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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same way, and yet I'm also guilty of this. I'm trying to reach out to an expert, and because of the stakes, I want to write it exactly right. I'm using Claude to write it, but I don't like how Claude writes, so I rewrite it in my own words, and I still don't like it. I've iterated over this for several days. Finally I talk to my wife, she gives me some pointers, and I just write it down perfectly.

And yet, every person high up in business that I talk to, including my wife, advises me to use Claude for this sort of thing. I don't get it. Claude text sucks, and it hurts my eyes when I'm forced to read it.

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As someone who is usually on the other side of this interaction (software engineer at a company receiving bug reports), it's much easier when people write in their own words (even if they sometimes use the wrong terms or say something which can't be true) than when they use an LLM to make things clear and correct. I want to know what you're trying to do, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened - that doesn't benefit from having an LLM rewrite it.

Sure, I use precise and technical language, but I'm still a human and I can understand what people are getting at when they use imprecise terms. But if the text passes through an LLM I can't tell whether the result actually matches the original problem or whether the LLM has made guesses or filled in blanks.

Bug reports aren't so high-stakes (although poorly written bug reports can often be useless). I've got something to sell, and I want this expert to confirm that what I've built is better than what's currently available. That's a much harder approach. You want people to send bug reports. You don't want everybody to try to sell something to you. But I really think that I've solved the problem that she identified, so I want her to take a look at it instead of dismissing it as most people would probably do when a random nobody claims to have solved something. It doesn't help that this entire issue is way out of my comfort zone.

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