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Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

This article, despite clocking in at nearly 10,000 words, appears to have been written in only two days. In fact the author has written five engineering articles in the last week, seeming to average around 5000+ words per article. What a spurt of productivity! Coincidentally, the article happens to be filled with pithy headers and constant sensationally dramatic contrasts that are out of place in long-form technical writing, but which LLMs are known to spam ad nauseum because they are effective for hooking attention in clickbait rags. Curious, that.

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Author here: I have a bunch of drafts that I haven't gotten around to publishing for quite some time, and I'm on parental leave, which affords me a little more time than usual to get things published. I don't have a lot of additional ideas left in the tank.

That seemed a lot more plausible to the rational people who are careful readers than all the speculative baseless accusations.

Well, I didn't get LLM vibes from it at all, and the article is deeply relevant to the engineering I am working on at the present (migrating a monolith to a highly event-sourced workflow-based distributed application), and I deeply appreciated this work!

Funny how that guy claims to be able to spot "sensationally dramatic contrasts" yet doesn't understand the concept of drafts, or saving writing for later.

Too many smartasses commenting on the skills (or lack thereof) of others just because of "AI".

1. You literally don't know when/how many days the article was written in, so not sure what that "written in only 2 days!" is about unless you're counting the days from their last post. You don't seem to understand the concept of drafts.

2. "What a spurt of productivity!" = a petty personal snide that's not in good faith at all.

3. You provide nothing in terms of what this article gets wrong or the technicalities of it. If you want to discuss flaws with the article, be specific instead of "this screams AI! clickbait rags!"

As someone who works with a LOT of AI-generated content, I'm pretty sure this is not AI-written.

Idk I'm halfway through it and am really resonating with its points AND missing the telltale signs of ai.

So either his prompt is making the writing more palatable, or maybe he's just prolific.

In either case, I would count this as a w

It would explain why the information density is so low. I got about halfway through hoping for something clever, then started scanning, then just gave up.

10k words for "migrating code and data is a headache". Yeah. Next.

Counterpoint: I found this article more insighful and better researched than most of the posts that usually stay for days in HN first page.

Could be shorter though, and the title might not be 100% spot on and a bit clickbaity indeed.

Also, it does not shout "AI generated" to me. The style is pleasant enough (but for the repetitions).

I honestly can't relate this comment with that article. Have we read the same thing?

If this was written by AI, then AI is now capable of writing insightful long-form technical posts.

You know what triggered me as likely flag for LLM - the fonts, the style, the abundant comments.

Makes me think - what if all of this was written by an LLM agent?

Excuse me what? Fonts? How do fonts signal LLM usage now

I've seen a bunch of interactive toys and visualizations generated by AI in the past year. For some reason they really like monotype "techy" fonts.

It's just one of the signals - not the primary one.

I came away impressed with this article. Whatever he is prompting might have crossed the uncanny valley.

I got the impression he tweaked bits of it. It's still extremely apparent though.

There's a huge amount of valuable content in the article. People saying silly nonsense like '10k words for "migrating code and data is a headache"' missed out on all of it--which may well be fine for them because not everyone needs to know these things, but this is an excellent article for those who do. And rejecting this article because an LLM may have been involved is irrational ideology.

My biggest problem with the article is the title, which is somewhat the inverse of clickbait--functional programmers are his apparent intended audience but the content is much broader.

How do you know when the articles were written?

> appears to have been written in only two days

> the author has written five engineering articles in the last week

considering you can only see when the articles are published, not written, I'd say you're trying too hard...

The author had all these massive articles all on fairly different topics ready to go... and then decided to pump 4 of them in a span of 4 days.

If it looks like a duck...

...then it is clearly AI?

It isn't impossible that it's AI, but assuming writing and publishing happen at the same time would also lead you to conclude that Anne Frank wrote from the afterlife.

Not clearly, but given the world we live in makes me highly suspicious that AI was involved to one degree or another.

Plenty of people out there are happy to let AI do most of the work while claiming it as their own.

"This matters because..." - dead giveaway.

What pity headers?

Even if it is, or isn't ai, the content is in fact correct.

There is no 'one' state of your application, unless you literally do maintenance window deploys and 0 queues and keep everything sync.

These headers are quite exhausting:

> Message queues are version time capsules

> Event sourcing: the version problem as a way of life

> Temporal and bitemporal databases: time as a first-class citizen

> Semantic drift: the type didn’t change, but the meaning did

> Knowing what’s running changes everything

> What if the old code just kept working?

> The right tools, pointed at the wrong level

Presentation matters as much as content. Particularly if you want somebody to read 10,000 words, making that reading go down smoothly is a good thing to strive for. If this was by chance written by a human who happened to have absorbed LLM-like writing tendencies, I would still find fault in this article for how it is written, and would suggest they spend more time revising it rather than publishing a 5k-10k word technical article daily. Much like writing code, sheer lines written is not the goal; the actual goal is to succinctly and clearly represent your ideas in as refined a form as possible. This article dragged on and on and on, with fatiguing prose, for an idea that can be well expressed without such length.

Perhaps this is just a form of technical writing you're unfamiliar with? Those titles are pretty standard for what I consider good technical writing section headers. LLM writing tendencies are tendencies LLMs have integrated by encountering those tendencies. If your assessment standard for AI is just "common best practices for a subset of good writers", then I think perhaps you need to adjust how you assess to be a bit more nuanced.

For some reason people frequently suggest that my problem with LLM writing is that it's too good. Allow me to restate that I find fault with how the article is written, and that I do not in any way perceive this to be good writing. The flaws happen to manifest in a way that I would expect LLM flaws to manifest, which I also do not find to be good writing. I do not find LLMs to have absorbed good technical writing tendencies at all. Instead they absorb sensationalist tendencies that are likely both more common in their dataset and that are likely intentionally selected for in the reinforcement learning phase. Writing which is effective, in the same way that clickbait headlines and Youtube thumbnails are effective, but not good. I felt as though this article was, through its headers and overuse of specific rhetorical devices, constantly trying to grab my attention in that same shallow manner. This gets tiring at length, and good technical writing does not need to engage in such tendencies.

If you disagree and find this to be good writing, you are entitled to your opinion, but nonetheless this is my own feedback on the article.

> For some reason people frequently suggest that my problem with LLM writing is that it's too good.

> I felt as though this article was, through its headers and overuse of specific rhetorical devices, constantly trying to grab my attention in that same shallow manner.

I think perhaps you're quick to assess a certain type of writing, which many see as done quite well and in a way that's approachable and is good at retaining interest, as AI. Perhaps you just don't like this type of writing that many do, and AI tries to emulate it, and you're keying on specific aspects of both the original and the emulation and because you don't appreciate either it's hard for you to discern between them? Or maybe there is no difference between the AI and non-AI articles that utilize these, and it's just your dislike of them which colors your view?

I, for one, found the article fairly approachable and easy to read given the somewhat niche content and that it was half survey of the current state of our ability to handle change in systems like these. Then again, I barely pay any attention to section titles. I couldn't even remember reading the ones you presented. Perhaps I've trained myself to see them just as section separators.

In any case, nothing in this stuck out as AI generated to me, and if it was, it was well enough done that I don't feel I wasted any time reading it.

I am a technical writer. This article is not good technical writing.

Good technical writing allows you to get to and understand the point in a minimum of time, has a clear and obvious structure, and organizes concepts in such a way that their key relationships are readily apparent. In my opinion this article achieves none of these things (and it also is just bad insofar as its thesis is confused and misleading in a very basic way—namely the relationship between functional programming philosophy and distributed systems design is far more aligned than it suggests, and it sets up a false dichotomy of FP versus systems, when really the dichotomy is just one of different levels of design (one could write the exact same slop article about what OOP "gets wrong" about systems—it gets it "wrong" because low level programming paradigms techniques are in fact about structuring programs, not systems, and system design is largely up to designers—the thesis is basically "why don't these pragmatic program-leave techniques help me design systems at scale" or in other words "why don't all these hammering techniques help me design a house?")

I would only loosely categorize this as technical writing, depending on how you categorize technical writing. It seems much more a survey of problems and discussion piece, with notes about projects making inroads on the problem. It's definitely not a "this is how you solve this problem, and these are the clear steps to do so" type of article. Maybe that's some of the disconnect in how we view it. If I was hoping that this communicated a clear procedure or how to accomplish something, I would be disappointed. I don't think that was their intention.

I came away with some additional understanding of the problem, and thinking there are various nascent techniques to address this problem, none of them entirely sufficient, but that it's being worked on from multiple directions. I'm not sure the article was aiming for more than that.

I'm a highly literate reader and writer of technical topics, and there are a lot of bad technical writers who think they aren't. Except perhaps for the title, which is way too narrow, the article is excellent writing about a technical topic (which is quite different from technical writing)--but then I actually read it, so I know that he doesn't talk about a dichotomy between FP and systems, but rather between single programs and systems, and he explicitly says that his points aren't restricted to FP, but that because FP addresses the single program issues so well, FP programmers are particularly prone to missing the problem.

Can you please share an example of what you perceive to be good writing so we can compare?

Sure, I guess? I feel like this is getting rather in the weeds and will not necessarily lead the conversation in any kind of particularly productive direction, but I will nonetheless take the opportunity to promote what I consider to be excellent writing. Dan Luu is a favorite of mine, and offers what I find to be a much more rewarding use of reading time. A sample picked basically at random: https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/

Ok that's fair, he's a pretty unusual or at least he's a writer that cares a great deal about his writing, he's talked in the past about his writing gets getting passes from people so there's at least a quality bar there

Thanks for clarifying, in this case it might be comparing apples to oranges as I'd be surprised if most people approach they're writing like he does

The article is smooth reading and technically excellent.

I mean, I am dealing with much of the same problems mentioned in the article, and I found it super enlightening. It was neat to read about undecidability of the general problem of version updates, about the two-version window, and some of the solutions folks have come up with.

meh... I have tons of articles that I write and leave hanging only to pick up later.

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