what a good idea is. Figuring out what the good ideas are is already a huge part of making software, probably harder than implementing it. Maybe small-(ish) businesses will, like the farmers in the story, but end-users, maybe not, at least not in general.

I do think there is SOMETHING to all this, but it's really hard to predict what it's gonna look like, which is why I appreciate this piece so much.

I'm very impressed that was written by an LLM.

Does that make the OP an "authoring mechanic"? Or an "AI editor"?

Douglas Adams had it right, the problem is not that the answer was useless, it was that people didn't know what the right question was.

I do enjoy this sort of speculative fiction that imagines though future consequences of something in its early stages, like AI is right now. There are some interesting ideas in here about where the work will shift.

However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier.

The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better.

We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.

When I saw this the other day -- and it just went on and on, like a good human author who was going to write this kind of story probably wouldn't -- I looked for a note that it was AI-generated, and I didn't find it.

All I found was a human name given as the author.

We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.

I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.

Thanks for sharing. This was an amazing read. I’d love to see novels with similar style stories about speculative near future tech and world.

"This was the mechanic’s paradox: the cheaper you were relative to the cost of failure, the more your clients needed you; and the more they needed you, the more they resisted the implication that they’d need you again."

This is my common issue from building websites for SMEs. It's not until Google updates their algorithm - killing their ranking and their sales leads slow that you hear from them.

There is wisdom in constantly up-selling to your customers (we offer management services, SEO and are cautiously moving in AIO), they may say no, but you have a fall back that you offered things that would have mitigated their current crisis.

I liked it. It has a similar feel to an Andy Weir "The martian" type of novel.

Your polishing work made a difference! The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.

It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!

I really enjoyed fantasy part of many small farmers. It felt rustic. However based on my understanding the modern world is moving towards megacorps and economies of scale.

That it was largely/mostly generated by Claude adds a certain poignancy to it.

As an allegory it reminds a lot of one I read as a teen: Joshua by Joseph Girzone. Not a literary masterpiece but a cleaver thought-raising story.

I enjoyed this very much. But I have to wonder, was this written by Claude?

Edit: got it right!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47419681

There's a bit of a tradition of introducing engineering ideas through stories. I remember a novella which was used to introduce something like MRP II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning) in the 80's. One of the reasons I think it works is that it keeps a focus on the human elements - like why Tom fitted the switch in your story. I remember automating a lab system back in 1985, which would bring in £1000 per day. Two weeks later I found out that the reason it wasn't in use was that the user wanted an amber monitor rather than a green one. I fitted the switch.

I don't know if this is what the future will look like, but this looks realistic. And if my non-existent grandson starts re-coding my business without asking, he's going to spend the next six months using K&R C.

This sort of article really needs at least a vague clue as to what it is about.

It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about

A fun read. I was hoping for the title to have some more relevance to the story, like someone who had handcrafted a piece of software and didn’t want others messing with it! Was that ever part of a draft?

Often suggested by optimistic podcast guests these days: the as-yet-unknown new careers that will replace the familiar old ones and thus give employment in the AI era. I think your story is more a commentary on the current AI goldrush than an insight into future careers.

This is such a good written fiction story. Well done. And the best part: I can see myself as Tom.

I started reading this and it gave a strong whiff of Richard Stallman’s “the right to read” - once dystopian and now a commonplace.

Then I started scrolling and thought the author was just verbose like RMS.

When it just kept going I was just mad to have fallen into the AI tarpit.

Fun idea. 5x too long. I need to calibrate my ai spidey sense better.

So, in the past, your stories were warrant-eed? But no longer?

My favorite part was the illustration from inside the car. The rear-view mirror clearly shows un-mirrored store signs.

Prompts in, garbage out.

I can see this future happening!

this was a ridiculously pointless story, I stopped after the second paragraph and came here to ask politely what was the point of it

what was my surprise when I read it was AI-generated

I don't oppose reading AI generated content in principle, but because it's free to generate, I always am less likely to read super long prose that is AI generated. So the question is whether someone has taken the time to keep it as long as necessary but not longer. Or if there are ways to make it easier for me to commit to the experience, with a sort of TLDR

I used to live in Marshfield WI. It's kind of jarring to see it mentioned "in the real world", the the extent that HN resembles that.

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excellent story, it was both interesting and mildly terrifying. to think that one day software could be malleable seems so wrong to me - you would think having deterministic results is important for programming - and yet with "vibe coding" that really seems to be where it's going.

A few months ago, I asked Grok for a piece of fiction set in the cyberpunk 2077 universe. A cremated incredible story about a braindance that was actually stealthily programming the watcher through a back door in the watchers own implants to transmit a AI from beyond the black wall, allowing the AI to escape into the physical universe through the braindance’s audience. Excellent.

this is such a beautiful essay. thank you op for posting. made my day :)

with the speed of llm/ai improvement, this too maybe steamrolled

There are always bugs in software. The question is do you have enough eyes on the data to spot them or do they linger for years.

Who can know what the world will look like as we "transition"? I sure don't, but I'm thankful the author here has taken a stab at it. I feel like this is one of the first stories I've seen to try to imagine this post-transition world in a way that isn't so gonzo as to be unrelatable. It was so relatable (the human-ness shining all the brighter in a machine-driven world) that I cried as I finished reading. I've felt very anxious about my own future, and to see one possible future painted so vividly, with such human and emotionally focused themes, triggered quite an emotional reaction. I think the feeling was:

> If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.

it's crap. you all need to go outside

It’s a neat piece of writing, but not nearly dystopic enough for my taste. There will only be one farm and whoever is fixing it will be on the other side of the world.

I'm disappointed, as the Google result showed "warranty void if regenerated" in the description and I thought HN had started serving witicisms for the desciption

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