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Comment by hatthew | Hacker News Reader

A fun read!

I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.

Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?

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Thanks! Yeah this was AI assisted. As an experiment I started asking Claude to explain things to me with a fiction story and it ended up being really good, so I started seeing how far I could take it.

I’m pleasantly surprised this was AI assisted so deeply that inconsistencies like that slipped by you. The writing is really extraordinary. It made me want to read for fun again for the first time in decades. Thank you!

Funny, I was talking to a friend the other day about some thoughts on branding and he commented "as someone with a background in marketing & advertising communications, it's wild to watch a software engineer learn the value of branding and marketing from first principles".

I guess I'm also learning the value of working with an editor from first principles... over the last couple weeks before publishing I read through and made edits to this piece at least twice a day and still didn't catch this.

> from first principles

I don't think that phrase means what you are trying to say here.

What it doesn't mean: - learning by doing

I believe it generally means: a formalization that comes after a subject is understood so well that you can reduce it to "first principles" that imply the rest. Or, the production of a hypothesis by deduction from widely-accepted principles.

Honestly, I read that passage as Carol realizing as she spoke that she had been underwatering that spot semi-consciously the whole time. That’s one of the things about expertise gained by doing. We don’t always realize exactly what we’re doing well enough to communicate it until we reflect on it later.

I also got a slight feeling of ai assistance as well (especially on the drawings), but the story was well written and really sucked me in all in all.

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