In fact, post-LLM quality monitoring is a huge time trap.
I can't write anything for humans using LLMs, because there is so much to change that it ends up like the Ship of Theseus, I would have been faster writing it myself than delegating the task.
I can't write anything for humans using LLMs, because there is so much to change that it ends up like the Ship of Theseus, I would have been faster writing it myself than delegating the task.
Style guides are a big tools people are missing out on. It isn't enough to say "write concisely and technically". Give them a sample. Yea verily these many 5 or 6 years ago, "style transfer" was a big thing that early LLM tech was doing. It's still very good at it.
That said I still tend to cut out at least 25% of the resulting verbiage and adding back another 10% or so more of my own original content even under those circumstances.
Where it has been really helpful is that I tend to want to write in a conversational style that doesn't seem to match most people's expectations of a technical document. The LLMs let me write my way and style-shift it into something closer to what people expect. And LLMs, since let's be honest they're the primary audience nowadays. Which I am not even upset about; I'd rather 5 LLMs read the architecture document than the amortized .2 or so humans I could expect in the same circumstance 5 years ago.
Which also implies, in many cases, I am feeding the AI as much text as I expect to come out, or in some cases, even more, as I am describing context, reasoning, and other things that may impact the writing but are not necessarily repeated in the final text. I factored out a lot of the context into my user-level CLAUDE.md which has helped cut that down a bit.
I don't use a lot of "skills" so if there are others you've started using frequently I'd be curious to learn about them.
it is great at analyzing the argument, finding inconsistencies, helping you think through what parts should be cut, helping you refine examples or fix the occasional “how do i get this phrase to work correctly in this transition?” kinds of stuff. but anything where LLMs are the prima materia… that stuff literally only makes sense _to me_. which makes sense, because it is written _for_ me, no matter what instructions i actually give it, bc of memories and a million other things. and i say this as a complete maximalist wrt. trying to use llms for absolutely every last thing they possibly can be used for, just to see what it’s like.
i guess i would say that it does very, very little to make the writing process meaningfully faster; it _can_ do _plenty_ to help make your output better though, which is definitely something— just isn’t the thing most people are looking for.
Also the word "verbiage" ticks me off as a LLM-ism on the level of "delve" or "smoking gun". Are its users aware that in addition to its usage as somewhat of a synonym of "idiolect", it more commonly means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content", i.e. slop?
As for "verbiage", I guess that's too bad, I'm going to continue using it anyway. Interesting factoid about the word though. I will say that "utilize" is one of my pet peeves (99% of the time the word you actually want is "use") and I've excised it from my spoken vocabulary, but I like(d) how verbiage rhymes with foliage so I'm more reticent to give that one up.
Sadly people lost the skill to write a standard form concise 3-paragraphs-of-3-sentences cover letter even before keyword-based ATS initiated the beginning of the end. It wasn’t supposed to be a summary of a CV and an essay about your lifelong passion for automated ad-bidding quality checks or some other shit employers delude themselves into believing someone might organically be really into.