Comment by davekiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davekiss | Hacker News Reader

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hi! Dave here (a human, like you) — sometimes it's easy to forget there's a human on the other side, so I won't hold your thrashing too close.

1.) I've been writing both code and blogs for a long time. The feeling of having a skillset cultivated over a decade plus suddenly feel irrelevant is very real. Nothing about this post is unrepresentative of my perspective on what we're all going through. I don't think it's trash, but everyone is entitled to how they feel.

2.) I am shipping more code and words in the past month than I have in a long time, and yes, the process been AI-assisted — but _not_ AI derived. Anyone who has a personal blog can tell you first hand how it's the easiest channel to let slide, but I am of the camp that I'd rather have my thoughts exist in some form then die in the cavities of my head. This is true for both exploratory product ideas and recent personal writing.

3.) I'm no stranger to long-form articles. I can do it alone. Does that mean I should? I find it super interesting how those in tech are a-ok with AI-assisted programming, but other mediums are shunned. I'm a musician and write my music the old-fashioned way because I personally consider it my art. I probably wouldn't love listening to generative music. Some blogs I'd probably consider my art too. Others? I care more that the idea is represented in public than I do about the way it got there. My process has been dictate the idea -> work with Claude Opus 4.5 to structure it -> revise where the LLM misses the mark -> publish. It's been a force multiplier and I've had more traffic to my website in the past week than I had looking back at least 6 months. Clearly, the ideas resonate with others.

Does that mean I should stop? Is it more prudent that the idea dies due to its inability to climb the priority list? The whole point of these things are to use them as a tool. I'm not even defending this process, but I _am_ exploring what it means to use them effectively.

Good news; more on this will be posted soon, should you opt in(!) to read any further.

Here's my metric for "LLM-assisted" anything: if I, as someone who is well-informed on LLMs and pays close attention to the content I consume, can't tell an LLM generated the article/code/image/music/voice, it's fine and indicates that you as a person put enough effort into shaping the output to claim it as your own. If you can't even be bothered to do that much, to make it not completely obvious that an LLM generated it, you have no right to call it "assisted" or stake any ownership of the content. And I think it is frankly insulting to your readers that you would expect them to read something you couldn't even bother prioritising enough to write. If your ideas are actually worth sharing with the world, they would be worth making the time to write about.

And to be especially clear, my objection is not rooted in the moral aspect of LLM generation (although they are frequently used to plagiarise as well). My objection is that if I can tell the LLM generated it, it means the content is genuinely garbage. LLM output for writing is garbage. So too for code. So too for art. With enough human effort on top of it (usually more than doing it from scratch, IME), you can get it into a not-garbage state, but you didn't, and instead I wasted my time reading part of an article in which the writing was too bad for me to finish it.

From my perspective, the internet I once knew has been destroyed. The spambots won. Now spambots are openly accepted, promoted, reach the front page all the time. Somehow it is not a moderation policy to kill spambot posts and ban offenders. All because spambot technology advanced enough to fool people who are just consuming content passively. And now I have to sift through so, so much garbage to find the people who are still putting effort into creating content. Their work is being buried. It feels like living in a surreal nightmare for the past two years.

Footnote: Although I called the content you posted garbage, this is not an attack on you, because you did not write the content. I have not personally insulted you, so I hope that rather than taking this personally, you might reflect on whether this is really the way you want to express your ideas to the world. You might get views, but are your ideas really resonating? A lot of people mindlessly scroll the internet to kill time rather than critically engaging with content and digesting it. Is your ideal audience one who reads your idea and then forgets about it seconds later as they move on to the next shiny thing on the screen?

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