While I appreciate and agree with the key points of the post, Claude's writing style fingerprints are all over it and I guess it's even more exhausting to read someone's AI written article.
Turning to the substance of the article: why do people feel the need to run this fast? I have certainly experimented with letting coding agents run amok. The first few times you try it, it feels like a superpower. Then you start examining the icky choices they made in a codebase that is now a dense forest. Then you have to expend a bunch of effort beating it back into submission. Or I guess you can YOLO and throw more AI at it, but then I agree with the person quoted saying "at that point, what am I still doing here?" This is not a satisfying or sustainable way to build, and there really is no reason other than hype and FOMO to do it.
There probably is a correct way to do this, but your average "vibe coder", or even a competent solo dev just yoloing a project, are not implementing such harnesses. In the former case, they may not be able to; in the latter, you're probably better off in 1:1 human to agent workflow due to indeterminate/bad outputs and the amount of back-and-forth in prompts/specs/reviews required to get high-quality work
Then again, I saw Matz harness for his compiled ruby project was just like perms.allow find and grep. No skills, no agents.md or anything like that. Would love to see those prompts! I'm sure the fact that it was Matz had a lot to do with that working, though
Because if they don't they feel like they will be replaced by someone who will
Basically a bad relation to labor and sustainable lifelong work.
But of course the AI guys are preying on this anxiety in order to dominate. They are all over HN, either personally or with their bots. Which is why HN is no longer a place that you could go to get mainly unbiased anecdotes and experience. That is still available but it is being drowned out by FUD because the average HN user is now the mark.
- Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally.
- Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI.
- Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used in that context in the article.
I don't think you should put much stock in the output of pangram.com.
The classifier itself has a very low rate of false positives: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2...
My standard reply to claims like this is: post a pre-2022 link with an LLM style that matches your claims.
Usually people claim "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how people write". Your claim is only a little different: "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how corporate writes".
You may be correct, but I'd still like to see a pre-2022 link confirming this.
It's actually possible to counter some of this stuff with skills and guard rails. The author clearly has not mastered how to do that and sound more authentic.
It's all a bit stunted, cringe, long winded, repetitive, etc.
I find it very tiresome and repetitive and simply too grating to read at this point, after already working with Claude all day.
Dashline - present
Yes, it's AI-written
There are certain writing styles, which even if you wrote them all yourself, most people will now attribute to AI. The all-too-common em-dash, yes sure. Guess what, it's a thing that was actually taught as "the thing to use if you write properly". So guess what lots of folks consciously put into their writing to sound more professional even before AI. Bingo!
Similarly CVs. A lot of the stuff that lots of us complain about post-AI was "good practice to do" pre-AI. But most people didn't bother. Couldn't be bothered. Now that AI was trained on it and people ask their AIs to write CVs, it's all over the place.
A cover letter that actually picks up on the actual job description posted and connects it up to your CV? That used to be hard work and most people didn't bother. It made you stand out. Now it "reeks of AI" :shrug:
And try to substitute them, you may; but the bell might still ring.
(Yeah it stinks we have to adapt to avoid sounding like a model, especially for the best writers who were probably ripped off a lot more than the rest of us.)
Firefox doesn't seem to discriminate between em-dashes and hyphens using ctrl-F so I'm not sure about those.
Having said that the tone REEKS of AI generation, so meh.