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IMO, any (important) writing you expect other humans to consume should be your own writing. I think it's kind of disrespectful to outsource your voice to AI but
by overgard 8mo ago
IMO, any (important) writing you expect other humans to consume should be your own writing. I think it's kind of disrespectful to outsource your voice to AI but expect people to read it like it's yours. Why should I put in time to read if you're not putting in time to write?
- therobots927 8mo agoThat’s exactly right. The second I determine something was written by AI is the second I close the tab / scroll past. It’s beyond disrespectful to expect others to read wordslop that you only barely created via prompt.
- rebolek 8mo agoI write stories and tech docs. I'll happily outsource writing tech docs to AI. It would be better than anything I would write. I won't let AI to touch my stories. Their input is boring and cringy. So both things can be true at same time.
- kovek 8mo agoFor the tech docs writing, just give me the bullet points and I'll send them to the AI and discuss the bullet points with it.
- nxobject 8mo agoHonestly, I'd rather just read the bullet points, especially if it gives people more opportunities to lay out hierarchical structure.
- saulpw 8mo agoIt's more like, here's 80 pages of too much information, just give me the API in a tight section here, with an architectural overview. Usually these tools are used to compress, not fluff.
- rockemsockem 8mo agoI feel like these tech docs you're writing might not need to be written in the first place.
- roarcher 8mo agoThe AI doesn't know anything about the thing you're documenting except what you tell it, so what value does it add?
- jerkstate 8mo agoI write a lot of tech docs with AI so I can add some substance here. First of all, you do tell it what you’re writing about - you can give it reams of documentation on related systems, terminology, and source code. Stuff that would take you weeks to consume personally (but you probably know the gist of it from having read or skimmed it before). Let’s say you are writing a design doc for a new component. After all of this stuff describing the environment is in its context (you don’t have to type it all out, you can copy paste it, use an MCP to suck it in from a DB, read it from a file, etc), you describe at a high level what architecture choices and design constraints to make (for example, needs to be implemented with this database, this is our standard middleware, etc) and it will fill in blanks and spit out a design for you. Then you refine it - actually this component needs to work like that, unit testing strategy needs to be like this, and so on. Now give me the main modules, code stubs, suggest patterns to use, etc. continue to iterate - it will update the entire doc for you, make sure there are no dead or outdated references, etc. extremely powerful and useful.
- HellDunkel 8mo agowell said! especially like the fact you chose IMO in favor IMHO.
- hippo22 8mo agoI disagree. The purpose of writing is to convey ideas. If written language had just been invented, I’m sure you’d be saying “IMO any important stories you expect others to know should be communicated orally. It’s kind of disrespectful to convey stories as if they were hearing you speak.”
- gedy 8mo agoIf you can't articulate an idea yourself, it's not worth conveying imho
- crystal_revenge 8mo agoYour conflating the medium with the source of the message in this analogy. Writing and oration are two different media, the question of which is preferable in which context is completely unrelated to LLM authorship. If "the purpose of writing is to convey ideas" (which I largely agree with), which ideas are being added between whatever you prompt the model to convey and what the model conveys? Are you proposing that an LLM can extract some meaning from your initial prompt that a human being couldn't?
- hippo22 8mo ago> Are you proposing that an LLM can extract some meaning from your initial prompt that a human being couldn't? No, I’m asserting that an LLM can help formulate ideas in a coherent, understandable way. You can give it a brain dump with a rough outline for an argument and it fill in the details. If the argument isn’t to your liking, you can try again. But the end result is basically equivalent to the human-written equivalent.
- 486sx33 8mo ago[dead]
- wiredpancake 8mo ago[dead]