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Comment by sinab | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the demo! I like the concept. However, I personally find that the writing style you've designed for reads very strongly as AI-generated. For example, opening a section with phrases like "Here's the irony: after automating everything up to this point," or "Turning emoji into images solved the missing-font problem and created a subtler one."

These are both strong tells of AI-generated prose, though I find it surprisingly difficult to articulate exactly why. It makes me wonder whether your style has evolved to sound more like AI-generated prose, or whether AI-generated prose has evolved to sound more like you!

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Another that hits me is the over-the-top dramatization:

> I’m not going to tell you to write 5,500 tests for your novel. For most books, most of this is wildly disproportionate — and that’s the point.

I too smell guns smoking: "re-pins [...] loud", "honest", ... Cool stuff nevertheless!

Fair, and I think this is the most interesting feedback here, especially because I made the same observation in the blog post itself:

> One of these caught me. `validateHypotheticalHooks` flagged the opening of a paragraph I was certain I’d written myself — and I had. But reading it back cold, it did sound ghost-authored; I’d absorbed the cadence from reading too much generated text and produced a fluent imitation of nothing.

As for the book, "trust me, I'm human" isn't going to cut it here (we literally prove humanity on the internet by training robots to act more like humans). As I posted earlier in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337307), most of the book's chapters began as blog posts that I've published for over a decade, well before AI slop came into the picture. The book is those, refined. 2026 me can't Terminator myself into creating a retroactive paper trail.

And thanks for the feedback. Human Ben is going to take another pass at the post and rewrite those you flagged so that they don't take away from the message.

Man even your comments sound like they’re written by an LLM

Look at the landing site for the book. The article and book are vibe-written. This is alarming for material meant to market a book.

Count the number of times it brags about a specific quantity.

Count the number of false insights, sentences made to elevate the obvious into the profound.

Count the number of em dashes. Count the number of times an inanimate object or verb is used as a noun. Observe the textbook Claude design, full of glows and embodying all the worst aspects of web 2.0 landing page culture.

https://open-and-async.com/

> Fun isn’t a distraction—it’s a retention strategy. Self-care isn’t weakness; it’s operational discipline

> The book in one page / The playbook, start to finish / Ten parts, each building on the last. Here’s the path.

The most alarming part is it appears Ben either did not bother to review and edit the content, or was not adept enough to recognize it as deficient. That didn't prevent them from posting it directly to hacker news via their own account without even a Show HN. They consider this material to be ready for an audience and that's concerning to me.

Yours instantly! 576 pages!

It's so very clear why he thought it was a good idea to have a regex validator to check that he doesn't imply he still works at Github.

"i dont work at github"

"Yes, you're absolutely right. I apologize for the mistake and have edited the document accordingly.

reads War and Peace system prompt

Here is how we can programmatically and scientifically avoid this problem in the future:

1. Add to the regex validator library: We can add to the regex validator library an additional entry to catch any future instances of this mistake. This is a low-cost, high-yield approach---regex runs with deterministic and repeatable results, with the added benefit that its big-O runtime scales at most linearly with the size of the text for most use cases (Hartmann, 2018).

*Three other braindead ideas*

Which future-proofing strategy shall we take?"

"sure 1"

"Um ackshually your writing looks like AI and that is so problematic" wags finger

This is how you people sound.

You can't recognize AI. Nobody can without training specifically to recognize AI, and eve then, it's only been shown to be successful with a language with an online corpus significantly smaller than English.

The thing LLMs are best at in the entire world is imitating human writing. So all you're really doing is discouraging a human from writing.

I hate AI in the artistic disciplines. No one hates it more than I do. But Jesus Christ, I've been seeing legitimate authors get called AI for over a year now, and it's so bad that I know people are quitting writing over it. ("What's the point, everyone stopped reading because they think I'm AI") End result being the percentage of writing that is AI goes up, and humans enjoying the most human of all disciplines goes down.

I didn't claim that I could determine whether AI wrote the prose, or even parts of it. Nor am I trying to discourage folks from writing (actually the opposite, I even thanked Ben for the demo!).

What I observed are overused, and recognizable, stylistic patterns that have become quite common in LLM generated prose. In this article alone there are three "here's the X" rhetorical signposts, well over a dozen neatly constructed reversals/antitheses ("not X but Y," "solved X and created Y"), repeated setup->complication->punchline paragraph structures, rhetorical questions used as transitions, and a high density of anthropomorphized technical metaphors.

None of these alone prove AI authorship. In fact their existence (and the authors own words!) are exactly the point I am making: his validateHypotheticalHooks linter flags "formulaic AI-tell openers," and he describes catching himself writing one because he'd "absorbed the cadence from reading too much generated text."

I'm sorry, but if you're halfway adept in both writing and using modern LLMs, every single telltale sign exists in this material. OP is right to call it into question, and you are embodying the very caricature which you're attempting to assign to him in your fallacious assault on character and authority.

Let's return to a more positive discourse, and not immediately become vitriolic when someone rightfully points out that material marketing a book might not be genuinely produced by a human. We should expect more transparency from the author around the use of AI in their writing and marketing process if we are expected to give this book any attention.

I normally don't comment on AI articles, but the TLDR was so obviously AI and a huge turnoff that I closed the tab.

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