> This is such a well written story, [...] you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read.
Don't forget to give credit to the LLM too which wrote the story for him.
Don't forget to give credit to the LLM too which wrote the story for him.
Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.
At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because
1. the heuristic is flawed
2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.
One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.
I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
Writing is not about writing. Admittedly, that is a trick sentence [what does it mean??] and it exists because I'm trying to get you to re-evaluate my next words. And, I am doing this because I think you are missing the point.
Writing is about organizing your thoughts. You cannot have someone else organize your thoughts. Once you approach writing as a thought excercise, and not an output excercise, then there is a world of nuance and writing is more than just organizing your thoughts.
Further, you have allegedly spent 3 years on this. I know you're busy. That said, you can certainly spend 3 days on writing if you spent 3 years working on this.
Please don't double down on acting like everyone is just a hater. There is more depth to the criticism than I think is being acknowledged.
P.s, if you feel "blocked" writing and think of it as just about output, try this: (0) Ask yourself what you want to convey, why; to whom. (1) Write without inhibition (2) Edit, cut, delete. Refer to (0); look at what seems higher word count in proportion to its value.
There are other tips to editing and writing. This is one rough off the cuff formula that I think tracks & may benefit you, especially since you seem to see yourself as a worse writer than you may actually be.
Speaking of LLMs, I recently used Claude Code on my own old codebase to do such a writeup, and it ended up a very nice read for myself too - Claude managed to explain some parts of what I built better than I did :D
No, do. Really.
There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.
That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.
People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
I enjoyed the narrative. It was true. Who cares if it was written by a ghost writer, an AI or anything else.
Also, what are you comparing this post to? Because you should compare it to the author’s own writing and according to the author, his writing is not that good.
If you don’t like something simply move along. Constructive criticism is great but the volume of overly negative and honestly nasty replies like yours are not in the spirit of HN.
Good, I will continue to voice it. Unfortunately it takes me several thousand times longer to complain about AI slop polluting the bulletin than it does to populate the bulletin with AI slop, which is the actual nastiness going on here.
Yes, this has been inspired by a senior management figure in my company posting a clearly LLM assited 500 word slack message that could have been 2 lines.
'You used a tool I don't like' is really missing the point.
'You generated text that is long and a bit boring and will probably include falsehoods.' is a more accurate description of why people pick up on this - the style is an indicator of using a tool that generates convincing garbage.
The labor theory of value doesn't work in economics and it also doesn't work in literary criticism. You should spend time reading something if reading it is valuable. You shouldn't if it isn't.
Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.
AI changes things so that you can produce text that seem like it was written with care and effort very easily automatically. It requires significantly more effort from the reader to figure out that it is worthless.
It really is different.
This was true in the past, and is still true now.
> Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.
This isn't true now and wasn't true in the past.
Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.