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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

You have to assume that in many situations a human is asking an LLM about the content you've provided, even if they or another human reads some or all of it themselves too. So it's valuable to proactively ask your own LLM in the same way, so you can see what the other person will get out of it. And tune the verbiage until the LLM tells them what you want it to :)

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Sorry if this comes off as critical, but are you seriously doing that? I can't imagine optimizing my writing for people choosing to mangle it through a LLM rather than for the people reading it as-is.

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?

I wrote a contract proposal a few months ago and I absolutely did a few rounds with an LLM to get the result I wanted. Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters. You know that HR has a pipeline set up with a prompt like "here's the job description, here's the candidate's info, rate the candidate on a scale from 1-10" so you can do the same and learn how to boost your own signal. I have zero qualms about doing this.

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.

Fair enough, cover letters and contract proposals are more marketing than actual information, so that's fair game I suppose. Good trick. I wouldn't use it in something meant to transmit actual information though, like a manual or something.

> Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters

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.

This is the real crime of llms on writing. They’ve taken perfectly reasonable verbal ticks (the one I miss being able to use is scaffolding) and caused the audience to rebel against them en masse. Verbiage is a great word. I refuse to give it up. It’s load bearing even.

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