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Comment by blandcoffee | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the direction of this article, and commend the author on publishing work, but the first sentence in the first paragraph is exactly what they lament.

> A pattern I see is that people use AI to build something new, then they use AI to retrospectively summarize what they have already built into a design document. Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.

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To be quite generous, that could be tongue in cheek.

There are other AI smells later in the article, and the author talks about using AI to help with writing...

After all AI is trained on human writting, the line is incredible blur now.

I feel the need to self sensor my writing when phrases sound like AI. Pretty annoying.

It's now a CAPTCHA to tell humans apart from bots based on how you write.

You could try throwing in the odd homonym in place of an important word so that people know it must have been written by a human.

I leave typos in all my writing so people know it’s not ai

That was my assumption. The alternative is that the author is a blatant hypocrite, which seems less likely given their blog's history.

> given their blog's history

All of the posts in 2026 on that blog area about AI, by the way.

That's a classic calling card of LLM prose but that doesn't mean they actually used an AI. Though sure, it would be nice if we gave this style a name and then abolished it.

I call it the “it’s not delivery—it’s DiGiorno” construct. I generally tune out when I see this construct, which is so prevalent on LinkedIn these days, which is inundated with clichéd writing.

To be fair, LinkedIn was pure slop even before ai arrived.

> “it’s not delivery—it’s DiGiorno”

We've had AI output all these decades, but never recognized it. Is this evidence of time travel?

No, usually humans write more than just a short unsubstantiated punchline in their "it's not x, it's y's", unless they're trying to sell you something.

Well, not quite the classic calling card - LLMs generally use a contrast of opposites. (e.g. "it wasn't a bug -- it was a feature", although that predates LLMs :)

TFA's use is more common in "normal" language: "it's not just [minor], it's [major]". (But, as others have pointed out, it was probably deliberately parodic anyway.)

I believe that to be a very obvious joke. The kind that the british are fond of.

FWIW Pangram [0] "We believe that this entire text is human-written."

I've only just discovered pangram, but I've seen it referred to a few times in HN recently wit nothing obviously pejorative about it. Take it with all required grains of salt, though

0: https://www.pangram.com/dashboard

AI detectors are useless.

I’ll present with as much evidence as you do that I’ve heard pangram is quite reliable. I believe that have studies on their website.

The not this but that is bad when it is out of nowhere combination. In here, it has actual meaning.

I was about to comment on the exact same thing. Stopped reading after this. AI writing patterns has started to show itself in my AI allergy. Don’t get me wrong I like AI but it’s a pain to read the same style over and over again.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt given the point of the article, and the rest of it was fine, so I also believe it was meant as a joke.

A bit ironic, too, because the same article later quotes polls where a majority of respondents said they immediately stop reading an article and any future ones by the same author if their LLM detector goes off.

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