Human Routers of Machine Words
borretti.me
borretti.me
The argument that communicating an idea is a necessary part of shaping it feels counterintuitive, but it’s really true.
Whether it’s debugging, ‘big’ writing, or even down to the scale of a tweet (RIP Twitter) or an HN comment, I’ve often had the experience of starting to explain a process or opinion and only then discovering that it’s inconsistent or even indefensible.
I suspect (I hope!) that this is something everyone can empathize with.
We have reached the point where you have college professors who defend[0] using AI to write scientific papers (in a seemingly AI-written tweet). Everywhere I go online, I see spam written with the exact same voice. Scientific journals and literary magazines are inundated with AI-written submissions. Software projects have shut contributions because maintainers are tired of reading AI-written slop pull requests.
What's the right tone to take here? "Please stop defecting"? "I wish you would kindly stop ruining the commons"? I don't know. Maybe, if we raise the reputational cost of slop, we get less of it.
I mean, I think there’s a middle ground between defending all uses of AI writing and saying “It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.”
Edit: or “if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass”
The author should learn how to write properly and communicate ideas in a less sexist and disgusting way if he wants to make a point about writing well.
The blog post has terrible writing sorry.
That's your fantasies, not author's. He merely implied that one can obviously decide whom to allow to fuck one's wife. He hasn't implied that wife's consent is unnecessary or automatic.
Ignoring the usual LLM rant, that's an interesting observation. Those conflicting goals reflect a problem that comes up quite often - the conflict between efficient volume production and flexibility. It's solvable for programming languages. That's what just-in-time compilers are for. Anything can change, but in practice, most things don't change that often. It's a caching problem.
This hits much harder in manufacturing. An extreme case is what was once called "Detroit automation" - totally specialized lines of machine tools that could make V8 auto engines all day and all night with very little human attention. But that's all they could make. Even switching to a V6 or a different cylinder size required new equipment. The other extreme is 3D printing in metal. It works, but it's so slow it's only useful for high-value items. Space-X makes Raptor engines that way. Nobody makes auto engine blocks that way.
A decade ago, there was a huge enthusiasm for 3D printing for making everything. That's declined. It's become another machine in the machine shop. It works, but if you want to bang out thousands of something, injection molding or stamping is far faster. There's a sizable tooling cost, and then each item is cheap. This is the tradeoff between efficiency and dynamics.
A year or two ago, someone posted a link on HN to a video of someone making a small screw on a lathe. Nobody does that except out of desperate need for a non-standard part. Small screws are made by special purpose machines that bang them out at machine-gun speeds. American culture does not know this any more. Too few Americans today have been inside manufacturing plants. The culture has forgotten where stuff comes from.
* JITs can be faster than C by specialising at runtime on runtime-knowable values such as the length of the input or the tag of a tagged union.
"And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows."
Maybe it simply comes down to how things get used and people are trying to figure out how to use this strange new tool that's available to us.
What I generally tend to do is have a long conversation with an LLM for at least 30 minutes, and then have that turn into the first draft. It might be considered lazy, but I've never been very good at editing prose - I always end up making a mistake that makes it more confusing.
If after the conversation I find it's an idea worth sharing (usually with colleagues), then getting the LLM to turn it into something readable is the best option available to me. If I had to do it myself, it likely wouldn't make it before I move onto something else. And it has had my genuine input throughout the long conversation, I wouldn't call it incoherent nor am I an idiot for not being able to express myself in long form writing
Even if you are smart you still have to budget your mental energy and one way to do that is to delegate tasks to AI.
Some people might hate writing documentation but love to write code and vice versa.
Delegating things you don’t want to spend time on is ok in my book.
That’s why the analogy “might as well let Claude hump your wife” does not hold, unless you really don’t enjoy that process.
OP is quite good with words and has a high standard and world view. The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise.
It's a medium to pack the idea into "something" that represents the idea. It was never about a finished and polished product. It's the sign language for deaf people - a way to show your thoughts.
I'm certain that the people presenting their github repo do put quite some effort (= prompt work) into it, which IS the thinking process. At the end of the day, most developers are introverts that can think very well but have hard times with soft skills.
Everyone wants to be proud of his work, let us don't blame them how the show it off.
What?! This is nonsense. You’re really making the argument that most people getting LLMs to write for them just couldn’t communicate in any way five years ago?
But I don't feel the same way about AI writing. It feels totally different in a way that good spelling does not.
Even if I liked the style, I would object strongly to that style quickly becoming a monoculture.
We're on a path to a style optimized for shallow attention maximization becoming the majority of text we read.
Isn't this a bit circular? They're not communicating to the AI through a BCI.
Sign language is a fully fledged language, as capable of expressing deep and complex thoughts as spoken English. Likening it to some kind of prosthetic for second-rate thinkers is insulting.
Unfortunately due to how tasteless this passage was, I won’t be reading this or your future writing.
Alas, for rude, tasteless behavior, such as replacing your own authentic self-expression with the mellifluous spew of verbal diarrhea that bullshit machines slather across all surfaces they touch, rude, tasteless metaphors are the only fitting ones.
I'm not against authentic self-expression, but this is more about being wrapped up in ones own self-importance.
In a better world that would happen in school and as a normal part of growing up, but at least in the US, that mostly doesn't happen.
If humans use LLMs to write, it's much more likely they will never uncover the unique perspectives they could share with the world.
So, for those whose parents and teachers failed them, embracing, encouraging, and engaging their clumsy, self-centered rudeness is, I think, the best path forward.
Granted, when it is clumsy, self-centered, and rude, one of the more helpful things we can do is offer the critiques that clearly and coherently point that out, as you've done here.
...though I stand by my claim that using LLMs to write is actually deeply offensive and rude, a rejection of what it means to be human, and that it should be met with strong rejections.
One of the best and worst things to ever happen to self-expression was the internet. While it exposes us to so many new ways of thinking, it can also be repressive in so many ways, not to mentions limits many of us from engaging with those in the immediate area. Also it holds onto our worst outputs forever!
You might see why I really like the point about embracing imperfect communication and expression for so many reasons.
I think it's fine to strongly reject non-human communication for certain (maybe even many purposes), but there are a lot of "production" type situations (boilerplate code, CRUD systems) that don't require a human grinding away at it, and humanity benefits from using it's time more wisely. Defining what is "intellectual" work versus this "repetitive" work is kinda tough, and it is probably different for everyone. There is a certain amount of grinding necessary, and some move through it faster than others.
In any case, thanks for the response.
Laziness.
Yes, conceptually it’s something about surrendering one’s voice and agency to a subpar machine. Or something like that. (Though that persistence-suggestive neutering metaphor is probably a unwarranted exaggeration.) In practice though it’s more like “I don’t want to write anything, but some poorly written document I’ll just proofread to be not too blatantly wrong beats having absolutely nothing. PRs welcome.”
It might be not the best decision, sure. Quite arguably, a wrong one. Still, I find it concerning that it’s sufficient for the author to dehumanize someone, even in a jest of edginess. Like wtf dude chill down, as if the world isn’t mad enough already.
[0]: https://blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/ai-generated-papers-in-th...
I very explicitly tried to separate this third-party perception and actual first-party intent. Well, my guess of it, of course - but I find it hard to believe someone decides to LARP Adeptus Mechanicus and goes along the lines of “why don’t I cede my voice to the Machine Spirit”, while “why don’t I task this tool to write notes instead of doing it myself” is a lot more plausible.
Choices and outcomes are two very different things.
Because obviously someone who is rude must be wrong about everything. If someone calls someone a waste of biomass, by the rule of conservation of insults that must imply they are not one. Also we must be civil and polite to people who are destroying civilization.
Damn, that is so hurtful. I'm sorry if English is my third language. But for my project documents I would love to read it like a proper documentation so I'm thankful for AI.
Regardless, I would rather read a thousand pages of imperfect writing than a single page of machine slop.