4 ms·

Sure, it's 2026 I used Claude to write a lot of it. But tell me this. Do you know which paragraphs I wrote?

Eisenstein 8mo ago
Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived. Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it. At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because 1. the heuristic is flawed 2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
- magic_hamster 8mo ago
  I don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.
  - benstopics 8mo ago
    I agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.
    - grey-area 8mo ago
      It’d be an interesting exercise to just write it again yourself without referring to the LLM article then compare the two to see which bits of each are better. Yours would be shorter, but perhaps better and more honest?
    - magic_hamster 8mo ago
      Just wanted to say don't worry about it too much. I do advocate for writing because I like it and I feel it rewards me. But you made a decision to do it a certain way and that's fine. Don't let people tear you down for this.
  - Eisenstein 8mo ago
    I don't use AI for my writing and I agree with you. I meant that it is bad heuristic because people often do put a lot of effort into posts with AI writing styles in them, so it is not accurate due to a large amount of false positives. If one performs a test that is wrong a significant percentage of the time then it will be eventually abandoned.
- benstopics 8mo ago
  I honestly get it. I wouldn't have made that comment but I get why it was made. It tells me I need to go back and put some more effort into it and clean it up. You know, in-between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and working on the actual game... Without Claude there would be no story to read. I pay Anthropic $200/mo and Claude is a robot. I don't think anyone shed a tear that I didn't put "coauthored by Claude" at the bottom.
  - sokka_h2otribe 8mo ago
    It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude" The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing. One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts. I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
    - skystarmen 8mo ago
      There's no reason to be so nasty. The fact that it's currently on the top 5 posts on HN means you're dead wrong, he's not wasting anyone's time. TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
    - baq 8mo ago
      The content isn’t low quality, though. The form got LLM signatures all over, but the story itself is quite interesting.
    - benstopics 8mo ago
      Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. No, do. Really.
- mapt 8mo ago
  The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph. There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good. That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out. People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
markstos 8mo ago
It has a particular style I’ve seen lately using more short confident sentences as professional writers do. But it lacks the professional writer’s sense of when to add an anecdote and when to leave out a detail. And it is this juxtaposition that gives it a distinctive LLM feel of being written in the style of a professional writer, yet something is off.
rgovostes 8mo ago
Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes. Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
- benstopics 8mo ago
  I did that on purpose, I thought it needed to be reiterated. See, you're blaming the AI but that was me. I did not specify a word count. Maybe I should have let the AI write the whole thing? Like I said I am not a great writer, especially content editing. Even with AI I couldn't make everyone happy. Oh well.
  - IshKebab 8mo ago
    Dude why do you meet every valid criticism with such passive aggressive defence? It doesn't come off well at all.
duskdozer 8mo ago
I don't, because I stopped reading after I recognized LLM output. You could basically take all the comments you wrote in this thread verbatim and it would still be better, even if there are some grammar errors here or there. Please give yourself more credit.

Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived. Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it. At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because 1. the heuristic is flawed 2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult

magic_hamster 8mo ago
I don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.
- benstopics 8mo ago
  I agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.
  - grey-area 8mo ago
    It’d be an interesting exercise to just write it again yourself without referring to the LLM article then compare the two to see which bits of each are better. Yours would be shorter, but perhaps better and more honest?
  - magic_hamster 8mo ago
    Just wanted to say don't worry about it too much. I do advocate for writing because I like it and I feel it rewards me. But you made a decision to do it a certain way and that's fine. Don't let people tear you down for this.
- Eisenstein 8mo ago
  I don't use AI for my writing and I agree with you. I meant that it is bad heuristic because people often do put a lot of effort into posts with AI writing styles in them, so it is not accurate due to a large amount of false positives. If one performs a test that is wrong a significant percentage of the time then it will be eventually abandoned.
benstopics 8mo ago
I honestly get it. I wouldn't have made that comment but I get why it was made. It tells me I need to go back and put some more effort into it and clean it up. You know, in-between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and working on the actual game... Without Claude there would be no story to read. I pay Anthropic $200/mo and Claude is a robot. I don't think anyone shed a tear that I didn't put "coauthored by Claude" at the bottom.
- sokka_h2otribe 8mo ago
  It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude" The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing. One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts. I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
  - skystarmen 8mo ago
    There's no reason to be so nasty. The fact that it's currently on the top 5 posts on HN means you're dead wrong, he's not wasting anyone's time. TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
  - baq 8mo ago
    The content isn’t low quality, though. The form got LLM signatures all over, but the story itself is quite interesting.
  - benstopics 8mo ago
    Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.
chrisjj 8mo ago
> Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. No, do. Really.
mapt 8mo ago
The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph. There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good. That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out. People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.

markstos 8mo ago

It has a particular style I’ve seen lately using more short confident sentences as professional writers do. But it lacks the professional writer’s sense of when to add an anecdote and when to leave out a detail. And it is this juxtaposition that gives it a distinctive LLM feel of being written in the style of a professional writer, yet something is off.

rgovostes 8mo ago

Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes. Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.

benstopics 8mo ago
I did that on purpose, I thought it needed to be reiterated. See, you're blaming the AI but that was me. I did not specify a word count. Maybe I should have let the AI write the whole thing? Like I said I am not a great writer, especially content editing. Even with AI I couldn't make everyone happy. Oh well.
- IshKebab 8mo ago
  Dude why do you meet every valid criticism with such passive aggressive defence? It doesn't come off well at all.

duskdozer 8mo ago

I don't, because I stopped reading after I recognized LLM output. You could basically take all the comments you wrote in this thread verbatim and it would still be better, even if there are some grammar errors here or there. Please give yourself more credit.