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Comment by linkregister | Hacker News Reader

Having only heard of Pi in passing, I derived value from this article. I plan to experiment with it as a replacement for claude-code and gemini-cli.

[meta] I frequently see criticism about an article having been obviously written by an LLM. Often the author apologizes for it in the HN comments. I wonder what is wrong with me that I am totally unaware of this LLM stench.

I have gotten a lot of value from hearing people criticize candidates' LLM usage in technical interviews and conversations. I adjusted my style from talking about axioms and best practices. Instead I always relate a personal anecdote to explain a technical decision. This has been universally well-received.

So I am hoping that someone can respond with some helpful holistic answers beyond a checklist of "uses em-dashes" and "says 'not X, but Y'". I suspect my writing style could be easily declared as having been written by an LLM.

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See https://github.com/blader/humanizer for a skill that helps avoid some of the common LLM “tells”. It’s based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

I think the main objections are the effort mismatch between writing and reading, and the likely low informational content and errors in the text, which the author may or may not have read. Some of this like the bit I quoted below is pretty nonsensical, comparing lobsters and quiet engines.

The writing definitely has a stench and is full of breathless comparisons which pretend some very minor thing is a breakthrough. This is annoying and trite and people dislike it for that alone but also for the more important reasons above.

This blog post could have been a lot shorter. I’d honestly rather just read the prompt with a link to pi. People like this author should just publish their prompt IMO and they will continue to be called out on it till this bubble pops.

Are you referring to:

> "The lobster gets the attention. The engine gets quietly forked into production."

This line?

It's funny, cause it was this very sentence that convinced me this article is mostly human written. It captures what the author is trying to say (the lobster = OpenClaw, the engine = Pi; OpenClaw got a disproportional amount of attention from the public), and the nature of the project (Pi's author encourages people to fork Pi and ask it to add features for itself, instead of submitting feature PR).

It's not something that LLM would give you if you just prompt it to "write an article to hype Pi up."

This phrase is definitely LLM generated. The false opposition of two sentences, odd phrasing, and unnecessary use of the 'quietly' adverb give it away.

One phrase isn't particularly important, but it's kind of annoying to read articles like this and realise half way through that it is just a blob of generated text, when the author could have said what they want in a paragraph and be done with it.

Writer of the article here. English is my second language, so my workflows tidy up the writing for me, for sure, but it is not 'write an article for me' kind of a deal guys. I wish rather than shitting on things like that, we could focus on the actual topic. But I do understand that in a world with so much ai slop, people are alert about these things.

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