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Comment by lmorchard | Hacker News Reader

Sure, I ran the post past an LLM for some ideas on clarity and tightening it up - but I wrote, edited, and published it myself.

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It's increasingly clear that the LLMs leave more of a mark than authors realize when they run their writing through for a touching-up. This has been coming up a lot lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346449.

That's why readers end up reacting to the LLM imprints rather than the content.

I don't mean to be critical because it's a good article! But I bet if you shared the version before it was "tightened up", most of us would prefer it.

(I suppose I'd better add that this isn't a criticism of LLMs either - it's about figuring out how to use them well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342045)

As I'm asking folks what bits they think are LLM imprints, they keep showing me bits that I originally wrote. It's really weird.

Maybe the imprints aren't on your text, but on your soul, my dear friend :)

I hear you. This stuff is really messy and imprecise right now.

If the core of the post is yours I think it is fine, but there are so many pieces which the LLM always uses in these things that they stand out more than emdashes.

Some examples.

> I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.

> I kept having this nagging sense that we were mourning different things.

> Here's what I notice about my grief: none of it is about missing the act of writing code. It's about the world around the code changing.

> If you're mourning the context—the changing web, the shifting career landscape, the uncertainty—that's real too, but it's more actionable.

It uses these kinds of patterns over and over that it becomes obvious Just go on LinkedIn.

"It's not X, its Y"

I mean, the irony is that those sentences were in my original draft before running it past the LLM

It's too bad it has so much grating LLM-voice. I don't think you typed all the LLM-isms, and they make it hard to know how much to trust that the rest is what you intended to convey.

I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't think it sounds particularly different than how I've written other posts.

I've read through your comments on HN and you really don't. Comments and a blog post are different things but the difference in voice is stark. In your comments it's clear someone writing it cares about things.

My comments are often more off-the-cuff than my blog posts—I spend more time editing the posts, usually

It's the split. Many of us are mourning, you are not.

Maybe the stages of grief are not aligned yet. Or maybe it's as your post says there are two types of people.

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