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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind that anyone would ever use an LLM to write, if communication is their goal.

LLM writing takes your prompt and adds stuff you didn't write, burying your meaning and making it harder for the reader to get your message.

Way more effective to just publish the prompt.

Of course, it's great if you're just trying to fill space or satisfy demands of a bullshit job.

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Here's how I use it to write. I dump an unedited stream of consciousness into the prompt. Sometimes it's just me having a conversation with myself thinking through what I actually want to say. Then, I have it ask me to clarify anything that's unclear. Then I have it write me a rough draft. I read that and then just rewrite most if not all of it while I edit the output. I use this workflow for work stuff or dealing with businesses in personal life. I'd never use this to generate a letter or email to a friend or colleague.

Interesting. Does your output end up being shorter than your input?

Hmmm, I've never actually checked that. Just had codex run the numbers excluding the boilerplate in some of the documents output is on average ~13% shorter than input, I only checked the ones that were all of the same type (proposals) since it was easier to have codex run the numbers on that.

I compared at final edited output less boilerplate vs sum(prompts).

If I had to guess I'd say far more people are better at editing than they are at writing de novo. My approach probably limits the creativity of the output but I'm not writing a novel.

Definite ‘work stuff’ because most work stuff is read by colleagues, otherwise why was it written?

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