Not all AI prompting is expanding the prompt.
What if the original prompt is 1000 words, includes 10 scientific articles by reference (boosting it up to 10000) , and the AI helps to boil it down to 100 words instead?
I'd argue that this is probably a rather more responsible usage of the tools. And rather more pleasant to read besides.
Whether it meets the criterion is another thing. But at least don't assume that the original prompt is always better or shorter!
It'd be far better to just have a thread about the best way to get good summaries.
I don't expect AI HN responders to out themselves by sharing, but I would be curious to learn if people are prompting anything more involved than just "respond to this on HN: <link>", or running agents that do the same.
So technically the prompts involved might expand into megabytes all told. And in the end I formulate a post by myself (to adhere to HN rules), but the prompting can be many many many megabytes and include PDFs, images, blocks of text from multiple sources, and ... you know. Just Doing The Work.
I think this is valid. Previously I would have (and have) (and still do) search google, wikipedia, pubmed, scientific literature, etc. Not for everything. But often. And AI tooling just allows me to do that faster, and keep all my notes in one place besides.
Again, the final edit is typically 90-100% me. (The 10% is if the AI comes with a really good suggestion) . But my homework? Yes. AI is involved these days.
This should be ok. I'm adhering to the letter and the spirit. My post is me.
But those are pretty specific cases (For example, discussing AI in healthcare). That's about the only time where I think it's reasonable to post the AI output so it can be analyzed/criticized.
What's not helpful is I've been hit by users who haven't disclosed that they are just using AI. It takes a few back and forths before I realize that they are just a bot which is annoying.
Example: "write me an article about hidden settings in SSH". You get back more information than most of HN's previous posts about SSH, in a fraction of the text, and more readable.
Actually, screw it, we should just make a new version of HN that has useful articles written by AI. The human written articles are terrible.
