Lots of comments about the general use of AI here, but in particular I think the AI renderings are counterproductive and especially misleading in this application.
The original drawings have ambiguities in them; they are well done but perspective and scale are off, and there are lots of questions about particular details of the drawings. The AI drawings simply take these particular questionable details and render them as "real."
There should be real life artifacts for many of these tools. LLMs can just as easily go search the web for images of those as create completely unreliable, fictional renderings of the same.
The LLM aftertaste is terrible but the idea is very nice.
If it's worth doing, why not do it well? This is a tiny book by book standards and writing this text would be a matter of a few weeks at most. And that way it would be much more valuable (and less off-putting)
Perhaps he is busy, and this is a passion project.
As he says, he doesn't have much time to research the entire book.
You think he has "weeks" to write it up for others?
I imagine there are thousands of interesting projects people are doing solo and can't be bothered creating website to share with others for.
If AI can do this- fantastic! Let people moan if they can't see the positives of this. He's not trying to win an award or is paid to create a site for the public.
I am very happy to see people make use of AI to do previously impractical work, but the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.
> Not a diary, not a family chronicle - a tool book.
> As reliable as it says on each page - no more and no less.
> Pages without a special note have been editorially reviewed: carefully checked and corrected.
This sounds like an extremely interesting topic but the lack of care in the presentation is disappointing.
“carefully checked and corrected” is also the sort of thing that llm's like to insert when you tell them to carefully check and correct in the prompt, and isn't otherwise really a natural thing to write.
LLMs love all kinds of idioms that indicate quality work (even when it isn't): 'checked', 'correct/corrected', 'witnessed', 'works/working', 'verified', 'validated'. They overuse these to the point that they become flags rather than reassurances.
This [0] is my secret weapon against this kind of slop. Any time I see any of these markers I tell my agent to read this again. Works unreasonably well.
Maybe this is because of the translation, I guess the author has written the non-English version first and then got it translated into English with AI, adding some additional explanations if necessary.
That thought certainly crossed my mind, but having worked with people using LLMs for this purpose successfully, this instead comes across as taking a simple idea and asking {model} to expand this two or three sentence idea into a web page.
It may be the translation, however, this project is a passion for him. I would guess the passion is the book itself, and though he wants to share his passion, I imagine creating the actual page for others is tedious compared to the work of discovering the book. I have had the same issue.
If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.
> the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.
But that is typical AI quality. It is a fancified Babelfish 2.0 translator.
Some humans also use AI to "interact" with other humans. They don't seem to
understand that this is a problem for some humans. When a human AI slops me,
I stop all any every further interaction (assuming I can find out that this
human did so. It is not always possible to find that out).
I don't like to frame it in terms of, "this person is using AI, so I am no longer interested in communicating", because it is not really the AI that is the problem. It is the lack of effort put into communication with another human. AI can be extremely helpful for some people (e.g., proofreading text if one's native language isn't English). But this use case is almost never a problem if done carefully because the original ideas were all there in the beginning.
I focus my frustration on writing that is circular, vague, unnecessarily explanatory, etc. In my experience this is a symptom of the fact that there were no original ideas to begin with.
Can anyone tell me how they would have made the paper and the pigments used in the drawings (or would these be called paintings)? Is this water colour? Is it reasonable for me to make my own paper and paints following the same receipts that would have been used to make this book and its contents?
Pigments are a rabbithole that will suck you in and spit you out 10 years later with arcane knowledge about grinding up various gemstones, drying plants and all manner of minerals such as clays and so on. You will also be exceptionally well traveled.
If you're ever in the Netherlands I can recommend a visit to the Zaanse Schans where they have a mill[1] from the days when pigments were ground with windpower. You can see the colors and you'll have a better understanding of why Royal Blue[2] was Royal (because it was incredibly expensive to make a lasting blue pigment).
Thank you for the links, I really appreciate that. I have never been to the Netherlands, but it is someplace I would love to travel one day.
I imagine it would be a rabbit hole, but rabbit holes can be a lot of fun. I will have to work with the poor-man pigments though. No ultra expensive gemstone grinding for me :-).
Poor man pigments: vegetable matter. You can get surprisingly far on that alone. Side effect warning: people may think you need burning at a stake or weighing.
Good quality pestles can be found on flea markets, people hardly ever use them now so they don't appreciate what they've got.
The author says in the introduction that a certain amount of the book is verified. Presence of LLM-use doesn’t inherently make something of less value.
If an author doesn’t have time to write. Why should I give up my time to read?
Because -- if the author is to be believed -- essentially no one bothered to look at this work at all before AI became available to help with it. I had certainly never heard of it before. Had you?
That's the choice being offered. Not between "LLM slop" or "painstaking human authorship", but between something being done or nothing at all being done.
The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself. To understand it fully, to the point where you don't need or even want to hand the work off to an LLM.
Interacting with AI content makes me feel like I'm consuming something that was created purely for engagement farming. Not that human created content wasn't for engagement farming, but noticing an AI tell breaks the suspension of disbelief in a way. It devalues the relationship between creator and consumer, so that genuine care is not being shared. It's like I'm a cow being milked on an industrial engagement farm.
Wow. This is the exact opposite of what that the site is. It is very clear that the author of the web site cares deeply about the material and has put a lot of effort into the work. You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.
Note that (1) this is just your opinion and (2) that he has put a lot less effort into it than others have put into similar endeavors which as a result have a different level of authenticity.
> You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.
Why the free psycho analysis? GP just made a statement.
1 point by scrollop 0 minutes ago | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
"The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself."
It may be the translation, however, this project is a passion for him. I would guess the passion is the book itself, and though he wants to share his passion, I imagine creating the actual page for others is tedious compared to the work of discovering the book. I have had the same issue.
If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.
There are likely many people out there doing remarkable work but they can't be bothered creating a website to share with others.
If AI can do that, fantastic - even though some people will moan. There are always people who complain.
I suppose the implication is that you cannot presume human care with evidence of LLM use, it's considerably more likely that it's an indicator of lack of care, unfortunately.
It's like saying "but a lot of human care goes into factory made X" when comparing it to handmade X. It starts on a lesser footing unless evidence suggests otherwise
If you are deciding to delegate parts to AI, that’s probably a signal that it should just be edited out. If it isn’t worth your time to create, it probably isn’t worth my time to read.
AI is being used for the most part to shit out as much “content” as possible in order to show ads, sell courses and other products (bonus points if what is sold is itself also pure AI slop), or to finish tasks at work with as little effort as can be done, so that boss man is impressed by the velocity. “Who cares about quality? This is 2026, bro.”
The actual thoughtful use of AI is the minority case. Not the default. We humans are lazy, and when we can get away with less effort we put as little effort as we can into things.
I at least appreciate the warning on unreviewed generated pages and excluding them from SEO until reviewed, but it's still all untrustworthy spam by default.
There was one the other day. Seemed really compelling. History thing where they walked through a statistical life of a regular person at some point in history. Really enjoyed it until I realized the whole thing was basically ai slop. Totally devalued real work for some slop BS. So frustrating.
for back in the day this knight had pretty decent 3D perspective rendering skills I mean you can knock the chair but there are a lot worse illustrations and devotional art from the time.
The author is transparent about the use of AI, but so many negative connotations in the site!!
>I still have not found a place where truly every page of the Codex is described and interpreted in detail. I want to change that. But as a single person, I can only take on a project this big with AI as a tool.
> But as a single person, I can only take on a project this big with AI as a tool.
That's so not true though. One of my uncles did work like this and it usually took a year or two to fully research a project and write a book but it is definitely doable to do this sort of thing - and much better, frankly - as a single individual. AI makes it a matter of days, but it also makes it next to worthless.
The biggest contribution here is to make an otherwise lesser known book more known.
Lots of comments about the general use of AI here, but in particular I think the AI renderings are counterproductive and especially misleading in this application.
The original drawings have ambiguities in them; they are well done but perspective and scale are off, and there are lots of questions about particular details of the drawings. The AI drawings simply take these particular questionable details and render them as "real."
There should be real life artifacts for many of these tools. LLMs can just as easily go search the web for images of those as create completely unreliable, fictional renderings of the same.
FYI: The one tool page I checked out included a real life artifact.
The ones I have looked at all have an AI generated 'real life artifact' which makes them non-real life. Which page where you looking at?
Also he made a crossbow based on the image: https://loeffelholz-codex.org/en/codex/f014v.html
That does not look like it is the owner of the site.
The owner of the site is an SEO consultant in Munich and this person is Austrian.
https://loeffelholz-codex.org/en/codex/topics/thumbscrew.htm... seems to have a real sourced photo?
Indeed it is. Not his though, but at least it is credited.
https://loeffelholz-codex.org/en/codex/f076r.html
Reading this in between studying information theory makes a good laugh. This is the most inefficient code I've ever heard of. It's basically unary.
(For background, the first popular optical telegraph wasn't created until ~300 years later, and used 98 visually-distinct coding symbols).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph#Coding_and_de...
The LLM aftertaste is terrible but the idea is very nice.
If it's worth doing, why not do it well? This is a tiny book by book standards and writing this text would be a matter of a few weeks at most. And that way it would be much more valuable (and less off-putting)
Perhaps he is busy, and this is a passion project.
As he says, he doesn't have much time to research the entire book.
You think he has "weeks" to write it up for others?
I imagine there are thousands of interesting projects people are doing solo and can't be bothered creating website to share with others for.
If AI can do this- fantastic! Let people moan if they can't see the positives of this. He's not trying to win an award or is paid to create a site for the public.
It's not a passion project if you make it with AI.
How far our standards have fallen if spending 5 minutes typing into a chatbox is "a passion project".
Would be interesting, but the ai images and writing makes me trust it less.
I am very happy to see people make use of AI to do previously impractical work, but the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.
> Not a diary, not a family chronicle - a tool book.
> As reliable as it says on each page - no more and no less.
> Pages without a special note have been editorially reviewed: carefully checked and corrected.
This sounds like an extremely interesting topic but the lack of care in the presentation is disappointing.
“carefully checked and corrected” is also the sort of thing that llm's like to insert when you tell them to carefully check and correct in the prompt, and isn't otherwise really a natural thing to write.
LLMs love all kinds of idioms that indicate quality work (even when it isn't): 'checked', 'correct/corrected', 'witnessed', 'works/working', 'verified', 'validated'. They overuse these to the point that they become flags rather than reassurances.
This [0] is my secret weapon against this kind of slop. Any time I see any of these markers I tell my agent to read this again. Works unreasonably well.
[0] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/birep/bb865b2799d3f86d55f...
Maybe this is because of the translation, I guess the author has written the non-English version first and then got it translated into English with AI, adding some additional explanations if necessary.
That thought certainly crossed my mind, but having worked with people using LLMs for this purpose successfully, this instead comes across as taking a simple idea and asking {model} to expand this two or three sentence idea into a web page.
It may be the translation, however, this project is a passion for him. I would guess the passion is the book itself, and though he wants to share his passion, I imagine creating the actual page for others is tedious compared to the work of discovering the book. I have had the same issue.
If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.
> the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.
But that is typical AI quality. It is a fancified Babelfish 2.0 translator.
Some humans also use AI to "interact" with other humans. They don't seem to understand that this is a problem for some humans. When a human AI slops me, I stop all any every further interaction (assuming I can find out that this human did so. It is not always possible to find that out).
I don't like to frame it in terms of, "this person is using AI, so I am no longer interested in communicating", because it is not really the AI that is the problem. It is the lack of effort put into communication with another human. AI can be extremely helpful for some people (e.g., proofreading text if one's native language isn't English). But this use case is almost never a problem if done carefully because the original ideas were all there in the beginning.
I focus my frustration on writing that is circular, vague, unnecessarily explanatory, etc. In my experience this is a symptom of the fact that there were no original ideas to begin with.
Can anyone tell me how they would have made the paper and the pigments used in the drawings (or would these be called paintings)? Is this water colour? Is it reasonable for me to make my own paper and paints following the same receipts that would have been used to make this book and its contents?
Pigments are a rabbithole that will suck you in and spit you out 10 years later with arcane knowledge about grinding up various gemstones, drying plants and all manner of minerals such as clays and so on. You will also be exceptionally well traveled.
If you're ever in the Netherlands I can recommend a visit to the Zaanse Schans where they have a mill[1] from the days when pigments were ground with windpower. You can see the colors and you'll have a better understanding of why Royal Blue[2] was Royal (because it was incredibly expensive to make a lasting blue pigment).
Fascinating stuff.
[1] https://www.verfmolendekat.com/nl/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine
Thank you for the links, I really appreciate that. I have never been to the Netherlands, but it is someplace I would love to travel one day.
I imagine it would be a rabbit hole, but rabbit holes can be a lot of fun. I will have to work with the poor-man pigments though. No ultra expensive gemstone grinding for me :-).
Poor man pigments: vegetable matter. You can get surprisingly far on that alone. Side effect warning: people may think you need burning at a stake or weighing.
Good quality pestles can be found on flea markets, people hardly ever use them now so they don't appreciate what they've got.
An early project on my CNC machine was a basic set of inside/outside calipers:
https://community.carbide3d.com/t/locking-register-calipers-...
It would be interesting to see what would be involved in making the digital files which would allow re-creating each of these objects.
The entire website looks heavily LLM written/analyzed - and I'm not talking of the design which I'm fine with.
This devalues the scientific value a lot because every line must be checked for correctness and source.
The book itself is very beautiful and I'm thankful for the high quality pictures.
The author says in the introduction that a certain amount of the book is verified. Presence of LLM-use doesn’t inherently make something of less value.
In ways it does though. There are telltale signs of AI writing that once you see it across sites repeatedly, it starts to be annoying to find.
Couple of immediate examples:
- The Codex has 154 pages. 127 of them have been reviewed, 27 not yet. - Each of the 154 pages gets a page of its own.
If an author doesn’t have time to write. Why should I give up my time to read?
Maybe he is translating to English. Maybe he is translating himself and this is an artifact of German.
"If an author doesn’t have time to write. Why should I give up my time to read?"
Perhaps he is taking the time to translate it for you, otherwise you'd have to do it yourself.
> and this is an artifact of German
It isn't.
Can you point to any of those in the linked text?
Our job isnt to review the work of LLMs for free
From the first tool page. Clearly LLM slop.
> Löffelholz does not open his book with a showpiece. He opens it with a practical tool you can adjust: choose a size, clamp it, work.
It's all over.
You could simply read the linked text yourself. This is worse than asking someone to google something for you.
If an author doesn’t have time to write. Why should I give up my time to read?
Because -- if the author is to be believed -- essentially no one bothered to look at this work at all before AI became available to help with it. I had certainly never heard of it before. Had you?
That's the choice being offered. Not between "LLM slop" or "painstaking human authorship", but between something being done or nothing at all being done.
OBVIOUS presence of LLM-use devalues something to the point that you have to wonder why a human is in the loop at all
Using AI to go through an old manuscript has nothing to do with writing up those same results with AI. These are completely separate concerns.
The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself. To understand it fully, to the point where you don't need or even want to hand the work off to an LLM.
Interacting with AI content makes me feel like I'm consuming something that was created purely for engagement farming. Not that human created content wasn't for engagement farming, but noticing an AI tell breaks the suspension of disbelief in a way. It devalues the relationship between creator and consumer, so that genuine care is not being shared. It's like I'm a cow being milked on an industrial engagement farm.
Wow. This is the exact opposite of what that the site is. It is very clear that the author of the web site cares deeply about the material and has put a lot of effort into the work. You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.
Note that (1) this is just your opinion and (2) that he has put a lot less effort into it than others have put into similar endeavors which as a result have a different level of authenticity.
> You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.
Why the free psycho analysis? GP just made a statement.
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We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
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1 point by scrollop 0 minutes ago | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
"The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself."
It may be the translation, however, this project is a passion for him. I would guess the passion is the book itself, and though he wants to share his passion, I imagine creating the actual page for others is tedious compared to the work of discovering the book. I have had the same issue.
If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.
There are likely many people out there doing remarkable work but they can't be bothered creating a website to share with others.
If AI can do that, fantastic - even though some people will moan. There are always people who complain.
> It's like I'm a cow being milked on an industrial engagement farm.
Always were, just now this signal makes people aware of it and they don't like how it makes them feel.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I suppose the implication is that you cannot presume human care with evidence of LLM use, it's considerably more likely that it's an indicator of lack of care, unfortunately.
It's like saying "but a lot of human care goes into factory made X" when comparing it to handmade X. It starts on a lesser footing unless evidence suggests otherwise
If you are deciding to delegate parts to AI, that’s probably a signal that it should just be edited out. If it isn’t worth your time to create, it probably isn’t worth my time to read.
Any amount of slop makes the whole thing feel fake
There’s nothing delusional about what he said.
AI is being used for the most part to shit out as much “content” as possible in order to show ads, sell courses and other products (bonus points if what is sold is itself also pure AI slop), or to finish tasks at work with as little effort as can be done, so that boss man is impressed by the velocity. “Who cares about quality? This is 2026, bro.”
The actual thoughtful use of AI is the minority case. Not the default. We humans are lazy, and when we can get away with less effort we put as little effort as we can into things.
Is the author qualified to verify this book?
I at least appreciate the warning on unreviewed generated pages and excluding them from SEO until reviewed, but it's still all untrustworthy spam by default.
OTOH, it also seems to draw much from https://kdih.badw.de/datenbank/handschrift/49a/4/1 according to the information on "Sources", which sounds genuine.
There was one the other day. Seemed really compelling. History thing where they walked through a statistical life of a regular person at some point in history. Really enjoyed it until I realized the whole thing was basically ai slop. Totally devalued real work for some slop BS. So frustrating.
There are, in fact, countless late medieval manuscripts just like this one. LLMs have been trained on many of them.
What scientific value are you looking for?
As interesting as this appears, I've developed such a strong allergy to LLM writing that I simply cannot consume any of this content
Glad I'm not the only one...
for back in the day this knight had pretty decent 3D perspective rendering skills I mean you can knock the chair but there are a lot worse illustrations and devotional art from the time.
One thing that is mildly interesting about AI writing style is that all the major models use the exact same style. It is pretty foul smelling.
TAG: VIBECODED
I wouldn’t know if the whole thing was AI or not at a glance.
The knights did not have to deal with AI back then. It must have been a simpler life.
Definitely, but also shorter and a lot more violent. And then there were the diseases...
Such AI Prose Wow. It's Not A fucking horrible writing it's an abhorrent word spasm.
Imagine going to a history museum and there’s a sign outside that says “Some of the information here is totally made up”
You'd have to first get past the crowds of people outside talking about how bad the picture frames are.
The author is transparent about the use of AI, but so many negative connotations in the site!!
> But as a single person, I can only take on a project this big with AI as a tool.
That's so not true though. One of my uncles did work like this and it usually took a year or two to fully research a project and write a book but it is definitely doable to do this sort of thing - and much better, frankly - as a single individual. AI makes it a matter of days, but it also makes it next to worthless.
The biggest contribution here is to make an otherwise lesser known book more known.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6ffelholz-Codex
(Couldn't find an English wikipedia page on it)
Or enlist others or do a little bit at a time or…
The knight who wrote it took on a larger project without AI or a computer at all.