12 ms·

Do your own writing

748 points by karimf 6mo ago

simonreiff 6mo ago
[flagged]
PaulRobinson 6mo ago
Outsource things that aren't valuable to you and your core mission. Do the things that are valuable to you and your core mission. This applies at a business level (most software shops shouldn't have full-time book keepers on staff, for example), but applies even more in the AI age. I use LLMs to help me code the boring stuff. I don't want to write CDK, I don't want to have to code the same boilerplate HTML and JS I've written dozens of times before - they can do that. But when I'm trying to implement something core to what I'm doing, I want to get more involved. Same with writing. There's an old joke in the writing business that most people want to be published authors than they do through the process of writing. People who say they want to write don't actually want to do the work of writing, they just want the cocktail parties and the stroked ego of seeing their name in a bookshop or library. LLMs are making that more possible, but at a rather odd cost. When I write, I do so because I want to think. Even when I use an LLM to rubber duck ideas off, I'm using it as a way to improve my thinking - the raw text it outputs is not the thing I want to give to others, but it might make me frame things differently or help me with grammar checks or with light editing tasks. Never the core thinking. Even when I dabble with fiction writing: I enjoy the process of plotting, character development, dialogue development, scene ordering, and so on. Why would I want to outsource that? Why would a reader be interested in that output rather than something I was trying to convey. Art lives in the gap between what an artist is trying to say and what an audience is trying to perceive - having an LLM involved breaks that. So yeah, coding, technical writing, non-fiction, fiction, whatever: if you're using an LLM you're giving up and saying "I don't care about this", and that might be OK if you don't care about this, but do that consciously and own it and talk about it up-front.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > Outsource things that aren't valuable to you and your core mission. When you outsource the generation and thinking, you're also outsourcing the self-review that comes along with evaluating your own output. In the office, that review step gets outsourced to your coworkers. Having a coworker who ChatGPT generates slides, design docs, or PRs is terrible because you realize that their primary input is prompting Claude and then sending the output to other people to review. I could have done that myself. Reviewing their Claude or ChatGPT output so they can prompt Claude or ChatGPT to fix it is just a way to get me to do their work for them.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> When I send somebody a document that whiffs of LLM, I’m only demonstrating that the LLM produced something approximating what others want to hear. I’m not showing that I contended with the ideas. This eloquently states the problem with sending LLM content to other people: As soon as they catch on that you're giving them LLM writing, it changes the dynamic of the relationship entirely. Now you're not asking them to review your ideas or code, you're asking them to review some output you got from an LLM. The worst LLM offenders in the workplace are the people who take tickets, have Claude do the ticket, push the PR, and then go idle while they expect other people to review the work. I've had to have a few uncomfortable conversations where I explain to people that it's their job to review their own submissions before submitting them. It's something that should be obvious, but the magic of seeing an LLM produce code that passes tests or writing that looks like it agrees with the prompt you wrote does something to some people's brains.
- bandrami 6mo ago
  Lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The market-clearing solution is to have some mechanism by which the producers pay the rest of us to consume the products. Whoever comes up with that framework will probably do very well.
  - Gigachad 6mo ago
    They are basically destroying markets where there is value in producing content. No one wants to consume your LLM slop book, but if you spam Amazon with thousands and thousands of AI generated books, you will end up making a profit tricking some people in to buying them. Meanwhile the real books struggle to be seen in the mountains of shit.
CharlesW 6mo ago
The title and of this article is Don't Let AI Write For You, when its point seems to be closer to Don't Let AI Think For You (see "Thinking"). This distinction is important, because (1) writing is not the only way to faciliate thinking, and (2) writing is not neccessarily even the best way to facilitate thinking. It's definitely not the best way (a) for everyone, (b) in every situation. Audio can be a great way to capture ideas and thought processes. Rod Serling wrote predominantly through dictation. Mark Twain wrote most of his of his autobiography by dictation. Mark Duplass on The Talking Draft Method (1m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsV-3wel7k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsV-3wel7k4 This can work especially well for people who are distracted by form and "writing correctly" too early in the process, for people who are intimidated by blank pages, for non-neurotypical people, etc. Self-recording is a great way to set all of those artifacts of the medium aside and capture what you want to say. From there, you can (and should) leverage AI for transcripts, light transcript cleanups, grammar checks, etc.
- lokar 6mo ago
  I would count direct dictation (eg someone writes down what you say, and that is the final text), as writing, in the context of producing a document (book, etc) that you intend others to read. It's not the same thing as talking to someone (or a group) about something.
- keithnz 6mo ago
  I'm finding AI great to have a conversation with to flesh out ideas, with the added benefit it can summarize everything at the end
  - tines 6mo ago
    You're being steered without being aware of it.
    - whiplash451 6mo ago
      Worse. You’re being steered along a circle
TrianguloY 6mo ago
> Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you. This. This is the big distinction. If you like something and/or want to improve it, you do it yourself. If not, you pay someone else to do it. And I think that's ok. But I guess some people either choose a wrong job or had no other option. I'm happy to not be in that group.
fraywing 6mo ago
>Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you. It's worse than this. If someone is working out for you, they still own the outcome of that effort (their physique). With an LLM people _act_ like the outcome is their own production. The thinking, reasoning, structural capability, modeling, and presentation can all just as easily be framed _as your creation_. That's why I think we're seeing an inverse relationship between ideation output and coherence (and perhaps unoriginality) and a decline in creative thinking and creativity[0] [0] https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
roadside_picnic 6mo ago
I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really consolidated my thinking. However, there is a lot of writing that is basically just an old school from of context engineering. While I would love to think that a PRD is a place to think through ideas, I think many of us have encountered situations, pre-AI, where PRDs were basically context dumps without any real planning or thought. For these cases, I think we should just drop the premise altogether that you're writing. If you need to write a proposal for something as a matter of ritual, give it AI. If you're documenting a feature to remember context only (and not really explain the larger abstract principles driving it), it's better created as context for an LLM to consume. Not long ago my engineering team was trying to enforce writing release notes so people could be aware of breaking changes, then people groaned at the idea of having to read this. The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context. I think it's going to be awhile before the full impact of AI really works it's way through how we work. In the mean time we'll continue to have AI written content fed back into AI and then sent back to someone else (when this could all be a more optimized, closed loop).
- delusional 6mo ago
  For your context, I'm an AI hater, so understand my assumptions as such. > The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context. Why is more AI the "obvious" best solution here? If nobody wants to read your release notes, then why write them? And if they're going to slim them down with their AI anyway, then why not leave them terse? It sounds like you're just handwaving at a problem and saying "that's where the AI would go" when really that problem is much better solved without AI if you put a little more thought into it.
  - 6mo ago
janalsncm 6mo ago
Well said. The most important part of writing is thinking. LLMs cannot do the thinking for you. This is why I’m bearish on all of the apps that want to do my writing for me. Expanding a stub of an idea into a low information density paragraph, and then summarizing those paragraphs on the other end. What’s the point? Unless the idea is trivial, LLMs are probably just getting in the way.
fleebee 6mo ago
You quote this: > LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too? Given your endorsement of using LLMs for generating ideas, isn't this the inverse of your thesis? The quote's issue with LLMs is the ideas that came out of them; the prose is the tell. I don't think they'd be happy with LLM generated ideas even if they were handwritten. I feel like this post is missing the forest for the trees. Writing is thinking alright, but fueling your writing by brainstorming with an LLM waters down the process.
- atmosx 6mo ago
  I take it ideas to mean “well scoped replies” like “list pro and con if this vs that got flow”. While someone might think of N issues the LLM might present another six out of which three or four don’t make sense but one or two do. Might be worth adding these in the document.
nerevarthelame 6mo ago
I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.
- dummydummy1234 6mo ago
  I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.
  - monkaiju 6mo ago
    I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging. The moment I bring in a conversational element, I want a being that actually has problem comprehension and creativity which an LLM by definition does not.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dexwiz 6mo ago
      Sometimes people just need something else to tell them their ideas are valid. Validation is a core principle of therapeutic care. Procrastination is tightly linked to fear of a negative outcome. LLMs can help with both of these. They can validate ideas in the now which can help overcome some of that anxiety. Unfortunately they can also validate some really bad ideas.
bluepeter 6mo ago
Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) has totally devolved into "prompt-ese." Much like days of yore where we all approached Google searches with acrobatic language knowing how to specifically get something done. Now? I am pushing so much of my writing into prompts into AI where I know the AI will understand me even with lots of typos and run-on sentences... Is that a bad thing? A good thing? I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words, and the precision and grammar is mostly irrelevant. But I am able to insert nuances and sidetracks that ARE passing vital context to AI but may be lost on people. Or at least pre-prompt-writing people.
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
  > Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) No. Don't pretend your taking shortcuts is less questionable because everyone else is doing it too. We're not. Own it yourself, don't get me involved. > I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words If you think value comes from volume of words you really need to understand writing better.
  - bluepeter 6mo ago
    Ok, but 3 generations ago, shorthand was a core skill that any competent professional could read and extract MORE value from than laboriously typeset prose. Something similar is probably happening now with prompt-ese and human-to-human (vs just AI) writing.
- qaadika 6mo ago
  > Nowadays my writing [] has totally devolved into "prompt-ese." I've noticed this myself. Even in my Obsidian vault, which only I read and write in. I think it's a development into writing more imperatively, instinctually. Thinking more in instructions and commands than the speaking and writing habits I've developed organically over my life. Or just "talking to the computer" in plain English, after having to convert my thoughts to code anytime I want to make it do something. I've been thinking about the role of "director" in media as an analogy to writing with LLMs. I'm working right now on an "essay," that I'm not sure I'll share with anyone, even family (who is my first audience). Right now, under the Authorship section, I wrote "Conceived, directed, and edited by Qaadika. Drafted by Claude", with a few sentences noting that I take responsibility for the content, and that the arguments, structure, audience, and editorial judgments are mine. I had a unique idea and started with a single sentence prompt, and kept going from there until I realized it should be an essay. So the ideas in it are mine. The thesis is mine. I'm going back and forth with the LLM section by section. Some prompts are a sentence. Some are eight paragraphs. I can read the output and see exactly what was mine and what the LLM added. But my readers won't. They'll just see "Author: Qaadika" and presume every single word was mine. Or they'll sniff out the LLM-ness and stop reading. I can make a film and call myself director without ever being seen in it. Is is the same if I direct the composition of words without ever writing any of the prose myself? Presuming I've written enough in prompts that it's identifiably unique from cheaper prompts and "LLM, fill in the blank". We credit Steven Spielberg with E.T. But he didn't write the screenplay. He probably had comments on it, though. He didn't operate the camera. But he probably told the operators where to put it. He didn't act in it. But he probably told the actors where to stand and where to move and how to be. He didn't write the music. But he probably had a sense of when and where to place it in the audio. And he didn't spend every moment in the cutting room, placing every frame just so. But his name is at the top. He must have done something, even if I can't point to anything specific. The "Vibe" of the film is Spielberg, but it's also the result of hundreds of minds, most of whole aren't named until the end of the film, and probably never read by most viewers. His contribution to the film was instructions. Do this, don't do that. Let's move this scene to here. This shot would be better from this angle. The musical swell should be on this shot; cut it longer to fit. So where, exactly, is "Spielberg" in E.T.? What can we objective credit him with, aside from the finished product: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Coming June 1982?
paulpauper 6mo ago
Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you. The problem with writing is the feedback tends to be inconsistent. With going to the gym you can track your progress quantitatively such as how fast or far you can run or weight lifted, but it's sometimes hard to know if you're improving at writing.
- sikiri_app 6mo ago
  real fact and it is an interesting point.
gbro3n 6mo ago
I fully agree with the sentiment of the article. I will say that I feel I've had some success in having an LLM outline a document, provided that I then go through and read / edit thoroughly. I think there's even an argument that this a) possibly catches areas you I have forgotten to write about, and b) hooks into my critique mode which feels more motivated than author mode sometimes (I'm slightly ashamed to say). This does come at the cost however of not putting my self in 'researcher' mode, where I go back through the system I'm writing about and follow the threads, reacquainting myself and judging my previous decisions.
firefoxd 6mo ago
I'm 100% an advocate for not using LLM for writing... But I'll tell you were I use them just for that. For ceremonies. A large part of our work is about writing documents that no one will read, but you'll get 10 different reminders that they need to get done. These are documents that circulate, need approval from different stake holders. Everybody stamps their name on it, without ever reading it. I used to spend so much time crafting these documents. Now I use an LLM, the stakeholders are probably using an LLM to summarize it, someone is happy, they are filed for the records. I call these "ceremonies" because they are a requirement we have, it helps no one, we don't know why we have to do it, but no one wants to question it.
- criddell 6mo ago
  If it's very mechanical you probably aren't losing out on anything by using a machine to produce it.
windowliker 6mo ago
>Don't Let AI Write For You >Essay structured like LLM output Hmmm...
- paulpauper 6mo ago
  I think a lot of people run their posts through an LLM after writing it and edit it accordingly, resulting in an output somewhere between human-made and AI-generated.
drnick1 6mo ago
> They are particularly good at generating ideas. I think it's the opposite. People have ideas and know what they want to do. If I need to write something, I provide some bullet points and instructions, and Claude does the rest. I then review, and iterate.
jonathaneunice 6mo ago
Agree with the underlying point: "don't let an LLM do your thinking, or interfere with processes essential to you thinking things clearly through." My own experience, however, is that the best models are quite good and helping you with those writing and thinking processes. Finding gaps, exposing contradictions or weaknesses in your hypotheses or specifications, and suggesting related or supporting content that you might have included if you'd thought of it, but you didn't. While I'm a developer and engineer now, I was a professional author, editor, and publisher in a former life. Would have _killed_ for the fast, often excellent feedback and acceleration that LLMs now provide. And while sure, I often have to "no, no, no!" or delete-delete, "redraft this and do it this way," the overall process is faster and the outcomes better with AI assistance. The most important thing is to keep overall control of the tone, flow, and arguments. Every word need not be your own, at least in most forms of commercial and practical writing. True whether your collaborators are human, mecha, or some mix.
- deevelton 6mo ago
  was curious how it might look if we started seeing prompts/steering inline with the finished product: https://dvelton.github.io/trace/examples/the-post.html https://dvelton.github.io/trace/examples/the-post.html
  - jonathaneunice 6mo ago
    First impression is love that! Need to study it more. We need—or at least I need—a better UI/tool to manage the sequence of edits and collaboration, drafting, rubber-ducking, and evaluation that AI tools provide. Including the prompts and edits is a nice feature, though I would also like more comparison "where we started" vs "where we are now."
    - deevelton 6mo ago
      I wonder if an animation with the prompts/edits inline and the text morphing might be an interesting UI…fun stuff to think about. Contributions welcome! https://github.com/dvelton/trace https://github.com/dvelton/trace
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
D13Fd 6mo ago
> LLMs are useful for research and checking your work. I have to disagree that it's good for LLMs to do the research, depending on the context. If by "useful for research" you mean useful for tracking down sources that you, as the writer, digest and consider, then great. If by "useful for research" you mean that it will fill in your citations for you, that's terrible. That sends a false signal to readers about the credibility of your work. It's critical that the author read and digest the things they are citing to.
bboynton97 6mo ago
There's a lot of ways to use an LLM, the least effective is automating an entire process- yet it's the most compelling. To your point, it's entirely a balance. I personally will record a 10-15 minute yap session on a concept I want to share and feed it to an agent to distill it into a series of observations and more compelling concepts. Then you can use this to write your piece.
locusofself 6mo ago
I had an interesting experience the other day. I've been struggling with some lyrics to a song I am writing. I asked Claude to review them, and it did an amazing job of finding the weak lines and best lines, and nearly perfectly articulating to my why they were weak or strong. It was strange because the output of the analysis almost perfectly mirrored my own thoughts. When I asked it for alternatives/edits, they were not good however.
6thbit 6mo ago
Writing down specs for technical projects is a transformational skill. I've had projects that seemed tedious or obvious in my head only to realize hidden complexity when trying to put their trivial-ness into written words. It really is a sort of meditation on the problem. In the most important AI assisted project I've shipped so far I wrote the spec myself first entirely. But feeding it through an LLM feedback loop felt just as transformational, it didn't only help me get an easier to parse document, but helped me understand both the problem and my own solution from multiple angles and allowed me to address gaps early on. So I'll say: Do your own writing, first.
tombert 6mo ago
My blog is 100% written by me. You can tell because of all the typos. I don't really understand why people will create blogs that are generated by Claude or ChatGPT. You don't have to have a blog, isn't the point of something like a blog to be your writing? If I wanted an opinion from ChatGPT I could just ask ChatGPT for an opinion. The whole point of a blog, in my mind, is that there's a human who has something that they want to say. Even if you have original ideas, if you have ChatGPT write the core article makes it feel kind of inhuman. I'm more forgiving of stuff like Grammarly, because typos are annoying, though I've stopped using it because I found I didn't agree with a lot of its edits. I admit that I will use Claude to bullshit ideas back and forth, basically as a more intelligent "rubber duck", but the writing is always me.
godot 6mo ago
The way I approach having LLM help with writing documents like this is to have it help me clean up my writing, not write the substance of it. I tend to do extensive research (that process in itself would involve LLMs too, sure) in a tech plan, a product spec, etc. and usually end up with a really solid idea in my head and like say, five critical key points about this tech plan or product spec that I absolutely must convey in this document. Then I basically "brain dump" my critical key points (including everything about it, background/reasoning, why this or that way, what's counterintuitive about it, why is this point important, etc.) in pretty messy writing (but hitting all the important talking points) to a LLM prompt, asking it to produce the document I need (be it tech plan, product spec, whatever) and ask it to write it based on my points. The resulting document has all the important substance on it this way. If you use LLM to produce documents like this by a way of a prompt like "Write a tech plan for the product feature XYZ I want to build", you're going to get a lot of fluff. No substance, plenty of mistakes, wrong assumptions, etc.
jcalvinowens 6mo ago
I feel very much the same way about debugging: it is through the process of repeatedly being slightly wrong that I come to actually understand what is happening. Sometimes an LLM can shortcut me through a bunch of those misunderstandings. It feels like an easy win. But ultimately, lacking context for how I got to that point in the debugging litany always slows me down more than the time it saved me. I frequently have to go backwards to uncover some earlier insight the LLM glossed over, in order to "unlock" a later problem in the litany. If the problem is simple enough the LLM can actually directly tell you the answer, it's great. But using it as a debugging "coach" or "assistant" is actively worse than nothing for me.
unsignedint 6mo ago
[flagged]
kristopolous 6mo ago
I write far better than any llm ... I've tried to get them to help me with writing, they always fuck it up. The biggest problem is they don't understand the time effort tradeoff between understanding and language so they don't know how to pack the densities of information properly or how to swim through choppy relationships with the world around them while effectively communicating. But who knows, maybe they're more effective and I'm just an idiot.
fazkan 6mo ago
why do I feel that this post itself was written by AI
- xz_tie 6mo ago
  This is the issue in this AI-everywhere world - I sometimes can't tell if I'm reading something written by a human or generated by an LLM. As a result, I tend to read less or skim faster, coz I don't wanna spend too much time on the latter, which feels like a summary of existing knowledge with less creativity. Over time, I found myself doing less serious reading, reflection, and thinking, and I hate that tbh.
vicchenai 6mo ago
the gym analogy lands. you dont hire someone to do your reps, but its fine to hire a trainer to critique your form. that distinction matters when thinking about how to actually use these tools.
borski 6mo ago
Writing well is a superpower, and even better in a world where “no one” is writing well. LLMs write poorly because most people write poorly. They didn’t cause it, they simply emulate it.
jasoneckert 6mo ago
For me, drawing the line as to when you will leverage AI and when you won't comes down to a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." Art is where I choose to draw the line, for both ideation and content generation. That work report I leveraged AI to help flush out isn't art, but my personal blog is, as is anything I must internalize (that is thoroughly understand and remember). This is why I have the following disclaimer on my blog (and yes, the typo on this page is purposeful!): https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/
- mat0 6mo ago
  This is the second time today that I come across this quote. I’m always happy to see Vonnegut in the wild. Let alone two times in a day!
smallerfish 6mo ago
Bad AI writing is bad, and obvious once you know what you're looking for. Nobody wants to read it. Good AI writing takes time, can be valuable, and can inspire readers to send in praise about how insightful or thorough a particular article was (speaking from experience). Why do it? The same reason we all use Claude all day to write code - it is faster / you can do more of it. But in the same way that a junior engineer vibing code is a lot more likely to produce slop than a grizzled senior who is doing the same thing, you have to know what you are doing to get good results out of it. Pushing back against AI writing in 2026 is like the people pushing back against AI coding in 2024. It's not a question of if it will happen. It's a question of how to do it well. ;)
fallinditch 6mo ago
The rational response to document overload is to mostly ignore it. Workers and managers in organizations are being overwhelmed by large numbers of documents because it's so easy to bang something off that's 'about right' and convincing enough. But there's still some value in writing documents. I agree with the original article - it's all about thinking. My take on it is this: it's possible to use LLMs to write decent documents so long as you treat the process as a partnership (man and machine), and conduct the process iteratively. Work on it, and yes, think.
Jbird2k 6mo ago
I use LLMs for compilation of information sometimes. I’m a teacher and I sometimes use it to hack together a quick worksheet for my students. I see they need some practice with a certain concept and I get the LLM to generate a LaTeX doc which I compile to pdf. I find it can be particularly useful at document creation but it is horrible at writing anything that’s in sentence form. It stinks and is not great at conveying my voice. I will sometimes write a lesson and have an LLM generate a quiz and give me feedback on my content search for mistakes or unclear content. I have also used it to help me structure a document. I give it requirements it makes a general outline that I then just fill in with my own words. I’m still not sure how to approach my students’ uses of an LLM. I am loath to make a hard and fast rule of no LLMs because that’s ridiculous. I want to encourage appropriate use. I don’t know what is appropriate use in the context of a student. An LLM can be a great learning tool but it also can be a crutch.
arbirk 6mo ago
I agree. As the amount of cheap content grows, I think we will come to like condensed to the point articles like this one.
jilles 6mo ago
The author articulates perfectly what I think too. I’d recommend for everyone to read Writing to Learn by William Zinsser. It’s an incredible book showing that you can learn anything by writing about it. With an LLM doing all the writing for you, you learn close to nothing.
keybored 6mo ago
> The goal of writing is not to have written. It is to have increased your understanding, and then the understanding of those around you. When you are tasked to write something, your job is to go into the murkiness and come out of it with structure and understanding. To conquer the unknown. Adults now have to be explained, like children, that you can’t just stream info through the eyes and ears and expect to learn anything. That’s one explanation for this apparent need; there are also more sinister ones.
yawnxyz 6mo ago
so many thinkers/writers mistake writing prose for thinking. including Paul Graham. this is ABSOLUTELY not true. You can write for yourself, through thinking, and it can be sloppy, bc you're doing it for yourself. A homecooked meal does NOT look like a Thanksgiving meal. Most of these writers think that all writing looks like Thanksgiving meals- they aren't. Homecooked meals can be simple, delicious, and not meant to cater for 20+ guests, from family to friends. Each with their own weird peculiarities and food allergies. writing for thinking should be more like home cooked meals- really disorganized, really sloppy, with none of the presentation, but with all the nutrition and comfort that comes with home cooked meals. writing is thinking for me, but writing looks like this post; something shot from the hip, and unpolished, to be consumed for myself. it'll probably be downvoted, and that's absolutely ok
nbaksalyar 6mo ago
I have a feeling that the same idea absolutely does apply to code. Writing code is much closer to writing prose than it may seem. And the act of writing code also makes you think as you write. Even if you're writing boilerplate. Because how else would you uncover subtle opportunities to reduce the boilerplate and introduce new, better abstractions?
- globular-toast 6mo ago
  That's a good point. When I first started programming web backends in PHP it quickly became apparent that what I was doing was very repetitive and formulaic. I could see that it would be possible to write some kind of framework to reduce the amount of repetition. I was nowhere near a good enough programmer to do it at the time, but I was maybe a couple of years ahead of Ruby on Rails and Django. I wasn't the only one to spot this. What worries me is, if we had LLMs back then would we ever have bothered inventing RoR/Django? Why bother when we don't feel the pain of repetition every day? How would we ever develop instincts about the code if we can't even read it, much less write it? I feel like we are heading full steam into a depression. An era of stagnation where we forget how to do anything original. Idiocracy comes to mind. It might take a decade to correct.
- JetSetIlly 6mo ago
  I agree. The act of coding is when I do my thinking.
njmicali 6mo ago
Curious if people are actually using AI to publish real scientific papers?
bushido 6mo ago
I wrote about something similar this week[0]. Beyond doing your own writing and understanding the outcomes that you want clearly, there is an increasing need for us to write our own docs/tickets as all of these are also the prompts. Docs written by agents almost always produce mediocre results. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579977
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codexb 6mo ago
I find LLM's particularly good at filtering and distilling a large rambling idea that I have into a well-formatted and coherent paragraph, and also removing any statements that would be perceived as overly argumentative or rude. In essense, LLM's are a much better spell check.
thisisrobv 6mo ago
I think we're beyond this already for most Claude/ChatGPT users they just assume that everything is written by AI because that's what they'd do. Credibility has been lost, but certainly there are many cases where human thinking will improve the final artifact, I think it's enough to focus on improving quality vs some moral high ground.
enduku 6mo ago
I feel like LLMs are just forcing me to realize what writing actually is. For me, writing is basically a mental cache clear. I write things down so I can process them fully and then safely forget them. If I let an LLM generate the text, that cognitive resolution never happens. I can't offload a thought i haven't actually formed - hence am troubld to safely forget about it. Using AI for that is like hiring someone to lift weights for you and expecting to get stronger (I remember Slavoj Žižek equating it to a mechanical lovemaking in his recent talk somewhere). The real trap isn't that we/writers willbe replaced; it's that we'll read the eloquent output of a model and quietly trick ourselves into believing we possess the deep comprehension it just spit out. It reminds me of the shift from painting to photography. We thought the point of painting was to perfectly replicate reality, right up until the camera automated it. That stripped away the illusion and revealed what the art was actually for. If the goal is just to pump out boilerplate, sure, let AIdo it. But if the goal is to figure out what I actually think, I still have to do the tedious, frustrating work of writing it out myself .
modriano 6mo ago
This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea. I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an "Easy button" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
- observationist 6mo ago
  I'm not sure - being able to take something like a casual response to a post, and then changing it to iambic pentameter with the easy button could be a great way of learning how to do that off the cuff. Though I’m unsure, this notion comes to mind: to take a casual reply to a post and turn it, with an easy button’s press, to flawless iambic pentameter might be the finest way to learn the art of speaking thus extempore, off the cuff. It's not perfect, but I envy the wealth of tools this generation has. They'll find uses for AI that leave us in awe.
  - Planktonne 6mo ago
    It's worth emphasizing here that you haven't changed it to iambic pentameter with an easy button. Your A lines are, but the Bs butcher it.
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ryguz 6mo ago
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wei03288 6mo ago
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AYBABTME 6mo ago
This reduces writing to one concept: thinking and the writing is just a byproduct. But writing is also presentation and also communication. There is nothing wrong with speechwriters. Various authors spilled out their thoughts in rough format and had writers turn them into better structured, prosed and understandable projections. Hand writing each sentence that is presented as an end-product to the reader doesn't solve that problem. Forcibly coupling the two is an arbitrary choice that may be a valid tradeoff for some and not so for others, and not so for _all_ writing. I'm not good at looping through a document with proper english prose. My writing is raw, particular, and I gloss over a lot of details. LLMs help me turn my shitty extensive notes in bad grammar and syntax, into shareable and understandable artifacts. They help me turn more of my thoughts into ingestable communication by others. Without AI, I communicate less of my thoughts due to friction. My thoughts are formed and authored and written, but not in a format consumable by anyone else. Ebikes help older riders keep riding.
- ozozozd 6mo ago
  Keep in mind that thoughts similar to yours produce the same output from an LLM. You may be thinking “my thoughts are original” and I would agree, but we won’t be able to see the original parts when it runs through an LLM.
_pdp_ 6mo ago
LLMs are not very good at generating ideas - unless you ask them to go crazy - then they can generate interesting ideas that quickly become repetitive. But the initial set is actually good in my own experience. As for writing, we need to keep in mind that LLMs are tools that augment. So yes if you completely abdicate all responsibility to the LLM that is basically not constructive at all. But if you use it as a tool - what difference does it make? Spell and grammar checkers are also changing your text and of course I am exaggerating a little. And I do think LLMs can help you think better but not in a default mode. It is not about prompting skills but making it work the way you want it. And that takes time because well, it is not deterministic and it requires understanding how you generally think and write. Most of the time might not be possible. For others it works really well, maybe because they write like an LLM? Btw, we often forget that English is not native for majority of people on this planet. IMHO using LLMs to express themselves clearly is many times better than remaining misunderstood.
jmatthews 6mo ago
I learned some of this the hard way. I did the thinking and the distillation, but I had AI write the prose and that's all a lot of people saw, the AI tell-tales.
zhoujing204 6mo ago
I am not a native English speaker, I can do reading fine, but writing is a big trouble for me, especially formal writing and academic writing, AI can do help me writing better, of course I'll review what AI generated.(Above all are not written by AI obviously.)
aussieguy1234 6mo ago
Write down the core facts, questions and answers in a very rough around the edges draft. Don't bother spell or grammar checking. But make sure the facts are all there. Then, ask an LLM to fix up the article, make it look professional and fill in the "fluff". Explicitly tell it to not include facts not already in the document. Review the document and if its all good, its done.
stephen_cagle 6mo ago
Writing (unassisted) is probably the first step towards your own independent thoughts. I'm reminded of that scene in "Ghost in the Shell" where some guy ask the Major why he is on the team (full of cyborgs) and she responds something along the line of "Because you are basically un-enhanced (maybe without a ghost?) and are likely to respond differently then the rest of us; Overspecialization is death." I think a diversity of opinion is important for society. I'm worried that LLM's are going to group-think us into thinking the same way, believing the same things, reacting the same way. I wonder if future children will need to be taught how to purposely have their own opinions; being so used to always asking others before even considering things on their own? The LLM will likely reach a better conclusion than you would on your own, but there is value in diverging from the consensus and thinking your own thoughts. https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2025-10-14-you-should-write-poorly/ https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2025-10-14-you-should-...
- apsurd 6mo ago
  Agree. Also, deference to consensus has always been a thing. "Best practices" is a thing at all levels of school and work. So it's very much a human thing, AI drastically compresses the timeline. Importantly, it's not wrong. I say this as someone that seems to have the contrarian gene. I am worried too, that status-quo is now instant and all-consuming for anyone anywhere. But there's still hope in that AI compresses ramp up speed for anyone that would have the capacity to branch out anyway. So that's good.
- alcor-z 6mo ago
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- Gigachad 6mo ago
  I think LLM writing is probably a short term fad. It doesn't provide any value and no one likes reading it. That said, anywhere where value can be extracted by posting writing will be completely destroyed by LLMs as people try to grift their way in. Either we find some way to filter out AI slop or the internet just stops getting used to post and consume content.
openenough 6mo ago
I find it interesting that there are some who want to tell me how to use AI. Are these people politically on the left? I'm genuinely interested to know what kind of person does this?
ozozozd 6mo ago
I realized that running one’s own writing through an LLM reduces the amount of information in it. Sort of like washing the nutrients of a fruit. When we write about something, inevitably, things about us leak into our writing. How we think about this thing, our value judgments about it, how much we thought about it, whether our perspective and thoughts on it are aged or fresh all come through, even if we don’t intend to. All of this information builds trust, helps the reader empathize and see our point of view. When our writing passes through an LLM, most of these are simply lost. An average expression of those thoughts with all the sharp edges - its character, essence - removed comes out. All writing is opinionated, and when it runs through an LLM, it comes out opinion-less. I noticed that I don’t care for opinion-less writing. Or people. One exception is the official Python documentation. I recently read some of the new documentation, and realized that it reads almost exactly as I first read it in 2010. I couldn’t believe it. Low opinion, high information density. I know for a fact that it has opinions in parts, but it’s shockingly infrequent.
visarga 6mo ago
The cognitive benefit of writing comes from externalizing and evaluating ideas under friction. LLM conversation provides more friction per unit time than solo drafting because you're constantly reacting to a semi-competent interlocutor who gets it almost-right in ways that force you to articulate exactly where it went wrong. I checked my logs and I write 10 words in chat for 1 word in LLM output for final text. So it's clearly not making me type less. I used to type about 10K words per month now I type 50-100K words per month (LLM chat is the difference). The surplus capacity provided by LLMs got reinvested immediately in scope and depth expansion. I did not get to spend 10x less time writing.
globular-toast 6mo ago
I still don't understand the concept of "using an LLM to write". You have to write your context in. That is your writing! Just send me that! I wrote about this ages ago. Just send me the prompt! https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/ https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/
instalabsai 6mo ago
For the same reason I prefer writing with a keyboard instead of handwriting, I prefer writing with a LLM than manually typing these days. I end up spending the same amount of time rewriting and editing a text than I would have otherwise but instead of worrying about grammatical mistakes or the flow of the text, I spend 100% of my time getting my idea across. Of course you can be lazy with LLMs and I can usually tell if it’s one—shotted as well, but if you are a good writer, you’ll get 10x out of using an LLM to write.
ghurtado 6mo ago
> The goal of writing is not to have written. A certain percentage of comments I write on social networks end up being deleted before even clicking post. Sometimes after spending 10 or 15 minutes writing it. The reasons are many, and I've long suspected I shouldn't feel like I'm throwing my time away when this happens. Now I have a way to remember why.
microbuilderco 6mo ago
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mrroryflint 6mo ago
I recently added an AI Policy to my blog (https://rory.codes/ai-policy https://rory.codes/ai-policy). The assumption now appears to be AI guilty unless proven innocent which I think is a travesty for readers and writers alike.
- riskable 6mo ago
  I use bullet points a lot in my writing and it seems that, specifically is causing people to accuse me of either: * Being an AI bot. * Using an LLM to generate it. It's driving me bonkers!
  - mrroryflint 6mo ago
    Yup! I am, ironically, second guessing myself when doing edits now to ensure I don't sound like an LLM...thus altering my natural writing style in places.
totierne2 6mo ago
Cut everyone. Paste er posters. Its 80s agi pop. Shoot in all directions. Twice.
Yash16 6mo ago
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radicalriddler 6mo ago
I wonder if anyone from HN would be willing to input their opinion into some features I'm building, which is really outputting LLM generated writing. It's basically automating release notes and sprint summary's from existing systems like Jira and Linear. The target user is a product team, the target reader are business stakeholders who want to validate your existence. I've found this process to be stupidly time consuming for both our delivery manager, and whichever Dev they decide to tap on the shoulder to help contextualize tickets. I feel like LLM's are a really good _summarizer_ and it can easily highlight if your tickets don't have enough context for actual people, if even an LLM can't write a summary with good enough context. Idk, maybe it's a sensible usecase because you REALLY don't want novel ideas from the LLM in this case. You want it to tell you 1:1 what you did this sprint based on a list of issues.
- probably_wrong 6mo ago
  I'm saying more and more "if you don't have the time to write it then I don't have the time to read it". Therefore my first impression is: if the process is so formulaic that you can automate it, then the content itself cannot be of any interest and the whole song and dance should probably be scraped altogether - think of a person asking ChatGPT "make this one-liner sound professional" and then sending it to someone who auto-summarizes it. You mention that the target audience is "stakeholders who want to validate your existence", which makes me think that your target audience doesn't really care about what you actually did but rather about being heard. If that's the case then replacing the Delivery Manager (who is arguably doing a good job) with a machine that screams "I want to think about you as little as possible" is definitely a risk. It may work well to provide the DM with a first draft, though. Disclaimer: I don't know your team nor stakeholders and I'm probably not in your industry.
  - iteria 6mo ago
    Some documents are not important today, but they become _critical_ in the future. We lost a guy from my team and he was the only one who happen to know how to do this one process that happens every couple of months. Having that document was crucial. There is a lot of writing that is like that. I make my LLM write PR descriptions. It's not for me now and it might be for some of the reviewer now. But it's 100% for me in 2 years when I'm trying to understand why I did any of this and what was even the intention. But I'm a dev who tends to work on long lived systems where every once in a while you desperately need to know why something was done this way 5 years ago.
matevz_smallPMS 6mo ago
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antryu 6mo ago
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alex1sa 6mo ago
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KolibriFly 6mo ago
A lot of the value is in discovering the holes in your own reasoning while trying to make it legible to someone else
bhekanik 6mo ago
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2020science 6mo ago
I find it depends on context. I write a lot as an academic and author. When I need to generate functional content that has a specific purpose (knowledge base, transfer of information etc) I will use AI where it makes sense. Where I write to explore ideas, develop my own thinking, and connect with others in a very relational way, I intentionally do not use AI. Plus, when I do this, writing is an extension of my identity and I'd rather not give that away!
Dev-Chris 6mo ago
Using LLMs to write defeats the whole purpose. When you write you learn, you see where you had gaps in knowledge and understanding and it prompts you to go back and fill them up. It helps bring out and sharpen your reasoning. Using an LLM to write is like Using a forklift at the gym. You learn nothing.
genadym 6mo ago
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theAurenVale 6mo ago
this maps to what im seeing in visual AI too. rendering quality is insane now, nobody disputes that. but most AI generated images look generic and flat because theres no direction behind them same thing with writing imo. the output quality is technically fine but if you didnt wrestle with the ideas yourself the result reads like noone actually thought about it writing forces you to confront where your thinking is vague. directing a photo shoot does the same thing actualy, the moment you have to commit to a specific angle or framing you discover what you realy want to say. skip that step and you get competent emptiness
- HeinrichAQS 6mo ago
  If we see intent as a real part of information which influences the output substantially then this is perfectly explainable - the part of intent is not intrinsic to any artificial generation. Intent can only be given by external input and will be therefor always transformed by the statistical operations which happen during the generation of the output. The wrestling with the ideas is to find the sweetspot between intent, anticipated outcome and the anticipated recognition from other of the result. Even if we put in intent into the generation than the assumption of the consequences of the certain output in certain contexts is still missing. And the core of this problem is in my opinion the missing casual chain - without this no causal link between the generation and its consequences can be established and therefore no "deepness" can be found in the generated artifacts.
DevKoan 6mo ago
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black_13 6mo ago
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notnullorvoid 6mo ago
It's interesting to see so many people agree with this perspective when it comes to articles yet disagree when it comes to writing software. Perhaps some form of Gell-Mann Amnesia, people are better at recognizing good articles than they are at recognizing good software. Combined with a vibe coding effect of never actually reading the source, and thus recognizing how bad it is.
matevz_smallPMS 6mo ago
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balderdash 6mo ago
I do my own writing, but i can go so much faster really just writing all of my thoughts down and organizing them a bit and using llms to really just clean up and better organize my thinking.
Willish42 6mo ago
The trust component is so critical here. When I get halfway through reading a design doc and hit a part that's obviously slop, it really hurts my confidence in the project and in any faith in the developer having done their due diligence. Certain communications, especially technical writing, are "expensive" both in terms of the effort of the author(s), and in terms of the person-hours of people reading them to gain understanding. Like mission-critical code, they should be written and reviewed with care, and at the very least heavily edited from an automated LLM output to be unrecognizable as such. I personally don't use LLMs at all in my designs and I remain skeptical of the value proposition for those who do.
berz01 6mo ago
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jongjinchoi 6mo ago
I agree with most of this post. And I ask myself "When I write something for my own without AI?

748 points by karimf 6mo ago

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Outsource things that aren't valuable to you and your core mission. Do the things that are valuable to you and your core mission. This applies at a business level (most software shops shouldn't have full-time book keepers on staff, for example), but applies even more in the AI age. I use LLMs to help me code the boring stuff. I don't want to write CDK, I don't want to have to code the same boilerplate HTML and JS I've written dozens of times before - they can do that. But when I'm trying to implement something core to what I'm doing, I want to get more involved. Same with writing. There's an old joke in the writing business that most people want to be published authors than they do through the process of writing. People who say they want to write don't actually want to do the work of writing, they just want the cocktail parties and the stroked ego of seeing their name in a bookshop or library. LLMs are making that more possible, but at a rather odd cost. When I write, I do so because I want to think. Even when I use an LLM to rubber duck ideas off, I'm using it as a way to improve my thinking - the raw text it outputs is not the thing I want to give to others, but it might make me frame things differently or help me with grammar checks or with light editing tasks. Never the core thinking. Even when I dabble with fiction writing: I enjoy the process of plotting, character development, dialogue development, scene ordering, and so on. Why would I want to outsource that? Why would a reader be interested in that output rather than something I was trying to convey. Art lives in the gap between what an artist is trying to say and what an audience is trying to perceive - having an LLM involved breaks that. So yeah, coding, technical writing, non-fiction, fiction, whatever: if you're using an LLM you're giving up and saying "I don't care about this", and that might be OK if you don't care about this, but do that consciously and own it and talk about it up-front.

Aurornis 6mo ago
> Outsource things that aren't valuable to you and your core mission. When you outsource the generation and thinking, you're also outsourcing the self-review that comes along with evaluating your own output. In the office, that review step gets outsourced to your coworkers. Having a coworker who ChatGPT generates slides, design docs, or PRs is terrible because you realize that their primary input is prompting Claude and then sending the output to other people to review. I could have done that myself. Reviewing their Claude or ChatGPT output so they can prompt Claude or ChatGPT to fix it is just a way to get me to do their work for them.

Aurornis 6mo ago

> When I send somebody a document that whiffs of LLM, I’m only demonstrating that the LLM produced something approximating what others want to hear. I’m not showing that I contended with the ideas. This eloquently states the problem with sending LLM content to other people: As soon as they catch on that you're giving them LLM writing, it changes the dynamic of the relationship entirely. Now you're not asking them to review your ideas or code, you're asking them to review some output you got from an LLM. The worst LLM offenders in the workplace are the people who take tickets, have Claude do the ticket, push the PR, and then go idle while they expect other people to review the work. I've had to have a few uncomfortable conversations where I explain to people that it's their job to review their own submissions before submitting them. It's something that should be obvious, but the magic of seeing an LLM produce code that passes tests or writing that looks like it agrees with the prompt you wrote does something to some people's brains.

bandrami 6mo ago
Lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The market-clearing solution is to have some mechanism by which the producers pay the rest of us to consume the products. Whoever comes up with that framework will probably do very well.
- Gigachad 6mo ago
  They are basically destroying markets where there is value in producing content. No one wants to consume your LLM slop book, but if you spam Amazon with thousands and thousands of AI generated books, you will end up making a profit tricking some people in to buying them. Meanwhile the real books struggle to be seen in the mountains of shit.

CharlesW 6mo ago

The title and of this article is Don't Let AI Write For You, when its point seems to be closer to Don't Let AI Think For You (see "Thinking"). This distinction is important, because (1) writing is not the only way to faciliate thinking, and (2) writing is not neccessarily even the best way to facilitate thinking. It's definitely not the best way (a) for everyone, (b) in every situation. Audio can be a great way to capture ideas and thought processes. Rod Serling wrote predominantly through dictation. Mark Twain wrote most of his of his autobiography by dictation. Mark Duplass on The Talking Draft Method (1m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsV-3wel7k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsV-3wel7k4 This can work especially well for people who are distracted by form and "writing correctly" too early in the process, for people who are intimidated by blank pages, for non-neurotypical people, etc. Self-recording is a great way to set all of those artifacts of the medium aside and capture what you want to say. From there, you can (and should) leverage AI for transcripts, light transcript cleanups, grammar checks, etc.

lokar 6mo ago
I would count direct dictation (eg someone writes down what you say, and that is the final text), as writing, in the context of producing a document (book, etc) that you intend others to read. It's not the same thing as talking to someone (or a group) about something.
keithnz 6mo ago
I'm finding AI great to have a conversation with to flesh out ideas, with the added benefit it can summarize everything at the end
- tines 6mo ago
  You're being steered without being aware of it.
  - whiplash451 6mo ago
    Worse. You’re being steered along a circle

TrianguloY 6mo ago

> Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you. This. This is the big distinction. If you like something and/or want to improve it, you do it yourself. If not, you pay someone else to do it. And I think that's ok. But I guess some people either choose a wrong job or had no other option. I'm happy to not be in that group.

fraywing 6mo ago

>Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you. It's worse than this. If someone is working out for you, they still own the outcome of that effort (their physique). With an LLM people _act_ like the outcome is their own production. The thinking, reasoning, structural capability, modeling, and presentation can all just as easily be framed _as your creation_. That's why I think we're seeing an inverse relationship between ideation output and coherence (and perhaps unoriginality) and a decline in creative thinking and creativity[0] [0] https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

roadside_picnic 6mo ago

I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really consolidated my thinking. However, there is a lot of writing that is basically just an old school from of context engineering. While I would love to think that a PRD is a place to think through ideas, I think many of us have encountered situations, pre-AI, where PRDs were basically context dumps without any real planning or thought. For these cases, I think we should just drop the premise altogether that you're writing. If you need to write a proposal for something as a matter of ritual, give it AI. If you're documenting a feature to remember context only (and not really explain the larger abstract principles driving it), it's better created as context for an LLM to consume. Not long ago my engineering team was trying to enforce writing release notes so people could be aware of breaking changes, then people groaned at the idea of having to read this. The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context. I think it's going to be awhile before the full impact of AI really works it's way through how we work. In the mean time we'll continue to have AI written content fed back into AI and then sent back to someone else (when this could all be a more optimized, closed loop).

delusional 6mo ago
For your context, I'm an AI hater, so understand my assumptions as such. > The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context. Why is more AI the "obvious" best solution here? If nobody wants to read your release notes, then why write them? And if they're going to slim them down with their AI anyway, then why not leave them terse? It sounds like you're just handwaving at a problem and saying "that's where the AI would go" when really that problem is much better solved without AI if you put a little more thought into it.
- 6mo ago

janalsncm 6mo ago

Well said. The most important part of writing is thinking. LLMs cannot do the thinking for you. This is why I’m bearish on all of the apps that want to do my writing for me. Expanding a stub of an idea into a low information density paragraph, and then summarizing those paragraphs on the other end. What’s the point? Unless the idea is trivial, LLMs are probably just getting in the way.

fleebee 6mo ago

You quote this: > LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too? Given your endorsement of using LLMs for generating ideas, isn't this the inverse of your thesis? The quote's issue with LLMs is the ideas that came out of them; the prose is the tell. I don't think they'd be happy with LLM generated ideas even if they were handwritten. I feel like this post is missing the forest for the trees. Writing is thinking alright, but fueling your writing by brainstorming with an LLM waters down the process.

atmosx 6mo ago
I take it ideas to mean “well scoped replies” like “list pro and con if this vs that got flow”. While someone might think of N issues the LLM might present another six out of which three or four don’t make sense but one or two do. Might be worth adding these in the document.

nerevarthelame 6mo ago

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

dummydummy1234 6mo ago
I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.
- monkaiju 6mo ago
  I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging. The moment I bring in a conversational element, I want a being that actually has problem comprehension and creativity which an LLM by definition does not.
  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - dexwiz 6mo ago
    Sometimes people just need something else to tell them their ideas are valid. Validation is a core principle of therapeutic care. Procrastination is tightly linked to fear of a negative outcome. LLMs can help with both of these. They can validate ideas in the now which can help overcome some of that anxiety. Unfortunately they can also validate some really bad ideas.

bluepeter 6mo ago

Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) has totally devolved into "prompt-ese." Much like days of yore where we all approached Google searches with acrobatic language knowing how to specifically get something done. Now? I am pushing so much of my writing into prompts into AI where I know the AI will understand me even with lots of typos and run-on sentences... Is that a bad thing? A good thing? I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words, and the precision and grammar is mostly irrelevant. But I am able to insert nuances and sidetracks that ARE passing vital context to AI but may be lost on people. Or at least pre-prompt-writing people.

add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
> Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) No. Don't pretend your taking shortcuts is less questionable because everyone else is doing it too. We're not. Own it yourself, don't get me involved. > I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words If you think value comes from volume of words you really need to understand writing better.
- bluepeter 6mo ago
  Ok, but 3 generations ago, shorthand was a core skill that any competent professional could read and extract MORE value from than laboriously typeset prose. Something similar is probably happening now with prompt-ese and human-to-human (vs just AI) writing.
qaadika 6mo ago
> Nowadays my writing [] has totally devolved into "prompt-ese." I've noticed this myself. Even in my Obsidian vault, which only I read and write in. I think it's a development into writing more imperatively, instinctually. Thinking more in instructions and commands than the speaking and writing habits I've developed organically over my life. Or just "talking to the computer" in plain English, after having to convert my thoughts to code anytime I want to make it do something. I've been thinking about the role of "director" in media as an analogy to writing with LLMs. I'm working right now on an "essay," that I'm not sure I'll share with anyone, even family (who is my first audience). Right now, under the Authorship section, I wrote "Conceived, directed, and edited by Qaadika. Drafted by Claude", with a few sentences noting that I take responsibility for the content, and that the arguments, structure, audience, and editorial judgments are mine. I had a unique idea and started with a single sentence prompt, and kept going from there until I realized it should be an essay. So the ideas in it are mine. The thesis is mine. I'm going back and forth with the LLM section by section. Some prompts are a sentence. Some are eight paragraphs. I can read the output and see exactly what was mine and what the LLM added. But my readers won't. They'll just see "Author: Qaadika" and presume every single word was mine. Or they'll sniff out the LLM-ness and stop reading. I can make a film and call myself director without ever being seen in it. Is is the same if I direct the composition of words without ever writing any of the prose myself? Presuming I've written enough in prompts that it's identifiably unique from cheaper prompts and "LLM, fill in the blank". We credit Steven Spielberg with E.T. But he didn't write the screenplay. He probably had comments on it, though. He didn't operate the camera. But he probably told the operators where to put it. He didn't act in it. But he probably told the actors where to stand and where to move and how to be. He didn't write the music. But he probably had a sense of when and where to place it in the audio. And he didn't spend every moment in the cutting room, placing every frame just so. But his name is at the top. He must have done something, even if I can't point to anything specific. The "Vibe" of the film is Spielberg, but it's also the result of hundreds of minds, most of whole aren't named until the end of the film, and probably never read by most viewers. His contribution to the film was instructions. Do this, don't do that. Let's move this scene to here. This shot would be better from this angle. The musical swell should be on this shot; cut it longer to fit. So where, exactly, is "Spielberg" in E.T.? What can we objective credit him with, aside from the finished product: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Coming June 1982?

paulpauper 6mo ago

Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you. The problem with writing is the feedback tends to be inconsistent. With going to the gym you can track your progress quantitatively such as how fast or far you can run or weight lifted, but it's sometimes hard to know if you're improving at writing.

sikiri_app 6mo ago
real fact and it is an interesting point.

gbro3n 6mo ago

I fully agree with the sentiment of the article. I will say that I feel I've had some success in having an LLM outline a document, provided that I then go through and read / edit thoroughly. I think there's even an argument that this a) possibly catches areas you I have forgotten to write about, and b) hooks into my critique mode which feels more motivated than author mode sometimes (I'm slightly ashamed to say). This does come at the cost however of not putting my self in 'researcher' mode, where I go back through the system I'm writing about and follow the threads, reacquainting myself and judging my previous decisions.

firefoxd 6mo ago

I'm 100% an advocate for not using LLM for writing... But I'll tell you were I use them just for that. For ceremonies. A large part of our work is about writing documents that no one will read, but you'll get 10 different reminders that they need to get done. These are documents that circulate, need approval from different stake holders. Everybody stamps their name on it, without ever reading it. I used to spend so much time crafting these documents. Now I use an LLM, the stakeholders are probably using an LLM to summarize it, someone is happy, they are filed for the records. I call these "ceremonies" because they are a requirement we have, it helps no one, we don't know why we have to do it, but no one wants to question it.

criddell 6mo ago
If it's very mechanical you probably aren't losing out on anything by using a machine to produce it.

windowliker 6mo ago

>Don't Let AI Write For You >Essay structured like LLM output Hmmm...

paulpauper 6mo ago
I think a lot of people run their posts through an LLM after writing it and edit it accordingly, resulting in an output somewhere between human-made and AI-generated.

drnick1 6mo ago

> They are particularly good at generating ideas. I think it's the opposite. People have ideas and know what they want to do. If I need to write something, I provide some bullet points and instructions, and Claude does the rest. I then review, and iterate.

jonathaneunice 6mo ago

Agree with the underlying point: "don't let an LLM do your thinking, or interfere with processes essential to you thinking things clearly through." My own experience, however, is that the best models are quite good and helping you with those writing and thinking processes. Finding gaps, exposing contradictions or weaknesses in your hypotheses or specifications, and suggesting related or supporting content that you might have included if you'd thought of it, but you didn't. While I'm a developer and engineer now, I was a professional author, editor, and publisher in a former life. Would have _killed_ for the fast, often excellent feedback and acceleration that LLMs now provide. And while sure, I often have to "no, no, no!" or delete-delete, "redraft this and do it this way," the overall process is faster and the outcomes better with AI assistance. The most important thing is to keep overall control of the tone, flow, and arguments. Every word need not be your own, at least in most forms of commercial and practical writing. True whether your collaborators are human, mecha, or some mix.

deevelton 6mo ago
was curious how it might look if we started seeing prompts/steering inline with the finished product: https://dvelton.github.io/trace/examples/the-post.html https://dvelton.github.io/trace/examples/the-post.html
- jonathaneunice 6mo ago
  First impression is love that! Need to study it more. We need—or at least I need—a better UI/tool to manage the sequence of edits and collaboration, drafting, rubber-ducking, and evaluation that AI tools provide. Including the prompts and edits is a nice feature, though I would also like more comparison "where we started" vs "where we are now."
  - deevelton 6mo ago
    I wonder if an animation with the prompts/edits inline and the text morphing might be an interesting UI…fun stuff to think about. Contributions welcome! https://github.com/dvelton/trace https://github.com/dvelton/trace

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D13Fd 6mo ago

> LLMs are useful for research and checking your work. I have to disagree that it's good for LLMs to do the research, depending on the context. If by "useful for research" you mean useful for tracking down sources that you, as the writer, digest and consider, then great. If by "useful for research" you mean that it will fill in your citations for you, that's terrible. That sends a false signal to readers about the credibility of your work. It's critical that the author read and digest the things they are citing to.

bboynton97 6mo ago

There's a lot of ways to use an LLM, the least effective is automating an entire process- yet it's the most compelling. To your point, it's entirely a balance. I personally will record a 10-15 minute yap session on a concept I want to share and feed it to an agent to distill it into a series of observations and more compelling concepts. Then you can use this to write your piece.

locusofself 6mo ago

I had an interesting experience the other day. I've been struggling with some lyrics to a song I am writing. I asked Claude to review them, and it did an amazing job of finding the weak lines and best lines, and nearly perfectly articulating to my why they were weak or strong. It was strange because the output of the analysis almost perfectly mirrored my own thoughts. When I asked it for alternatives/edits, they were not good however.

6thbit 6mo ago

Writing down specs for technical projects is a transformational skill. I've had projects that seemed tedious or obvious in my head only to realize hidden complexity when trying to put their trivial-ness into written words. It really is a sort of meditation on the problem. In the most important AI assisted project I've shipped so far I wrote the spec myself first entirely. But feeding it through an LLM feedback loop felt just as transformational, it didn't only help me get an easier to parse document, but helped me understand both the problem and my own solution from multiple angles and allowed me to address gaps early on. So I'll say: Do your own writing, first.

tombert 6mo ago

My blog is 100% written by me. You can tell because of all the typos. I don't really understand why people will create blogs that are generated by Claude or ChatGPT. You don't have to have a blog, isn't the point of something like a blog to be your writing? If I wanted an opinion from ChatGPT I could just ask ChatGPT for an opinion. The whole point of a blog, in my mind, is that there's a human who has something that they want to say. Even if you have original ideas, if you have ChatGPT write the core article makes it feel kind of inhuman. I'm more forgiving of stuff like Grammarly, because typos are annoying, though I've stopped using it because I found I didn't agree with a lot of its edits. I admit that I will use Claude to bullshit ideas back and forth, basically as a more intelligent "rubber duck", but the writing is always me.

godot 6mo ago

The way I approach having LLM help with writing documents like this is to have it help me clean up my writing, not write the substance of it. I tend to do extensive research (that process in itself would involve LLMs too, sure) in a tech plan, a product spec, etc. and usually end up with a really solid idea in my head and like say, five critical key points about this tech plan or product spec that I absolutely must convey in this document. Then I basically "brain dump" my critical key points (including everything about it, background/reasoning, why this or that way, what's counterintuitive about it, why is this point important, etc.) in pretty messy writing (but hitting all the important talking points) to a LLM prompt, asking it to produce the document I need (be it tech plan, product spec, whatever) and ask it to write it based on my points. The resulting document has all the important substance on it this way. If you use LLM to produce documents like this by a way of a prompt like "Write a tech plan for the product feature XYZ I want to build", you're going to get a lot of fluff. No substance, plenty of mistakes, wrong assumptions, etc.

jcalvinowens 6mo ago

I feel very much the same way about debugging: it is through the process of repeatedly being slightly wrong that I come to actually understand what is happening. Sometimes an LLM can shortcut me through a bunch of those misunderstandings. It feels like an easy win. But ultimately, lacking context for how I got to that point in the debugging litany always slows me down more than the time it saved me. I frequently have to go backwards to uncover some earlier insight the LLM glossed over, in order to "unlock" a later problem in the litany. If the problem is simple enough the LLM can actually directly tell you the answer, it's great. But using it as a debugging "coach" or "assistant" is actively worse than nothing for me.

unsignedint 6mo ago

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kristopolous 6mo ago

I write far better than any llm ... I've tried to get them to help me with writing, they always fuck it up. The biggest problem is they don't understand the time effort tradeoff between understanding and language so they don't know how to pack the densities of information properly or how to swim through choppy relationships with the world around them while effectively communicating. But who knows, maybe they're more effective and I'm just an idiot.

fazkan 6mo ago

why do I feel that this post itself was written by AI

xz_tie 6mo ago
This is the issue in this AI-everywhere world - I sometimes can't tell if I'm reading something written by a human or generated by an LLM. As a result, I tend to read less or skim faster, coz I don't wanna spend too much time on the latter, which feels like a summary of existing knowledge with less creativity. Over time, I found myself doing less serious reading, reflection, and thinking, and I hate that tbh.

vicchenai 6mo ago

the gym analogy lands. you dont hire someone to do your reps, but its fine to hire a trainer to critique your form. that distinction matters when thinking about how to actually use these tools.

borski 6mo ago

Writing well is a superpower, and even better in a world where “no one” is writing well. LLMs write poorly because most people write poorly. They didn’t cause it, they simply emulate it.

jasoneckert 6mo ago

For me, drawing the line as to when you will leverage AI and when you won't comes down to a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." Art is where I choose to draw the line, for both ideation and content generation. That work report I leveraged AI to help flush out isn't art, but my personal blog is, as is anything I must internalize (that is thoroughly understand and remember). This is why I have the following disclaimer on my blog (and yes, the typo on this page is purposeful!): https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

mat0 6mo ago
This is the second time today that I come across this quote. I’m always happy to see Vonnegut in the wild. Let alone two times in a day!

smallerfish 6mo ago

Bad AI writing is bad, and obvious once you know what you're looking for. Nobody wants to read it. Good AI writing takes time, can be valuable, and can inspire readers to send in praise about how insightful or thorough a particular article was (speaking from experience). Why do it? The same reason we all use Claude all day to write code - it is faster / you can do more of it. But in the same way that a junior engineer vibing code is a lot more likely to produce slop than a grizzled senior who is doing the same thing, you have to know what you are doing to get good results out of it. Pushing back against AI writing in 2026 is like the people pushing back against AI coding in 2024. It's not a question of if it will happen. It's a question of how to do it well. ;)

fallinditch 6mo ago

The rational response to document overload is to mostly ignore it. Workers and managers in organizations are being overwhelmed by large numbers of documents because it's so easy to bang something off that's 'about right' and convincing enough. But there's still some value in writing documents. I agree with the original article - it's all about thinking. My take on it is this: it's possible to use LLMs to write decent documents so long as you treat the process as a partnership (man and machine), and conduct the process iteratively. Work on it, and yes, think.

Jbird2k 6mo ago

I use LLMs for compilation of information sometimes. I’m a teacher and I sometimes use it to hack together a quick worksheet for my students. I see they need some practice with a certain concept and I get the LLM to generate a LaTeX doc which I compile to pdf. I find it can be particularly useful at document creation but it is horrible at writing anything that’s in sentence form. It stinks and is not great at conveying my voice. I will sometimes write a lesson and have an LLM generate a quiz and give me feedback on my content search for mistakes or unclear content. I have also used it to help me structure a document. I give it requirements it makes a general outline that I then just fill in with my own words. I’m still not sure how to approach my students’ uses of an LLM. I am loath to make a hard and fast rule of no LLMs because that’s ridiculous. I want to encourage appropriate use. I don’t know what is appropriate use in the context of a student. An LLM can be a great learning tool but it also can be a crutch.

arbirk 6mo ago

I agree. As the amount of cheap content grows, I think we will come to like condensed to the point articles like this one.

jilles 6mo ago

The author articulates perfectly what I think too. I’d recommend for everyone to read Writing to Learn by William Zinsser. It’s an incredible book showing that you can learn anything by writing about it. With an LLM doing all the writing for you, you learn close to nothing.

keybored 6mo ago

> The goal of writing is not to have written. It is to have increased your understanding, and then the understanding of those around you. When you are tasked to write something, your job is to go into the murkiness and come out of it with structure and understanding. To conquer the unknown. Adults now have to be explained, like children, that you can’t just stream info through the eyes and ears and expect to learn anything. That’s one explanation for this apparent need; there are also more sinister ones.

yawnxyz 6mo ago

so many thinkers/writers mistake writing prose for thinking. including Paul Graham. this is ABSOLUTELY not true. You can write for yourself, through thinking, and it can be sloppy, bc you're doing it for yourself. A homecooked meal does NOT look like a Thanksgiving meal. Most of these writers think that all writing looks like Thanksgiving meals- they aren't. Homecooked meals can be simple, delicious, and not meant to cater for 20+ guests, from family to friends. Each with their own weird peculiarities and food allergies. writing for thinking should be more like home cooked meals- really disorganized, really sloppy, with none of the presentation, but with all the nutrition and comfort that comes with home cooked meals. writing is thinking for me, but writing looks like this post; something shot from the hip, and unpolished, to be consumed for myself. it'll probably be downvoted, and that's absolutely ok

nbaksalyar 6mo ago

I have a feeling that the same idea absolutely does apply to code. Writing code is much closer to writing prose than it may seem. And the act of writing code also makes you think as you write. Even if you're writing boilerplate. Because how else would you uncover subtle opportunities to reduce the boilerplate and introduce new, better abstractions?

globular-toast 6mo ago
That's a good point. When I first started programming web backends in PHP it quickly became apparent that what I was doing was very repetitive and formulaic. I could see that it would be possible to write some kind of framework to reduce the amount of repetition. I was nowhere near a good enough programmer to do it at the time, but I was maybe a couple of years ahead of Ruby on Rails and Django. I wasn't the only one to spot this. What worries me is, if we had LLMs back then would we ever have bothered inventing RoR/Django? Why bother when we don't feel the pain of repetition every day? How would we ever develop instincts about the code if we can't even read it, much less write it? I feel like we are heading full steam into a depression. An era of stagnation where we forget how to do anything original. Idiocracy comes to mind. It might take a decade to correct.
JetSetIlly 6mo ago
I agree. The act of coding is when I do my thinking.

njmicali 6mo ago

Curious if people are actually using AI to publish real scientific papers?

bushido 6mo ago

I wrote about something similar this week[0]. Beyond doing your own writing and understanding the outcomes that you want clearly, there is an increasing need for us to write our own docs/tickets as all of these are also the prompts. Docs written by agents almost always produce mediocre results. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579977

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codexb 6mo ago

I find LLM's particularly good at filtering and distilling a large rambling idea that I have into a well-formatted and coherent paragraph, and also removing any statements that would be perceived as overly argumentative or rude. In essense, LLM's are a much better spell check.

thisisrobv 6mo ago

I think we're beyond this already for most Claude/ChatGPT users they just assume that everything is written by AI because that's what they'd do. Credibility has been lost, but certainly there are many cases where human thinking will improve the final artifact, I think it's enough to focus on improving quality vs some moral high ground.

enduku 6mo ago

I feel like LLMs are just forcing me to realize what writing actually is. For me, writing is basically a mental cache clear. I write things down so I can process them fully and then safely forget them. If I let an LLM generate the text, that cognitive resolution never happens. I can't offload a thought i haven't actually formed - hence am troubld to safely forget about it. Using AI for that is like hiring someone to lift weights for you and expecting to get stronger (I remember Slavoj Žižek equating it to a mechanical lovemaking in his recent talk somewhere). The real trap isn't that we/writers willbe replaced; it's that we'll read the eloquent output of a model and quietly trick ourselves into believing we possess the deep comprehension it just spit out. It reminds me of the shift from painting to photography. We thought the point of painting was to perfectly replicate reality, right up until the camera automated it. That stripped away the illusion and revealed what the art was actually for. If the goal is just to pump out boilerplate, sure, let AIdo it. But if the goal is to figure out what I actually think, I still have to do the tedious, frustrating work of writing it out myself .

modriano 6mo ago

This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea. I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an "Easy button" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

observationist 6mo ago
I'm not sure - being able to take something like a casual response to a post, and then changing it to iambic pentameter with the easy button could be a great way of learning how to do that off the cuff. Though I’m unsure, this notion comes to mind: to take a casual reply to a post and turn it, with an easy button’s press, to flawless iambic pentameter might be the finest way to learn the art of speaking thus extempore, off the cuff. It's not perfect, but I envy the wealth of tools this generation has. They'll find uses for AI that leave us in awe.
- Planktonne 6mo ago
  It's worth emphasizing here that you haven't changed it to iambic pentameter with an easy button. Your A lines are, but the Bs butcher it.
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ryguz 6mo ago

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wei03288 6mo ago

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AYBABTME 6mo ago

This reduces writing to one concept: thinking and the writing is just a byproduct. But writing is also presentation and also communication. There is nothing wrong with speechwriters. Various authors spilled out their thoughts in rough format and had writers turn them into better structured, prosed and understandable projections. Hand writing each sentence that is presented as an end-product to the reader doesn't solve that problem. Forcibly coupling the two is an arbitrary choice that may be a valid tradeoff for some and not so for others, and not so for _all_ writing. I'm not good at looping through a document with proper english prose. My writing is raw, particular, and I gloss over a lot of details. LLMs help me turn my shitty extensive notes in bad grammar and syntax, into shareable and understandable artifacts. They help me turn more of my thoughts into ingestable communication by others. Without AI, I communicate less of my thoughts due to friction. My thoughts are formed and authored and written, but not in a format consumable by anyone else. Ebikes help older riders keep riding.

ozozozd 6mo ago
Keep in mind that thoughts similar to yours produce the same output from an LLM. You may be thinking “my thoughts are original” and I would agree, but we won’t be able to see the original parts when it runs through an LLM.

_pdp_ 6mo ago

LLMs are not very good at generating ideas - unless you ask them to go crazy - then they can generate interesting ideas that quickly become repetitive. But the initial set is actually good in my own experience. As for writing, we need to keep in mind that LLMs are tools that augment. So yes if you completely abdicate all responsibility to the LLM that is basically not constructive at all. But if you use it as a tool - what difference does it make? Spell and grammar checkers are also changing your text and of course I am exaggerating a little. And I do think LLMs can help you think better but not in a default mode. It is not about prompting skills but making it work the way you want it. And that takes time because well, it is not deterministic and it requires understanding how you generally think and write. Most of the time might not be possible. For others it works really well, maybe because they write like an LLM? Btw, we often forget that English is not native for majority of people on this planet. IMHO using LLMs to express themselves clearly is many times better than remaining misunderstood.

jmatthews 6mo ago

I learned some of this the hard way. I did the thinking and the distillation, but I had AI write the prose and that's all a lot of people saw, the AI tell-tales.

zhoujing204 6mo ago

I am not a native English speaker, I can do reading fine, but writing is a big trouble for me, especially formal writing and academic writing, AI can do help me writing better, of course I'll review what AI generated.(Above all are not written by AI obviously.)

aussieguy1234 6mo ago

Write down the core facts, questions and answers in a very rough around the edges draft. Don't bother spell or grammar checking. But make sure the facts are all there. Then, ask an LLM to fix up the article, make it look professional and fill in the "fluff". Explicitly tell it to not include facts not already in the document. Review the document and if its all good, its done.

stephen_cagle 6mo ago

Writing (unassisted) is probably the first step towards your own independent thoughts. I'm reminded of that scene in "Ghost in the Shell" where some guy ask the Major why he is on the team (full of cyborgs) and she responds something along the line of "Because you are basically un-enhanced (maybe without a ghost?) and are likely to respond differently then the rest of us; Overspecialization is death." I think a diversity of opinion is important for society. I'm worried that LLM's are going to group-think us into thinking the same way, believing the same things, reacting the same way. I wonder if future children will need to be taught how to purposely have their own opinions; being so used to always asking others before even considering things on their own? The LLM will likely reach a better conclusion than you would on your own, but there is value in diverging from the consensus and thinking your own thoughts. https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2025-10-14-you-should-write-poorly/ https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2025-10-14-you-should-...

apsurd 6mo ago
Agree. Also, deference to consensus has always been a thing. "Best practices" is a thing at all levels of school and work. So it's very much a human thing, AI drastically compresses the timeline. Importantly, it's not wrong. I say this as someone that seems to have the contrarian gene. I am worried too, that status-quo is now instant and all-consuming for anyone anywhere. But there's still hope in that AI compresses ramp up speed for anyone that would have the capacity to branch out anyway. So that's good.
alcor-z 6mo ago
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Gigachad 6mo ago
I think LLM writing is probably a short term fad. It doesn't provide any value and no one likes reading it. That said, anywhere where value can be extracted by posting writing will be completely destroyed by LLMs as people try to grift their way in. Either we find some way to filter out AI slop or the internet just stops getting used to post and consume content.

openenough 6mo ago

I find it interesting that there are some who want to tell me how to use AI. Are these people politically on the left? I'm genuinely interested to know what kind of person does this?

ozozozd 6mo ago

I realized that running one’s own writing through an LLM reduces the amount of information in it. Sort of like washing the nutrients of a fruit. When we write about something, inevitably, things about us leak into our writing. How we think about this thing, our value judgments about it, how much we thought about it, whether our perspective and thoughts on it are aged or fresh all come through, even if we don’t intend to. All of this information builds trust, helps the reader empathize and see our point of view. When our writing passes through an LLM, most of these are simply lost. An average expression of those thoughts with all the sharp edges - its character, essence - removed comes out. All writing is opinionated, and when it runs through an LLM, it comes out opinion-less. I noticed that I don’t care for opinion-less writing. Or people. One exception is the official Python documentation. I recently read some of the new documentation, and realized that it reads almost exactly as I first read it in 2010. I couldn’t believe it. Low opinion, high information density. I know for a fact that it has opinions in parts, but it’s shockingly infrequent.

visarga 6mo ago

The cognitive benefit of writing comes from externalizing and evaluating ideas under friction. LLM conversation provides more friction per unit time than solo drafting because you're constantly reacting to a semi-competent interlocutor who gets it almost-right in ways that force you to articulate exactly where it went wrong. I checked my logs and I write 10 words in chat for 1 word in LLM output for final text. So it's clearly not making me type less. I used to type about 10K words per month now I type 50-100K words per month (LLM chat is the difference). The surplus capacity provided by LLMs got reinvested immediately in scope and depth expansion. I did not get to spend 10x less time writing.

globular-toast 6mo ago

I still don't understand the concept of "using an LLM to write". You have to write your context in. That is your writing! Just send me that! I wrote about this ages ago. Just send me the prompt! https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/ https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

instalabsai 6mo ago

For the same reason I prefer writing with a keyboard instead of handwriting, I prefer writing with a LLM than manually typing these days. I end up spending the same amount of time rewriting and editing a text than I would have otherwise but instead of worrying about grammatical mistakes or the flow of the text, I spend 100% of my time getting my idea across. Of course you can be lazy with LLMs and I can usually tell if it’s one—shotted as well, but if you are a good writer, you’ll get 10x out of using an LLM to write.

ghurtado 6mo ago

> The goal of writing is not to have written. A certain percentage of comments I write on social networks end up being deleted before even clicking post. Sometimes after spending 10 or 15 minutes writing it. The reasons are many, and I've long suspected I shouldn't feel like I'm throwing my time away when this happens. Now I have a way to remember why.

microbuilderco 6mo ago

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mrroryflint 6mo ago

I recently added an AI Policy to my blog (https://rory.codes/ai-policy https://rory.codes/ai-policy). The assumption now appears to be AI guilty unless proven innocent which I think is a travesty for readers and writers alike.

riskable 6mo ago
I use bullet points a lot in my writing and it seems that, specifically is causing people to accuse me of either: * Being an AI bot. * Using an LLM to generate it. It's driving me bonkers!
- mrroryflint 6mo ago
  Yup! I am, ironically, second guessing myself when doing edits now to ensure I don't sound like an LLM...thus altering my natural writing style in places.

totierne2 6mo ago

Cut everyone. Paste er posters. Its 80s agi pop. Shoot in all directions. Twice.

Yash16 6mo ago

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radicalriddler 6mo ago

I wonder if anyone from HN would be willing to input their opinion into some features I'm building, which is really outputting LLM generated writing. It's basically automating release notes and sprint summary's from existing systems like Jira and Linear. The target user is a product team, the target reader are business stakeholders who want to validate your existence. I've found this process to be stupidly time consuming for both our delivery manager, and whichever Dev they decide to tap on the shoulder to help contextualize tickets. I feel like LLM's are a really good _summarizer_ and it can easily highlight if your tickets don't have enough context for actual people, if even an LLM can't write a summary with good enough context. Idk, maybe it's a sensible usecase because you REALLY don't want novel ideas from the LLM in this case. You want it to tell you 1:1 what you did this sprint based on a list of issues.

probably_wrong 6mo ago
I'm saying more and more "if you don't have the time to write it then I don't have the time to read it". Therefore my first impression is: if the process is so formulaic that you can automate it, then the content itself cannot be of any interest and the whole song and dance should probably be scraped altogether - think of a person asking ChatGPT "make this one-liner sound professional" and then sending it to someone who auto-summarizes it. You mention that the target audience is "stakeholders who want to validate your existence", which makes me think that your target audience doesn't really care about what you actually did but rather about being heard. If that's the case then replacing the Delivery Manager (who is arguably doing a good job) with a machine that screams "I want to think about you as little as possible" is definitely a risk. It may work well to provide the DM with a first draft, though. Disclaimer: I don't know your team nor stakeholders and I'm probably not in your industry.
- iteria 6mo ago
  Some documents are not important today, but they become _critical_ in the future. We lost a guy from my team and he was the only one who happen to know how to do this one process that happens every couple of months. Having that document was crucial. There is a lot of writing that is like that. I make my LLM write PR descriptions. It's not for me now and it might be for some of the reviewer now. But it's 100% for me in 2 years when I'm trying to understand why I did any of this and what was even the intention. But I'm a dev who tends to work on long lived systems where every once in a while you desperately need to know why something was done this way 5 years ago.

matevz_smallPMS 6mo ago

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antryu 6mo ago

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alex1sa 6mo ago

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KolibriFly 6mo ago

A lot of the value is in discovering the holes in your own reasoning while trying to make it legible to someone else

bhekanik 6mo ago

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2020science 6mo ago

I find it depends on context. I write a lot as an academic and author. When I need to generate functional content that has a specific purpose (knowledge base, transfer of information etc) I will use AI where it makes sense. Where I write to explore ideas, develop my own thinking, and connect with others in a very relational way, I intentionally do not use AI. Plus, when I do this, writing is an extension of my identity and I'd rather not give that away!

Dev-Chris 6mo ago

Using LLMs to write defeats the whole purpose. When you write you learn, you see where you had gaps in knowledge and understanding and it prompts you to go back and fill them up. It helps bring out and sharpen your reasoning. Using an LLM to write is like Using a forklift at the gym. You learn nothing.

genadym 6mo ago

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theAurenVale 6mo ago

this maps to what im seeing in visual AI too. rendering quality is insane now, nobody disputes that. but most AI generated images look generic and flat because theres no direction behind them same thing with writing imo. the output quality is technically fine but if you didnt wrestle with the ideas yourself the result reads like noone actually thought about it writing forces you to confront where your thinking is vague. directing a photo shoot does the same thing actualy, the moment you have to commit to a specific angle or framing you discover what you realy want to say. skip that step and you get competent emptiness

HeinrichAQS 6mo ago
If we see intent as a real part of information which influences the output substantially then this is perfectly explainable - the part of intent is not intrinsic to any artificial generation. Intent can only be given by external input and will be therefor always transformed by the statistical operations which happen during the generation of the output. The wrestling with the ideas is to find the sweetspot between intent, anticipated outcome and the anticipated recognition from other of the result. Even if we put in intent into the generation than the assumption of the consequences of the certain output in certain contexts is still missing. And the core of this problem is in my opinion the missing casual chain - without this no causal link between the generation and its consequences can be established and therefore no "deepness" can be found in the generated artifacts.

DevKoan 6mo ago

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black_13 6mo ago

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notnullorvoid 6mo ago

It's interesting to see so many people agree with this perspective when it comes to articles yet disagree when it comes to writing software. Perhaps some form of Gell-Mann Amnesia, people are better at recognizing good articles than they are at recognizing good software. Combined with a vibe coding effect of never actually reading the source, and thus recognizing how bad it is.

matevz_smallPMS 6mo ago

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balderdash 6mo ago

I do my own writing, but i can go so much faster really just writing all of my thoughts down and organizing them a bit and using llms to really just clean up and better organize my thinking.

Willish42 6mo ago

The trust component is so critical here. When I get halfway through reading a design doc and hit a part that's obviously slop, it really hurts my confidence in the project and in any faith in the developer having done their due diligence. Certain communications, especially technical writing, are "expensive" both in terms of the effort of the author(s), and in terms of the person-hours of people reading them to gain understanding. Like mission-critical code, they should be written and reviewed with care, and at the very least heavily edited from an automated LLM output to be unrecognizable as such. I personally don't use LLMs at all in my designs and I remain skeptical of the value proposition for those who do.

berz01 6mo ago

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jongjinchoi 6mo ago

I agree with most of this post. And I ask myself "When I write something for my own without AI?