11 ms·
How to Write with an LLM
- pama 16d agoHow I write with an LLM: for each page “suggest up to 10 word changes to increase clarity.”
- fnoef 16d agoHow to write with an LLM? Don’t
- jamiejquinn 16d ago"Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice." Loved the (possibly not deliberately ironic) use of the LLM'S favourite analogy, load-bearing. Nice wee article though. I particularly agree with "Don’t take all of the model’s copyediting advice." I've been using LLMs to review teaching material and often it just doesn't get the point of teaching. It's good for prompting reflection on your writing but it's still an idiot savant.
- ameliaquining 16d agoThere's no way in hell that wasn't a deliberate joke.
- abc3354 16d agoThis article was so much better than what I though it would be Does anyone know about "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" ? Seems like an interesting book
- stackghost 16d agoCan't vouch for that but I can vouch for `Dreyer's English` as both hilarious (if you're the sort of person who relishes finding le mot juste, like me) and excellent as a style guide.
- bobmarleybiceps 16d agoYeah it's very short, but I can't remember if I read all of it, or just flipped through pieces. It has good advice and I think fairly "famous." (edit: this reminded me I still have my copy :-D) I know someone in a profession that does a lot of writing, and it blew my mind how clearly feedback was communicated by a superior. Made me wish tech people had better written communication skills. ;-;
- cbfrench 16d agoIt’s good—better than the much-revered Elements of Style, imho, which is overly prescriptive and frankly unhelpful at turns, even if it’s well written. But my all-time favorite is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It illustrates the variety of English sentence structures in an ordered way with a plethora of examples. The approach is not prescriptive; rather, it allows you inductively to develop a feel for the syntactical rhythms of the language. Also, I love Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. It’s a lovely, entertaining little book, filled with Fish’s insights as an eminent literary critic. What I appreciate most about the book is that Fish walks you through a number of examples and explains how and why they work, so you can walk away as both a better writer and a better reader.
- ramblurr 16d agoPaperback copies in EU seem to be very expensive (90+€ on amazone.de) unfortunately.
- Tomte 15d agoIt‘s been available under different variations of the title, you don‘t need the latest one, and amazon.de should have a used copy for five Euros or so.
- K0nserv 15d agoI've been reading Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style". Unlike "The Elements of Style", which is fine, it does a good job anchoring its suggestion in first principals. I do think I need to read a book on grammar to truly appreciate it though. "On Writing" is another book like "The Elements of Style", both are too prescriptive, albeit not useless.
- dwhitney 15d agoSteven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” is not a bad book for learning grammar. It’s a book about linguistics - not specifically grammar, but it covers diagramming sentences, and grammar falls out from there
- Tomte 14d agoI found his description of Classical Style very confusing and disorganized. You‘re much better off reading the original, Thomas & Turner.
- pjm331 15d agoClear and simple as the truth - another good one
- S-E-P 16d agoI fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write. I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used. This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful. If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
- boplicity 16d ago> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.
- derektank 16d ago>I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives
- boplicity 16d agoNot sure. I don't like LLMs inserting itself into human to human communication, as it can shape our thinking in many ways. Delegating this also makes it much harder for a person to become a subject-matter expert, which is a real loss.
- awithrow 16d agoI've seen this in action as well. The biggest value by far is seeing the overused phrases and tics in your writing style. The prompt I like is to tell it to highlight and flag passive voice and run ons since those are my major pain points. I can also tell when its getting out of "real" advice since it'll offer the same "trim 10-15%". Also important to tell it to highlight specifics otherwise it'll give vague editorial advice that isn't anchored. Another fun exercise is to submit other authors writing as well. Say a short story from a magazine. Some of the edits are legit, but do it enough times and you'll start to see the same generic writing advice gets applies to just about any input. another iteresting thing models can do is to highlight and notice themes and motifs in a piece. I find that helpful when thinking about a piece of work. Might be obvious ones, sometimes it can be subtle themes. Good for stirring your own brain.
- Retr0id 16d ago> overused phrases and tics in your writing style In the extreme these can be annoying, but more often I find them kinda charming, as an expression of the author's personality.
- tptacek 16d agoSimple example from this piece: I scrubbed 7 instances of the word “just” from it. Obviously, Emacs can do that on their own, but you have to know to look for that word, and every other one.
- sixtyj 16d ago> use them like a copyeditor rather than a ghostwriter This is what you need to know. Seriously, after 25 years in news (writing), you realize that you need “second eyes”, not the first hands.
- WaltPurvis 15d agoOn a somewhat off-topic note, it seems like even the richest publications no longer employ copy editors, or not enough of them anyway. I am constantly spotting obvious and stupid errors in articles (e.g., duplicated words and misspellings) in the New York Times, Washington Post, et al. I'm certain it didn't use to be that way. (Fact-checkers also seem to have gone extinct; at least once or twice a week I'll read a news article with a glaring factual error or an absurd mathematical error.)
- wj 15d agoI see that as well. Sometimes I can see that they are prioritizing speed to print for breaking news (publishing to the web happens continuously vs the cadence of a daily newspaper) but often it is just being sloppy. When most people are consuming _their_ news (as opposed to _the_ news) in the form of a thumbnail in an algorithmic social media feed, those copy errors matter less.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- trane_project 16d agoThis is similar to how I've come to use them but it's focused too much on the mechanics or writing. I've found them more valuable at role-playing as a specific profile of reader and asking it how they would receive the arguments advanced by the writing and what counterarguments they could present. After some rounds of this process, you either close all the gaps in the argument or realize it's not a strong one.
- SupremumLimit 16d agoIt's darkly amusing that while the author advises us not to let LLMs pick our words, their post includes this chunk of AI slop: "Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. Readers won’t put their fingers on what’s wrong, but they’ll sense that you’ve become artificially-flavored." The metaphor at the start is AI-like weirdness too: "without pasteurizing and jacking it with corn syrup." Pasteurising is good, corn syrup is bad - what the heck am I supposed to make of it? It's nonsense. It may even have been handwritten by the author, but it's slop nonetheless. You may be telling yourself that you're disciplined and you're just using the LLMs for review. But while you're reading their output, the slop makes its way directly into your brain anyway - and then it drips out into your writing.
- yapfrog 16d agoThe placement of the "Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice" sentence in the article makes me think the author intended the word choice
- simonw 16d agoI saw "load-bearing" there and instantly assumed Thomas was making a deliberate point that it's OK to use terms that LLMs have poisoned provided you use them effectively and in a way that adds to the piece. I'm personally furious that "load-bearing" has become an LLM tell, it's a really useful metaphor!
- avazhi 16d ago> How to Write with an LLM TLDR: Don’t.
- thombles 16d agoEven if you don't want style advice from an LLM (I generally don't, not for blogging), for a technical blogger "please check this post for factual accuracy" is a good way to not look like an idiot. Often it complains about hyperbole, which I tend to ignore since there's no point blogging unless you have some firm opinions, but on at least one occasion it pointed me towards some documentation that undermined my entire post - and led to a much better one a week later once I'd processed and applied that new information. Thanks, LLM.
- simonw 16d agoI do this all the time. It's shocking how well it works. A year or two ago suggesting that someone use LLMs for fact checking would get you laughed out of a room, but today the good ones (Fable, GPT-5.6/6) with a search tool enabled are genuinely excellent at this. They can even retrieve articles you link to and check that you aren't misrepresenting them.
- benoau 16d agoI do something like this with code all the time, “is this idiomatic <foo>?”, I find it very helpful.
- geraneum 16d agoThis is bad advice for anything serious that can be subtly wrong. I’ve had Fable being consequentially wrong about what a certain, rather small, code block does in our codebase. Not even on something very complex which wasted a lot of time and effort from the team until we checked the code ourselves. I think these tools are still useful and one should learn to use them but blind trust for anything of importance is misguided IMO.
- dist-epoch 16d agoTo paraphrase, "if a junior programmer doesn't understand what your code does, it's bad". If Fable doesn't understand, well...
- felipeerias 16d agoFor commit messages and other technical writing, I use a "narrative coherence" checklist to help ensure that a change is clear and understandable: - Establish a single thesis an external reviewer could recover from the diff. - Unify vocabulary across code, comments, tests, and commit message. - Use the same vocabulary consistently to refer to the same concepts. - Keep every hunk that serves the thesis; consider the removal or deferral of the rest. - Introduce abstractions at the point of need. - Align tests to narrate the same story as the implementation. - Reconcile the commit message and the diff. - Order changes expositorily, not chronologically. - Explain what the change does and why. Do not explain the details of the development process. - Prefer to edit subtractively. - Recompile and run all relevant tests after edits. - Iterate.
- dormo 16d agoThat checklist sounds like at least as much work as writing a commit message.
- felipeerias 16d agoBut I only had to write it once.
- felipeerias 16d agoIf English is your second language and you intent to write in your mother tongue, my advice is to use English to communicate with the LLM. This makes Rule 1 straightforward ("You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you") and helps avoid the horrible feeling that the machine is taking over your personal voice.
- xianshou 16d agoIronically, "load-bearing" appears in the main text of the article that says never to use a single word the LLM suggests. Womp womp.
- le-mark 16d agoI’ve used llms in two ways while writing fiction. First I’ll have a story idea and use the llm to explore what has come before that may be related; then I’ll go read some stuff. This has worked great for seeing where my ideas fit and flushing them out. Second I’ll describe settings or plot devices and use the llm to brainstorm consequences or further ideas. This fails miserably. The llms suggestions are devoid of creativity. This is all moot though because I’m really not a writer, I’ve just always thought I might like to be one someday.
- Retr0id 16d ago> Present the original and new writing to the model and ask it which is better. LLMs have absolutely terrible taste when it comes to writing. I don't find their feedback useful at all, beyond trivial spelling/grammar mistakes, which you don't really need an LLM for in the first place. Proofreading is all you need. Edit: I do sometimes ask an LLM for a fact-check, though.
- tptacek 16d agoThat’s what this is: it’s mechanical proofing.
- Retr0id 16d agoI don't think it's a useful substitute for actual proofreading though, unless you're truly in a time crunch. When I proofread I don't just look for mistakes, I try to put myself into the position of a prospective audience member. LLMs seem to have absolutely no concept of "theory of the reader's mind". If I'm going for extra high effort, I have friends read it, usually asking them to identify anything that was unclear or hard to follow.
- Retr0id 16d agoAs a "proof" of their poor judgement, take a paragraph you like. Ask the LLM to rewrite it to make it better (which I think we both agree will not make it better), and then in a fresh session ask it which it thinks is best. It'll almost always pick its own writing, even when it sucks.
- tptacek 16d agoRight, I agree: that’s exactly not what I’m recommending.
- Retr0id 16d agoYou are specifically recommending asking the model which of two versions is better (the quote in my top-level comment). We both agree that they are poor "make it better" machines, but I also believe they are bad A/B testers and I'm using the former to demonstrate the latter.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- 8bitsrule 16d agoAt one point in my graduate college studies, I tutored qualified (DEI) undergrads 'for free' (for them) as part of a work-study program which paid me a bit for that work. OTOH, an AI could not have qualified as such a student. But even if it did, before we began I would certainly bargain for considerably more than work-study tutoring paid.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- RajT88 16d agoIndeed. I have been experimenting with using frontier models for creative writing. Using adversarial models to evolve ideas. I have a whole novel of material, and the feedback has indeed been useful. But the actual novel? Not even AI models like their own writing once you give the simple prompt of "account for model sycophancy". The resulting structure and plot beats are good with AI as copy editor. Only the least discerning reader might not care or notice the actual non-human writing. And hey - maybe those are your readers. Probably not. Can we all appreciate for a moment the sci-fi dystopia which snuck up on us all? I just used to phrase: " non-human writing". 50 years ago, that would send a chill up your spine.
- Yashjain413 16d agoTill today, I was doing the complete opposite of what the article suggests. Definitely going to try this approach out, pretty helpful. I have a specific ChatGPT chat that rewrites my posts really well every time; I usually just give it a rough draft and let it clean things up. But it was pretty interesting to realize how good these LLMs are at actually finding mistakes rather than just rewriting things. The point about not letting the model influence your voice was also very, very relevant.
- qwerty_clicks 16d agoI feel like it normalizes writing faux pas; any use of a semicolon could have just been a new sentence. I’m thinking that people that get years semi-colon and colon filled paragraphs are going to believe this is a normal and good way to write on their own.
- brlewis 16d agoI agree with the central thesis, but disagree with some details. I wrote a blog response: https://writing.brlewis.com/posts/2026/llm-copyeditor/ https://writing.brlewis.com/posts/2026/llm-copyeditor/
- liqiug 16d agoI mostly use LLMs for coding, so this is an interesting use case. I’m curious how long an article it can handle in practice before the context starts becoming an issue.
- riskable 15d agoAll the Big AI APIs handle a million tokens of context. That's enough for 750,000 words or, several entire novels. Context isn't an issue. It's style. The argument the author is making is that if you use an LLM to write for you, you end up with a homogeneous work that's just like everything else. In journalism, that's sort of what you want. In novels/function, that's the opposite of what you want. However, there's degrees to these things. If you're looking at a sentence you wrote, thinking there's something "off" it can be helpful to have the LLM rewrite it just to see how it thinks it could be better worded. I've done this a few times and I do find it helpful. Just like the author, I never just accept what it gives me. I simply use it as an OK-ish copyeditor that's good at spotting issues and suggesting solutions.
- d4rkp4ttern 16d agoThe frontier live voice models (especially GPT Voice/Live or whatever they call it this week) do not have the typical AI-tells. So I wonder about a few things: Why is this? Why couldn’t whatever went into post-training these voice models be applied to the text-gen models to get rid of AI smells? Could we set up a pipeline that leverages the voice models to clean up text that reeks of AI ?
- Miraltar 16d agoI would guess that it's just a matter of context, I haven't used voice mode at all but I imagine you don't get full paragraphs from them but get something more conversational instead
- thunfischtoast 16d agoI think it's good advice. I find it a bit funny the author said to not use a single word coming out of the LLM, but they probably did just that because I never heard a human being say "load-bearing" before but now it's all over the place, also used here. Or I don't get the irony.
- duckerduck 16d agoThe "load bearing" term has become a bit of a meme, given the author is familiar with these AI-isms, we can assume it's a subtle joke.
- LtWorf 16d agoIn the simpsons there was a load bearing poster in their home, IIRC.
- skydhash 16d ago> but they probably did just that because I never heard a human being say "load-bearing" before but now it's all over the place I have but it was a house construction worker explaining its practice on youtube.
- jameshart 16d agoIf you’re familiar with tptacek’s writing you would be confident this is deliberate and recognize it as an ‘I see what he did there’ moment. If not, it does risk planting the seed of doubt - have I been duped once again into reading tokenslop again? Risky move. Surprised the LLM copy editor didn’t flag it.
- swah 15d agoWhat they took from us....
- lkbm 15d agoIt's been a common phrase for many years.[0] [0] https://x.com/search?q=%22load%20bearing%22%20until%3A2020-01-01%20-wall&src=typed_query&f=top https://x.com/search?q=%22load%20bearing%22%20until%3A2020-0...
- pmg101 16d agoIt's extremely refreshing reading good human prose isn't it! It's like when I would read a newly-written Paul Graham essay 20 years ago. He also uses rule of three and the phrase "load-bearing", just for fun, which elicited a wry smile from me. Thanks OP for a pleasant start to my day!
- tripvexa 16d agoBut why would you want to write with the help of an llm, you should be moving in the other direction. Don't let the creativity die!
- swapoer 16d ago[dead]
- jjhfarmer 16d agoWriting is thinking. You are outsourcing the process of thinking through your thoughts so you can communicate and understand them.
- CuriouslyC 15d agoThe mechanical act of writing is not thinking any more than talking is. Plenty of people are capable of written word vomit. The act of agonizing over the words you put on the page is thinking. A lot of humans don't do it. The writers who talk about writing being thinking are in a bubble and don't realize that their process is not universal.
- vidarh 16d ago> Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. I really hope this was intentional.
- caminante 16d agoIn context, he's just saying this self-scrutiny is what makes your words authentic.
- vidarh 16d agoI was referring to the use of the word "load-bearing". It was most likely an intentional joke, but it's one of the most grating current AI-tells to the point it's a word you'll at this point generally want to avoid (unless it's a joke).
- caminante 16d agoI figured that's what you meant and agree the phrasing is over-speak. To your comment, I wasn't aware of the eye rolling meta for the phrase [0]. I hadn't seen it overused to the extent people are claiming. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1upxk9r/loadbearing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1upxk9r/loadbeari...
- dist-epoch 16d agoGiven that he says "never use a LLM suggested word", and given he's a sophisticated writer, it's clearly a joke. Pangram 4 says it's 100% human written, including the "load-bearing" sentence.
- tptacek 16d agoIt sure was.
- moffkalast 15d agoHow many parts per million did they say again? ;)
- mrieck 16d agoThought I'd get an article with tricks how to stop an LLM from sounding like the most obnoxious Linkedin influencer. Instead it says to use it as a copyeditor. Ok - but that's not very useful.
- delis-thumbs-7e 16d agoI think style is overrated. Yeah if you write commercially, you are a journalist or a copywriter, sure, you need to write in certain style. There’s rules to this shit. I think it was Hemingway who said that. Then again, the good ones break the rules. Today even if you don’t use LLM’s following certain formal style you end up sounding like ad copy or wannabe Atlantic -hack. The. You might read some kid on Tumblr writing beautiful prose with typos and errors and all. First of all you should have something to say. I write a blog just to make tutorials for myself on stuff I need to regularly check out. I don’t really care if anyone reads it. I don’t use LLM to make the posts since, well, pride, but also because I learn better when I need to write the stuff down and check my facts several times. I don’t much care if I make a typo or grammar error here and there. If I want to write it as Jeeves from Wodehouse book, fuck it, I will. If you have a story you have something to write about. It doesn’t have to be fiction, it can be a story on how multicast works. And it needs to be your story. Then the words come by themselves and writing is relatively easy. To have a story you have to live and think. LLM’s don’t help in that.
- tptacek 16d agoYou can just not copyedit. That's fine. More than fine, lately: rough edges are a signifier of authenticity. If that's the way you want to go, writing raw, I think that can be a good strategy. But if you've generally been doing drafts and want to keep writing like that, if part of your process is going to continue to be refining and sharpening, then I think you should know that we're at a point where automation can accelerate that process for you. You can be getting the same amount of work done with less effort, or allowing yourself to concentrate more on the creative thinking part and less on the tedium. That's the point of the post.
- delis-thumbs-7e 15d agoMy point was, however, is that it depends on what -- and how -- you write. Style is kind of a pretense. Communication in general is a sort of a mucks game of guessing how to get your point across across the medum, whether that of air, FM-radio, writing, internet, video... In academia, copywriting and so-on we create these patterns we call writing styles to agree on the rules on the game. But honestly, we should use sá lot more fuckin swear words when disproving the fuckin conjectures. Yes I know automation makes things quicker. Sometimes even close to fast. But htere's things you should do slow. Writing and thinking are amongst them. And hey, LLM's can help you here as well. But they should not speed you up, they should slow you down. Why did you say this? WHat is your premise? What is the source of this? KIM by Moonshot is really easy to take a system prompt that makes the models output a biggest asshole editor in the world. It doesn't help me at all, on the contrary, it creates friction. I don't think more speed is what we need at this point of evolution.
- nirava 16d agoI've found the only good way to write with LLMs is to absolutely not use it for the first few drafts, the using it as a tool to list specific kinds of problems in text (word repetition, unnatural hard to read sentences etc) and approaching those points with caution and skepticism. Even copy pasting a single sentence, I've found, is a slippery slope.
- alansaber 16d agoExactly- without constraining the input, you're guaranteed to get slop. First-draft AI copy is usually 95% to-cut, 4% to re-sequence, 1% to keep. Use it to think about iterating, not sweep the solution space blindly.
- bsenftner 16d agoJust write, write your own words, then create an effective communication persona within your LLM's non-reasoning (non-Chain-of-Thought) capabilities and have it critique your writing after describing your target audience. Then, write your own revision following the critique. Using this, it is not possible to write "AI slop" unless your own writing is already in the style of LLM output. Which I get accused of when I write using my formal voice, but fuck that sorry for being well educated.
- bovermyer 16d agoThis is close to my approach. I'll use LLMs as a read-only editor for my writing. Sometimes I follow its advice. Sometimes I don't. Other times, it discovers things I want to change, but not in the way it describes.
- CuriouslyC 15d agoTry using them to have a long discussion and provide it input data, then have it emit a concise bulleted outline given the points you want to make. Then you can rejigger the outline efficiently as needed and write the text yourself.
- brap 14d agoOne thing that sort of worked for me is to write the skeleton myself, i.e. the general ideas and how they fit together, the overall “flow” of what I want to say, then have an LLM fill in the blanks (I either point it at some context.md or have it ask me questions when details are missing). It’s kind of like designing the high level software architecture yourself and have the LLM write the code for each component. Not bulletproof, requires some iteration, but miles better than what it would produce on its own.
- ACV001 16d agojust don't use it for writing
- arcwhite 16d agoSimply do not.
- AyanamiKaine 16d agoIf you write with an LLM it will taint you voice. Slowly but surely.
- ramblurr 16d ago>So give the options to a model that doesn’t have the context of your editing process. > I conjured a bit of software to manage this for me[...] I don't understand how the annotation application shown helps with the stated goal of preventing the model from praising you. What's the actual software assisted workflow?
- tptacek 16d agoLook at the prompt titles in the screenshot. None of them give opportunities for the model to praise --- they're all technical. There's a system prompt applied to all of them: Workshop a piece with me. NO ENCOURAGEMENT. Encouragement is useless; the only useful things are suggested corrections. DO NOT WRITE COPY FOR ME. Any words you provide will be disqualified, so if you come up with good words, I’m fucked because I can’t use them. Tell me ABOUT what should change. Assume I know my audience extremely well. We’re going to do this in a series of passes. Keep your suggestions locked in to the current pass we’re on. Note typos, but DO NOT generate long structural critiques based on those typos; note them and move on, assuming that I meant to write properly. Assume I do 8-12 passes on any piece. Assume I respond to ~60% of suggestions; the other 40% I'm like, "nah, I wanted it to sound that way". And then about half the time I change something, I just rewrite the whole paragraph, mooting the suggestion. (The other half of the time I do roughly what's suggested; ie, removing the word "just" or "very", or switching the subject of the sentence.)
- jennifer_ilands 16d ago[flagged]
- Eddy_Viscosity2 16d ago"LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output" The best advice for writing for other humans is: don't use LLMs. If you're writing for machines, liking coding, then fine go for it. If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing, then also ok to use LLMS. But if you're writing for a human mind to ingest and extract meaning from, then LLMs are poison.
- jackyinger 16d agoAgreed. If I’m spending my precious time reading something thing, I want the author to have invested their personal effort to write it.
- thesuitonym 15d agoOr to put it another way: Why should I be interested in reading something you weren't interested in writing?
- partyficial 15d agothe author can ask the same question - why should I write something if you're just going to use a LLM to summarize it ? This is an unnecessary argument both ways. Whether you use a LLM or write it yourself or read it yourself (and then comment on it), you're putting your signature beneath it. I don't care whether you use your natural brain or an artifical brain (LLM)
- andrew_lettuce 15d agoBecause it's an asymmetric relationship? If you write something it can be consumed with value at many different levels, and an llm summary is valid. If we could trust llms to get the details right, creation of technical content would also be valid, but for now IME the editing and proof reading required outweighs any gains.
- 15d ago
- weezing 16d agoI would have to be an utter moron to use LLM to write anything directed at other people.
- Luucas40 16d agoNot letting your llm write is good advice and letting him spot problems also is if you want good writing. For anything beyond "good", we're still on our own and I love that for us.
- bumjin 16d ago[dead]
- semiquaver 16d agoThis would sound insane to me from two years ago but I have recently started insisting on writing all my own commit messages and pull request descriptions. I do usually have an agent review them for factual accuracy, but not rephrase them. It slows things down a bit, but in the best possible way. It has helped immensely to improve the depth of my understanding of the agent-generated code. When agents are doing everything its way too easy to “skim” diffs and not really absorb them. I always prided myself on my technical writing, and commit messages and PRs were a great place to hone that skill. I found that I missed it and my work is better now I’ve reclaimed that part of my old job back.
- BeetleB 15d agoAt work, I simply don't allow LLMs to make commits. :-)
- hannasanarion 15d agoThis currently is my team's only AI-use policy and I thik it's working out fantastically. "No AI PR Descriptions" is a great rule because it does 3 things: 1. It's a hard binary that's easy to recognize and enforce 2. It establishes personal ownership for the submitter, making it psychologically difficult to submit something you don't understand. If a person has to describe what a change does, how, and why, then they must have looked at it and made a real attempt to understand it, because you can't map a territory you have never seen. This alone prevents "claude-code run amok" scenarios where devs have completely abdicated responsibility that are a real pain to clean up. 3. It informs the reviewer of the change's intent. A human PR tells reviewers what a thing is intended to do, as well as the authors belief about what it does, which they can use as a framework to critique the actual substance. It becomes easier to notice missed edge cases, code behavior that subtly differs from intent, or changes that would block off or complicate an intended future project direction or reduce maintainability. And as a bonus, at time of writing, AI pr descriptions basically always suck. They are usually full of irrelevant implementation details, misplaced emphasis, weird presuppositions that seem to come out of nowhere and are really annoying to read, etc. That won't be true forever, they are always getting better, but it is true now, so that's a temporary 4th benefit.
- mjmvisser 16d ago“Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.” So far so good… “Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice.” Oops.
- _nivlac_ 15d agoI like to think that was thrown in there as a joke... surely, for a piece like this. edit: it was! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753395
- VCFundedGenYer 15d agoThis article should just be one word: Don't.
- simonw 15d agoI take it you didn't read the article, then.
- virgilp 15d ago> Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output. So, first the bad news: you have to write for yourself. --- and then > Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. Readers won’t put their fingers on what’s wrong, but they’ll sense that you’ve become artificially-flavored. --- Are they wrong in the first paragraph? Or are they simply not following the advice they dispense to others?
- zzleeper 15d agoI thought that was a joke.. Like how I used "delve into" back in 2024 or so lol
- RichardChu 15d agoIt might be a joke, but I'm sure there are lots of people who don't perceive it as such. For me, it pulled me out of the article and diluted its advice.
- globular-toast 15d agoWhy are people not learning to write at school? In most developed countries don't we spend like a whole decade or more learning to do stuff like writing? Yet people still feel like they can't write? Writing is something we really, really need to learn from other people, because it's with people we are trying to communicate. There should be no need for "writing with an LLM". None at all. If what you are writing is important, ask a friend to proof read it. If you can't write, learn.
- 4lx87 15d agoIt's more effective in my experience to have an LLM emulate your own writing examples than to apply lists of rules in the hope it sounds human.
- ashton314 15d agoStep one: open up the LLM Step two: close the LLM Step three: pick up a pen and write Writing with LLMs is a great way to make yourself stupid: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2026-08-07-ai-writing-stupid/ https://lambdaland.org/posts/2026-08-07-ai-writing-stupid/ I'm glad the OP acknowledges that you have to have to do the writing yourself—though they say this more as a means to avoid getting pegged as having used an LLM, whereas I see the problem as being cognitive surrender.
- datadrivenangel 15d agoI actually like this as a method for getting over writers block. The second the AI starts spitting out words I know it will be wrong and dumb and so I might as well do it myself. Enough activation energy to get started
- Semiapies 15d agoLLMs seem overpowered for the use the author suggests, finding and marking problems in prose. Actual human-written programs exist for that purpose, things you don't have to bludgeon into not praising you or semantically ablating your work. Start with langtool or the like and start adding others. Even art-bollocks mode for Emacs can be useful.
- wannabe44 15d agoGoogle docs fixes all grammatical mistakes.
- tptacek 15d agoWhat is the actual human-written program that you're thinking of that detects verb nominalization, verifies that the subjects of sentences are actual characters in the action, that new information is placed in the stress position of sentences, and that each paragraph has a clear topic sentence? I'd love to know. I'll buy it!
- Semiapies 14d agoIt's called "writing skill". But you can just farm that all out to an LLM, if you like.
- in_absentia 15d agoI sort of agree, but I also think the advice here is circular. To look at the style suggestions produced by an LLM and decide that you agree with some of them in spirit, but want to put it in your own words, you already need how to know how to write well. In other words, you need to read a style manual or two, and you need to read and have opinions about other people's work. You must have taste. Otherwise, you can't really distinguish between good and bad advice. You'll anchor to the suggestions made by the LLM and it will turn your writing into LLMese. I guess that works - it sure gets clicks on HN - but it won't be your voice anymore. There's still value in getting a second pair of eyes on what you write. But here's another cool trick that gives you a similar benefit: just let it stew. Go for a walk, grab a lunch. Re-read what you wrote. You'll be surprised.
- tptacek 15d agoI wrote the article. I am not interested in "style suggestions" from the LLM; I'm interested in things I can verify for myself. Is this word or construction overused in the piece? Is there a pointless throat-clearing like "it's important to note that" crudding up this paragraph? Am I overusing vacuous nouns like "issue" ("the big issue is that") or "factor" ("the next factor to consider is")? Do I have my verbs buried in nouns, like "distortion" where I should just use "distort"? I don't care whether the LLM likes these constructions or not. I don't like them. I usually don't want to keep them in my work. It's my call what to change; I just want issues flagged. Your prompts would be different. Or, they would if you decided that having an LLM merely point things out about your own writing wasn't itself a form of contamination. You do you! I wrote this article in about 45 minutes and didn't workshop it with anybody else, so I'm not surprised it's gone over people's heads; it was just something I was talking about on Twitter that I wanted to get down on a page. But it's pretty obvious that a lot of people here have missed the point.
- politician 15d agoI think your take has more application than writing. I also suspect that Jev-like use cases for LLMs will begin to overtake the generate-all-the-things paradigm in programming, contracts/legal, music. People are beginning to wisen to how to more skillfully deploy generative models.
- mcv 15d agoSounds like solid advice. Those typical Claude turns of phrase are really grating on me. And I now see them everywhere. Many YouTube channels that are presented by a real human, still sound fake because their script is blatantly written by AI. I hate it. And yet, I'm stuck having to write an important message to someone that has real stakes riding on it, so I use Claude to refine it, and I see myself succumbing to Claude's pressure to use its words instead of my own. I hate it, but my words aren't very good. And finally Claude proclaims the message perfect and I let my wife take a look at it, and she rejects the entire thing, restoring some semblance of sanity again.
- seanmcdirmid 15d agoI use LLMs for nailing down the narrative in bullet point form. It proposes a lot of inappropriate points that I tell it to remove, but makes some useful proposals as well. It’s actually fairly efficient for narrative exploration, I then keep it away from prose for as long as possible since whatever it writes is pretty bad but once I start editing, it will usually clobber my edits if I make any narrative changes. Humans are still better at actual prose writing, especially when it comes to word rhythm.
- r0ze-at-hn 15d agoThe advice of "use your voice" only works if you have a good writing voice and comes off like Henry Cavill's dating advice or famous writers who said that you shouldn't use a thesaurus. Paying close attention to posts written by folks who are not using LLM's the comments here regularly complain (sometimes extensively) about the writing quality. Doesn't matter what people are saying or suggesting about avoiding LLM writing, the real lesson I am seeing is either to naturally be gifted at writing or somehow figure out how to have LLM's help with your writing. "Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you." isn't helpful for probably the majority.
- zrail 15d ago"Naturally gifted writer" is not a thing. The way to get better at writing is to write a lot. Developing a voice comes naturally as you go through the pain of being a terrible writer to eventually being mediocre. Accepting the LLM's words is actively harmful to that process because it lets you skip over the part where you read over what you wrote and rewrite until it doesn't suck as much. I mean, you do you. I'm not your dad.
- r0ze-at-hn 15d ago"Naturally gifted writer" is a thing. Yes like any skill there is a learning curve, but some folks can climb that curve incredibly fast while others will struggle even with a lifetime of practice. Clearly I am not a gifted writer as my original comment failed to convey this very well. And now I am pondering, maybe next time I should put my comment in an LLM to review it first. This meta lesson is playing out over and over everywhere by anyone writing anything. I am in no way saying LLM writing in general is good, but ignoring the reality of what is happening is silly. For good or bad the not great writers not only will, but are doing things like voice rambling into an LLM as a starting point and editing it from there.
- tptacek 15d agoOrdinary people were writing before the option existed to accept words from AI models.
- bzmrgonz 15d agoThis is very good advice. I hate when llms turn into yes-men. I am surprise that the author doesn't use ai to construct the skeleton of the written piece. In my opinion, they excel at this, with all the books they've guillotined and digested, our biological brain cannot match their content retention. I would do the old trick of "asking for a friend". In this case, a friend of mine has mental block and he needs to write a paper on (insert topic here). I want to help him by designing the skeleton, and give the conditions/parameters of your piece.
- apparent 15d agoI worry that reading too much LLM output will make me tend to write more like an LLM. Seems like it would be inevitable, to some extent. (Here's why it works)
- threetonesun 15d agoiA Writer's "Style check" feature can do 90% of this in real time.
- SamaLie7350 15d ago[flagged]
- dyauspitr 15d agoJust like you do everything else with an LLM. You ask it for something, if that doesn’t work you just ask it in natural language to change it until it outputs exactly what you want.
- blinkbat 15d agoDon't. There, easier
- devin 15d agoRead Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought". Emitting words is not really what "writing" is. https://twinada.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/708ong_writing.pdf https://twinada.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/708...
- tptacek 15d agoWhat is this comment responding to? I don't think anybody in this thread, or the article itself, believes "emitting words" is what writing is?
- devin 13d agoIt may not have been responding to anyone in particular, to be honest with you. I think it's important that people remember that a big chunk of what writing is, is the time spent thinking about the topic you're writing about. People take writing for granted. They forget that it is a technology itself.
- brunoarine 15d ago> Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. Oh, we do. We can also detect hackeneyed, LLM-made sentences where just one word had been replaced. "That's where it's going to f*** you".
- tptacek 15d agoApparently your detector is out of whack.
- nicebyte 15d ago> How To Write With An LLM Simply don't.
- mcapodici 15d agoFor blogging I just don't use an LLM at all. I just use a spelling/grammar checker. I get to sound like me even if that is imperfect. For docs I have used an LLM for the convenience of having them kept up to date.
- asveikau 15d ago> Your voice stays intact, but your work is faster, better, and less painful. This sentence specifically seems like an LLM. It's hard to quantify that. They just take that sort of tone when they're needlessly summarizing what they already told you. "This thing contrastive thing remains important, but we got XYZ benefit."
- striker44 15d ago[flagged]
- politician 15d agoI was seriously reading this article right up until the word "load-bearing", and then despite my best efforts, my brain just sort of disconnected from the piece. I just skimmed to the end quickly before realizing what happened.
- crossroadsguy 15d ago> frontier models are supernaturally good at selecting pleasing turns of phrase It's not even the suggestions in isolation, but it tries to convince you that your writing is stellar and then slips in a word or two, and you accept it because otherwise you'd be skipping greatness. I guess in some way one has to have a bit of hubris about one's writing to tell the model to f off. And OP, assuming this, from your prompt, is your language: > "… First get the bones up…" Congratulations, you are now doing LLM-speak :-)
- tptacek 15d agoI don't so much worry about whether LLMs taking my prompts enjoy my style.
- what 15d ago[flagged]
- drdaeman 15d ago> Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you. I think there's a use case where this rule can be ignored. Sometimes I ask LLM to help me pick a single word or short phrase in some language, that has specific meaning, and connotations. Or doesn't carry some connotations or associations. Especially when I have an idiom from some language in mind, but I'm writing in some other language and my brain struggles to find a good replacement. LLMs are super handy as fancy vibe-based dictionary search engines. They're all about words that go with other words, so when I'm struggling for a good term, I see no harm in asking and picking an option that I feel closest to what I want to express. My choice, my voice, just a very fancy thesaurus machine.
- mschnell 15d agoExactly. I often ask for a list of words that describe a specific concept. The choice is made by me.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- gyulai 15d agoA workflow I've recently discovered for myself, that may be useful to anyone who speaks at least two languages: Ask the LLM to write a first draft in a language that isn't the one the piece should ultimately be in. Then use the LLM's first draft as a blueprint, to write a first draft yourself in the intended target language. That way, you won't be tempted to shut off your brain and just meatproxy anything from the LLM's first draft. Then hand your actual first draft back to the LLM for editorial suggestions. At that point, feel free to ignore suggestions, push back on bad ones while adding a rationale about why you don't like them, etc. Work in the best suggestions, then iterate. If you're in “writer block” mode, force yourself to keep going by asking the LLM for five suggestions on how to phrase something, form an opinion about what you like and don't like about them, draft it yourself by frankensteining from among the suggestions, without using any one suggested phrasing literally. Optionally, provide feedback to the LLM explaining your thinking about why you did or did not like certain suggested phrasings. For objective/factual writing, asking for a fact check is a widely-used practice. And there's a useful counterpart for writing subjective things and opinionated hot takes, namely to ask the LLM: “Anticipate how this might be misunderstood in ways that might cause offence or trigger people.” Sometimes, you might want to say something that will cause offence, and there might be no way around it. In this case, making a conscious choice to let that be might be the right thing to do. But I find it surprising, how often an LLM will see an angle that I myself did not see, where something might cause offence in a way that I genuinely missed and genuinely want to fix. And then that gives me a chance to re-write before posting something.
- foobarbecue 15d ago"Streamline and improve" is redundant. Pasteurization is great. "jacking it with corn syrup" is nonsense. I'll get my writing tips somewhere else.
- TheFlyingFish 14d agoThe corn-syrup comment made sense to me FWIW. I associated corn syrup with mass-produced food that's optimized to make all your taste receptors go "bling" when it first hits your tongue, but lacks any real substance. Which also describes the text that comes out of an LLM.
- foobarbecue 14d ago[dead]
- vish045 15d agoI guess more often than not we are thinking about what to write rather than how to write :-D
- brap 15d agoOne thing that you should absolutely never do: have an LLM review and “improve” the text repeatedly in some closed loop. This might work well for some tasks (coding), but for writing it will absolutely take reasonable text and turn it into a pile of incoherent garbage no human would ever write. Maybe I’m the only one keeps trying this (more often than I’m willing to admit), but I suspect it’s a common cope engineers reach for when having to deal with the not-so-fun task of writing prose.
- maurelius2 14d agoGreat article. Thanks for sharing.
- tolerance 14d agoWhat this quite reasonable article has to endorse may be useless. I've read some decent articles both obviously and possibly authored with LLM-assistance and while they were well-structured and carried at least the gravitas of objectivity I couldn't help but feel like their technical fastidiousness belabored their messages.
- slipperybeluga 14d ago[dead]
- cyberspectre 14d ago[flagged]
- dsign 14d ago> In your first draft, most of your paragraphs are bad, your topic flow is incoherent, and you’ve got at least 750 words you don’t need. I stopped reading at this point. All of the above may have been correct five years ago, when there was a "canon" of good writing, but now LLMs pack that canon as tight as teenagers in a boy band concert. So, go with a flow that reflects your state of mind--LLMs don't have that--and yield the words in fistfuls and with abandon. To further distance yourself from LLM output, your writing can be any or all of these things: sassy, prosaic, heathen. Uses for LLMs: grammar checks, and to see if your idea comes through. However, depending on what you are writing, I recommend leaving in your writing a tiny doses of typos, grammar issues, and infuriating word order choices. Even some level of ambiguity is fine; your fellow humans and LLMs are not all of one mind, and if some of them are going to fight with knives over your exact meaning, well, it's them who are the extremists, not your problem.
- aitoolcrux 14d ago[flagged]
- scottsiume 14d agoGot it. I always have the model write the whole thing first and then I just do a little light editing. It has zero soul. I'm looking forward to trying out your editor. When will it be officially available? But I have another question: English isn't my first language. What kind of impact can this editor have for non-English ecosystems? and if we add translation and LLM models on top of that, how they would interact is something I care about.
- abalashov 14d agoIt seems to me if you're thinking about this for more than 500 milliseconds, maybe you should just write it yourself.
- AlisaYoki 14d ago[flagged]
- soufron 14d ago[flagged]
- zan 14d agoThank you for writing this. This is gold > Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you. Over the last week-ish I turned around 2 product announcement blogposts within ~24hrs. Both written manually by someone who doesn't do product marketing for a living. It actually felt incredibly satisfying to focus and smash something out that was 100% human (despite praising the benefits of agentic systems, oh the irony). My flow has been: Go for a walk, record all of the thoughts on the topic with speech to text, and have LLM organise my thoughts into what I call "facts" - simple sentences of fact, and point out open questions and inconsistencies ("you are a product marketing expert helping me organise the content for an upcoming feature announcement" ...). After some back and forth of inconsistency bashing I have a large pile of short sentences in the vein of "Feature X is for Y because Z", that I use to manually build a narrative with headings, and then write the actual copy covering a subset of them. I also agree that light style LLM edits are fine, and that I don't let LLM do anything other than ordering and filler words removal and provide structural comments.
- jjude 14d ago> Go for a walk, record all of the thoughts on the topic with speech to text I have been doing this. I think better when I walk (so much so, even within the confines of my home, I walk when I have to think). > organise my thoughts into what I call "facts" - simple sentences of fact, and point out open questions and inconsistencies Would appreciate little more details of how you do this.
- camgunz 14d agoAlso good advice for writing software with an LLM.
- ricksunny 14d agoThis was good. I think I want to see a boilerplate on all future substacks I read that says "I read sockpuppet's advice." (bonus points for "here's a hash of my visit log")
- tryzoen 13d ago[flagged]
- lproven 13d agoHere's my shorter version: Don't. Learn to be a better writer, because a bot cannot and will not help you.
- m4rtink 13d agoJust don't.