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Comment by NateEag | Hacker News Reader

I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun.

I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word.

It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.

The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched.

Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.

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> It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.

Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.

> I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons

Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good:

a) Always find them to be bad

b) Are always bad at using them

Well my coworkers are the ones sending me the AI text and it's always garbage. And they're using Claude on the newest models. And they're all drastically more enthusiastic about AI than me.

So yeah, maybe every single person in my company sucks at Claude, or maybe Claude just actually sucks at writing and you don't know what bad writing looks like

Claude does suck at writing. No argument here. It's for coding, and it's good at that.

So if the goal is "writing" and they are using Claude, then they do in fact suck at it.

Its like using a butter knife instead of a screwdriver. It might work if you waste enough effort, but will never do the same quality of work a screwdriver can.

> Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.

I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget).

I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with.

> Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good...

I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance.

That doesn't mean I like them.

And no, they really are not good at writing.

When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.

Claude might be the problem here. It really is bad at writing and ticks all the boxes you mentioned. It's much better at code.

I don't mean to be defensive, just to point out that most of the statements you made are provably and obviously untrue... And given that you admit bias that's the most likely explanation.

I hadn't considered that you have experience, but only with one that is legitimately bad at this particular thing because someone forced it onto you. Fair enough.

We don't all have to like the same things.

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