6 ms·

It’s getting tiring to hear at this point, but the Claude voice comes through clearly in this post, and it’s a little off-putting. If even an important product

• deanc 4mo ago
  Serious question, why does it matter to you? Maybe they wrote a draft and reviewed Claude's writing before publishing. Why are we trying to "call out" when AI is assisting us in our work? This is an open source project, not a F500 company. They have limited resources, maybe English isn't their first language.
  • lionkor 4mo ago
    Because it implies that the users of the AI don't understand that it's output is usually horseshit littered with enough good info to make it sound correct
  • dev_hugepages 4mo ago
    Because it sounds like the average LinkedIn poster and we don't want it to invade spaces outside LinkedIn.
  • IshKebab 4mo ago
    I think fundamentally it's just really annoying to read the same cringey LinkedIn style voice everywhere. If you manage to write an AI assisted article that doesn't tediously follow the "what this means for you", "it's not this, it's that", "One thing. Two things. Three things." formula... I really doubt people would complain.
    • vcf 4mo ago
      I agree that the style is somewhat generic, but for things like new release announcements, I find that the common structure allows me to skim through much faster. I value that and am happy with that tradeoff.
  • robmccoll 4mo ago
    Because I associate that style with "I have little to say, but I will say it in as many words as I possibly can"
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  • purerandomness 4mo ago
    Because it means that they think I'm stupid. They think it's not worth investing human attention to write it, so why am I expected to invest my attention to read it? If it's written as SEO spam, why link it here? If it's written to be read by humans, do they think we're stupid?
  • zopa 4mo ago
    I'm not a shadcn user, and so as with any project I'm not familiar with, I'm looking to see if if it's interesting to me. If the post is thoughtful and clear and I like the sense I get of their perspective on programming, then great, tell me more. No guarantees but maybe the writer is someone whose software I'd like to use. Claude doesn't tell me anything except that the writer used Claude. It's the same as with too marketing-speak, which conceivably this is. Maybe the actual work is good but Sturgeon's law, it's probably crud. If I really needed a UI library or whatever right now then maybe I'd dig deeper but in casual browsing HN mode? No time, catch them later. So maybe all your maybes but who cares? It's not AI that made me think badly of them: I think badly of all software by default and it takes more than Claude to change my mind.
    • hamburglar 4mo ago
      For me, I don’t care one bit whether the text is AI generated or not. What stood out to me on this one is that they talked about something called shadcn, something called base UI, and something called radix as if they were things that everyone should be familiar with, but failed to consider that a reader might never have heard of any of them. I read for a while to see if they give some clues but nothing was forthcoming so the whole thing might as well have been gibberish.
  • stefan_ 4mo ago
    Just read the post! It's essentially "we switched from Radix to Base UI". Why? "the ecosystem moved on". Nothing says braindead web frontend churn like this post, and them not having written it in the first place is just the cherry on the cake. They could have just written "we asked Claude to rewrite our project with Base UI because it eclipsed Radix in NPM downloads".
    • NamlchakKhandro 4mo ago
      If you're not a heavy frontend developer then you probably don't know why radix is a blocker for most server side react
  • LVB 4mo ago
    Tone/style bit aside, a real problem is length. Scroll waaay down and look at most older updates and see how brief and too-the-point they were. Often they look rushed, some essential links, and that’s it. Fine by me! That’s the real state of things… people usually don’t want to write bc it’s a lot of effort. I see the same phenomenon at work. A year ago I’d read your two-sentence daily update in slack, all riddled with the quirks and oddities that made it yours. Today when I see the page of headings and emojis describing the couple things you did yesterday, I wince because now I’m the one who has to sift through the fluff to get to the point.
  • nextaccountic 4mo ago
    I'd prefer to read the draft
  • re-thc 4mo ago
    > This is an open source project, not a F500 company. Vercel?
• nmstoker 4mo ago
  I'm sure this received full human attention, even if they used a computer to help write it (be that more traditional text tools or more recent ones).
• fjdjshsh 4mo ago
  I hate the marketing-selling-linkedn style as much as anyone, but I don't think it's an LLM thing in particular. It's a style that existed before LLMs and it's very easy to make LLMs avoid it with one or two prompt paragraphs. For what it's worth, I didn't get that vibe reading this post.
• drchiu 4mo ago
  Just read the post and it didn’t sound AI to me. Would be kind of funny if someone from the team came out and said it was written by a human.
  • relativeadv 4mo ago
    I didn't read the post and scrolled to a random clause. "Because you own the code. You've added variants, changed classes, threaded new props. A codemod handles the components you never touched and breaks on the ones you did."
    • dbbk 4mo ago
      It's so staccato throughout, a human wouldn't write like this.
  • designerarvid 4mo ago
    Maybe the human has been reading too much ai generated text and got influenced by it?
    • robofanatic 4mo ago
      Exactly! We have accepted British English, American English, Australian English …. Lets just accept AI English and move on.
  • KronisLV 4mo ago
    > Just read the post and it didn’t sound AI to me. Those short and punchy two-part sentence groups very much feel like the writing that Claude does, like: The writing feels familiar. Suspicion earns its keep. Ultimately, the judgement remains yours. Not conjecture, your thoughts. Then again, I bet how much aversion people feel to that sort of thing depends on how much they’ve been exposed to that, especially in frustrating circumstances. Personally, that’s a lot (daily Claude Code) and sometimes that writing makes me really upset. Or maybe people genuinely just write like that and overuse that style and Claude has ruined it for me, whereas otherwise I wouldn’t have given it a second look.
• draw_down 4mo ago
  [dead]
• eurekin 4mo ago
  Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I use plannotator with claude a lot and have much better time, since I asked for a specific styleguide. I used "CD era MSDN reference and Raymond Chen blogging style" as a starting prompt for the styleguide and my work ability to digest AI plans raised a lot. Couldn't recommend it more. Humble, insightful and respecting the reader
  • Melonai 4mo ago
    Exactly! See this is what I don't get about the Claude/GPT-style writing that's so prevalent everywhere and why it annoys me even more. It's just so easy to get rid of it, that's why it feels even more disrespectful when I still see it everywhere in full force, just a few sentences is enough to get rid of so much of the extremely obvious tells, sometimes even a "Don't write like an AI" in the prompt leads to completely acceptable results. Everywhere I use LLMs I put a tiny style-guide with instructions such as yours, and the results are just so much more pleasant I barely understand why it seems that almost everyone else seems incapable of it? The obvious response is of course, they're just completely unbothered by it. Why change it if it doesn't even matter (to me)? I presume the set of people who use AI like this for writing and the set of people who are annoyed by it are largely not overlapping, and there is a possibility that a lot of the text I read and think sounds human, might be written by an LLM with a style-guide like mine. Still though, if 5 words genuinely can reduce annoyance by a lot of people who read your article, why does it feel like so many people haven't picked up on it yet? Or is the LLM writing highly loved & popular amongst other people perhaps?
  • 8organicbits 4mo ago
    > respecting the reader When people say LLM slop is disrespecting the reader, I don't think they are complaining about style.
    • eurekin 4mo ago
      That's where the annotation in plannotator helps. I'm asking to scan projects on gitlab, go through some docs to find more grounding material, write a subarticle (in the same style), scan logs on the test env, issue some curls, etc.; until the whole article is digestible - in the "backing knowledge graph" department.
• petilon 4mo ago
  Isn't that a bit like working in the movie industry and no longer being able to enjoy films because you are always thinking about how they were made and noticing their flaws?
  • nullsanity 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • wongarsu 4mo ago
    More like working in the movie industry and noticing all the places where the director took the cheap shortcut instead of putting effort in. And while the result isn't much worse, it still feels a bit disrespectful. You reminisce about the time five years ago when things were much more human Oh, and the target audience of movie you are watching are other people in the movie industry. Nearly everyone in the audience can tell where production cheaped out
    • petilon 4mo ago
      After watching the movie everyone in the audience goes back to their offices, and what do they use to improve their productivity? Right, AI.
• techscruggs 4mo ago
  The post effectively communicated what it needed to. It seemed both written and structured in a way that was optimized for human consumption. If they used AI to write this and that gave them more time to volunteer their time towards developing this fantastic piece of open source software, then this all seems like a good thing to me.
  • sickcodebruh 4mo ago
    It is clearly not effectively communicated if the tool used to write it stamps its signature in such a way that it distracts from the great work they’re doing.
    • nullstyle 4mo ago
      Its only distracts the distractable. Does anyone ever read product announcement blog posts like they were great literature? Ive always just skimmed, theyve always been throwaway writing to me. I’d rather the humans spend more time on the actual creative challenges in a project.
      • F7F7F7 4mo ago
        tldr; continue to cede ground on the slippery slope. did i get that right?
        • nullstyle 4mo ago
          yep, and when the llms can pack flatware, stamp license plates or clean bedpans, I'll argue we shouldn't have humans doing that bullshit work either.
        • satvikpendem 4mo ago
          Language is descriptivist not prescriptivist so yes, exactly.
    • ashikns 4mo ago
      It is distracting you because part of your mental focus is on "is this AI".
• dstroot 4mo ago
  Am I the only one who expects ALL writing to be generated or at least edited by an LLM going forward? It's like pointing out the fabric in my clothes was not hand woven by a human. Sounding like an AI wrote it is not as valid a criticism as "it was unclear about...", or "It was too long", or "It left out this important point...". Can't we move past the "It sounds like AI..." posts?
  • mannanj 4mo ago
    I'd love to have this as a norm, as long as the AI doesn't lie and impersonate and deceive humans in speech by saying things as though it were the human like "I ate breakfast" or "I was saying this to my team" because clearly the AI did not do those things. That's lying, deception and harmful to a culture of truth and transparency. Instead the humans who promoted and allowed the LLM content to post behind their human identity, didn't bother to update the LLM language and either do a) mark the post as AI generated or b) properly update those pronouns so it isn't an AI speaking through the humans point of view. Consider this exaggerated example: Would it be ok for you if in a zoom meeting with your team someone was lip syncing an AI speaking on their behalf, both impersonating voice tonality, the words chosen, and even pretending to voice the humans thoughts themselves? Of course you wouldn't. So now extend this to the words people write in articles like this one where the "I said" perspective was used many times supposedly by an AI.
  • J_Shelby_J 4mo ago
    Look, if you can’t take the time to communicate with me, I won’t waste my time listening to you. Writing is not hard. It’s a fundamental skill. Even before LLMs, any successful professional had strong writing skills, and those that didn’t were treading water at best. This isn’t classism. It’s just that we literally can not communicate if you aren’t willing to put in the effort. And if you don’t need to take the time to put it in writing then I don’t need to read it.
  • Banditoz 4mo ago
    You are welcome to continue to read these LLM-generated writings without questioning their content.
  • 4mo ago
• mannanj 4mo ago
  I disagree, that it's not tiring to hear - because it's deception and lying as it gets used and presented today. I believe it's dangerous to a culture of cooperation that I think cooperation requires trust and truth to support and preserve. I don't want articles to have AI's lying and saying "I did or said" when it was the human who did and said those things. for example, in this article (if it was truly Claude written): > Last year, Base UI tagged a beta and a lot of you asked if we are going to replace Radix with it. I said "the worst thing you can do for your production app is switch component libraries". I meant it, and it still holds. So instead of switching, we did the shadcn thing: we rebuilt every component for Base UI, kept the same abstraction, and let you choose. December brought npx shadcn create with both libraries. January brought full Base UI docs. If an AI wrote this, why and how is it pretending to be a human and the humans on the team at that? That's impersonation, and it's a lie and deceptive. I personally don't want a culture where my AI agent is talking as though its me, when a pro-cooperative and honesty/truth preserving culture would instead say "My human said" or at least label correctly that this is an AI acting on behalf of a human.
• toddmorey 4mo ago
  [dead]