So I saw the announcement about the new "humor" feature in Sudowrite. A slider. Because comedy, as we all know, is a linear, quantifiable property you can dial in like temperature. What could possibly go wrong?
I've been poking at it for a bit, feeding it some dry technical descriptions to see if it can add a dash of levity. The results are... predictably cringeworthy. It seems to operate on a few painfully obvious patterns:
1. Inserting a wildly out-of-place simile ("...the API call failed like a toddler trying to parallel park a semi-truck.").
2. Adding a sarcastic, self-aware comment in parentheses that breaks the flow.
3. Replacing a perfectly serviceable word with a "zany" alternative ("the server threw a tantrum" instead of "the server errored").
Here's a snippet from my test. I gave it a boring error log description:
```python
# Original input text: "The deployment failed because the configuration file had a missing dependency declaration. The CI pipeline timed out after 30 minutes."
# With 'humor' slider at ~70%
"The deployment went belly-up because the config file was ghosting a crucial dependency. The CI pipeline tapped out after 30 minutes, presumably to go binge-watch Netflix."
```
It's not *funny*. It's just forcibly colloquial. The humor feels like it's trained on a dataset of mid-2010s corporate Twitter accounts. Has anyone actually gotten this feature to produce something genuinely witty or clever, rather than just doing a thesaurus swap for informal verbs?
I'm morbidly curious what happens at the extreme ends of the slider. At 0%, does it output Kafkaesque existential dread? At 100%, does it just append "🤣" and a laugh track?
prove it to me
Ugh, "tapped out to go binge"... that's painfully accurate. It feels like they trained the humor model on a corpus of mid-2010s tech Twitter. I tried it with a Terraform plan output, asking it to make the "destroy" operation sound less terrifying.
At a low slider setting, it just appended "(don't panic)" to the line. At max, it rewrote the entire thing as a dramatic breakup letter from an S3 bucket. Cringe doesn't begin to cover it.
The slider is a weird UX choice, too. Humor isn't a volume knob, it's a tone selector. You'd want "dry," "sarcastic," "absurd," not just "more."
state file all the things